Why, oh, why, Lynn asked herself, hadn’t she followed her first instinct and turned thumbs-down on the trip when it was presented to her? She would be at the station right now, or maybe on that cruise ship in the Caribbean if she had opted for a vacation after all, and Rory would be safe at home with her grandmother, playing video games or watching TV. Or maybe spending the night at Jenny’s.
And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
At last Jess stopped. The were within a few feet of a steep, rocky slope that rose past the whispering branches to disappear into the mist. A cliff, in fact, much like the one that had brought them to their current pass.
Leaning against the thick trunk of a mighty ponderosa pine, Jess pointed without speaking to the base of the cliff. Lynn drooped with exhaustion, holding Rory up because she was afraid that if either of them sat they would never get up again. She looked where he had pointed and saw a black semicircular opening in the rock wall, just big enough for a human to crawl through.
“In there,” he said. “Then we’ll rest.”
That was all Lynn needed to hear. Too tired to worry much about bears or bats or anything else that might be inside, she helped Rory over to the cliff.
Lynn entered first. Dropping to her knees, she crawled through the hole. Outside, the moss was spongy and damp beneath her palms. Inside, the ground was hard, cold rock, thick with dust and pebbles. Lynn moved with care, trying vainly to see through the inky blackness. The cave smelled of mold, and the space was small. Trying to stand up, she bumped her head; the ceiling was less than five feet high.
Rory crawled in behind her. Crouching, Lynn reached back to guide and reassure her daughter. With Rory beside her she watched as Jess appeared in the opening, pushing his pack inside before following.
For a moment he was silhouetted by silvery moonlight. His shoulders were broad enough so that he had to turn sideways to fit them through the hole. Maneuvering with a surprising degree of clumsiness, he managed to get inside the cave.
He balanced precariously on three limbs. His head went down, his back heaved, and he made a violent retching sound. Then he collapsed and lay still.
20
“JESS!” It was an urgent whisper. Lynn knelt beside Jess’s prone form, with Rory beside her. “Jess!”
She nudged his uninjured shoulder. Still no reply.
“Is he dead?” Rory asked fearfully.
“I think he fainted,” Lynn replied. Her hand slid along the back of his jacket. The area around his right shoulder blade was wet, warm, and sticky: blood.
“He threw up.” Rory sounded repulsed. “Gross.”
Lynn made a sound that was part snort, part laugh. “I guess if you’d been shot, you might throw up too.”
Lynn located Jess’s ear by touch and laid her fingers below it, against the pulse in his neck. His skin was warm and bristly with five-o’clock shadow. His heart pumped with a strong, steady beat, relieving some of her anxiety. Undoubtedly, that strong pumping was one of the reasons for the amount of blood he still seemed to be losing.
The bleeding needed to be stopped and the wound bandaged. There was a first-aid kit in her pack with gauze and pads and all the necessary materials to do just that—but it was so dark inside the cave that she could not even see Rory, who was right beside her.
How could she bandage a wound she couldn’t see? Their flashlight was long gone; she had dropped it when they fled the mining camp.
First things first.
“Let’s move him away from the mess,” she said.
“Sick,” Rory muttered, but she helped Lynn drag Jess deeper into the cave, away from the puddle of vomit. It wasn’t an easy task, and when they had finished, both were panting.
“He weighs a ton.” Rory was sounding less enamored of Jess by the second.
“Wait here with him a minute, will you?”
Lynn scooped dust and gravel over the mess as best she could, then fetched the packs. Unzipping Jess’s, she searched out the lighter by feel. Next she located the first-aid kit. Placing the kit at her knee, she lifted the lighter, bent over Jess—and hesitated.
The light might give them away.
Lynn was not sure whether the tiny flame produced by the lighter was of sufficient strength to illuminate the cave opening. Nor was she sure whether the amount of light would be enough to attract attention, or even if there was anyone near enough to see.
But she sure didn’t want to take the chance.
Shoving the lighter in her jeans pocket, she decided to do what she could by touch. Anything more elaborate would have to wait for the coming of day.
“Help me turn him over,” she said to her daughter.
“Can’t we have some light?” Rory sounded very young suddenly. She had always been afraid of the dark.
“No.” Lynn didn’t spell out why, but Rory didn’t argue. Between them they managed to flip Jess onto his back. Lynn felt for his coat zipper, pulled it down.
Jess groaned, stirring.
“It’s all right. I’m just going to bandage your wound,” Lynn said, in case he could hear.
“In the dark?” His voice was low and ragged, but at least he was conscious.
“You threw up.” Rory sounded accusing.
“Sorry.”
Lynn wasn’t sure if there was a touch of amusement in his answer or if she was imagining it.
“I’m afraid to use any kind of light,” she told him.
“Smart thinking.”
If Jess thought being bandaged in the dark was smart thinking, Lynn was doubly glad she hadn’t flicked on the lighter. He must believe that their pursuers were still on the hunt.
Did she? Lynn wondered. Surely she didn’t imagine that they were simply going to give up and go away.
It was a nice thought. Get real, she said to herself.
As Lynn tugged at the sleeve of his goose-down jacket, Jess managed to shrug his arm out of it. Then he made a movement to sit up.
“Stay still.” Lynn pressed him back down, her hand firmly in the center of his chest. The front of his T-shirt was sticky and wet with blood. He subsided without protest. “I don’t think you ought to move around much until we get this bandaged. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“You might throw up again,” Rory said.
“I’ll try not to.” This time there was no mistake: Though his voice was weak, there was amusement in it. Clearly he recognized that Rory, with her impossible, girlish notions of what a man should be, was feeling disillusioned.
“Put this under your head.” Lynn wadded up the discarded jacket, bloodied side in, and slid it under Jess’s head.
“Thanks.”
Was it her imagination or was his voice growing weaker? She needed to get his wound bandaged quickly. If he should become incapacitated, from loss of blood or for any other reason, she didn’t know what she would do. There was no way she and Rory could move him very far.
“Rory, get him some water, would you?”
“Sure, Mom.” Rory rummaged in the packs.
“How’d you know I was thirsty?” It wasn’t her imagination. Jess did sound weaker.
“ESP.”
To orient herself, Lynn touched his cheek, which, like his neck, felt warm and prickly with stubble. Her hand moved down to his chin, then his throat, and finally reached the soft cotton at the base of his neck.
“Your shirt needs to come off.” Her hands moved toward his waist as she spoke, and she began to tug the T-shirt free of his jeans.
“I can manage,” he said, his hands there before hers.
“I’ll do it. You need to lie still,” she said, brushing his hands aside, voice crisp because suddenly she felt self-conscious. Rory’s big-eared presence had something to do with that—it was difficult to undress a man, even for such a compelling reason, in the presence of one’s teenage daughter—but not everything. Helping Jess take his shirt off simply seemed like too intimate an act.
It was something a woman did for her
child—or her lover.
Now who was being ridiculous? she asked herself. The man was hurt, and he needed help. Period.
The tempo of his breathing increased as her hands slid the hem of his T-shirt over his chest. In different circumstances she might have attributed the changes in his rate of respiration to her powers of arousal, but in this case she was pretty sure his rasping could be chalked up to pain.
Nevertheless, she could not help noticing the body she bared. He had a nice abdomen, she discovered as her hands brushed it, all taut skin and hard muscle with a silky trail of hair disappearing into his waistband. And a nice chest too, wide and warm and firm, with its own wedge of silky hair. Or at least the hair would have been silky if it had not been matted with blood.
“Be careful, would you?” he grunted as she reached the critical area. Lynn discovered that some of the blood had started to dry, gluing the cotton T-shirt to his body.
“Here’s the water.” Rory thrust a cool plastic bottle against Lynn’s cheek.
“Thanks,” Lynn said, taking the bottle.
“Where?” Jess asked at the same time. Lynn twisted off the lid and pressed the bottle into his good hand.
“Do you need help to drink?”
“No.”
She heard him swallowing water. Gently, gently, she tried to disengage the shirt from his person without hurting him more than she had to.
“Ouch!” he said, choking on what must have been a too-greedy gulp.
“It’s stuck.”
“Well, don’t yank! Here!” He poured some of the water over the problematic spot. Lynn wasn’t sure that he was doing the right thing, but sure enough, her searching fingers told her that the water seemed to work, liquefying the drying blood.
“Ouch!” He gasped this time as she succeeded in pulling his shirt free of the wound.
“I thought it was unstuck,” Lynn said.
“You thought wrong.”
“I need you to raise up so I can get your shirt off. Rory, help me lift him.”
“I can sit up.”
He suited the action to the words before Lynn could stop him.
“Can you lift your arms?”
“Not the right one.”
Lynn eased the T-shirt up his left arm and over his head, then pulled it down his right arm.
Before the operation was completed, Jess was leaning heavily against her, his good shoulder pressing into her breasts, breathing harder than ever. She could feel the increasing heat of his body, smell his sudden outbreak of perspiration, and she realized that he was in more pain than he was letting on.
The T-shirt came off at last. He sighed with relief as she let it drop to the ground.
“My head hurts,” Rory said, her voice subdued.
“I know, baby. Why don’t you lie down for a minute and see if that helps?” Lynn’s hands were on Jess’s back, feeling their way around. It, too, was warm and wide and hard of muscle—and wet with blood.
A rustling sound told Lynn that Rory was complying with her suggestion. Under the circumstances a headache was only to be expected, Lynn reassured herself. Anyway, there was nothing she could do for Rory at the moment.
Jess, on the other hand, needed her help urgently.
“Can you lie on your side? Your left side,” she specified to Jess.
He grunted by way of a reply. Lynn kept her hands on him as he lay back down, on his uninjured side as requested. Once he was settled she reached for the first-aid kit.
During her earlier search for cigarettes she had opened the small plastic box to check out the contents. Now she was profoundly glad that she had. She knew what was in there, basically, and could identify the contents by feel: sterile pads in their paper wrappers, a roll of gauze, a tube of antiseptic ointment. Scissors. Tape. Even Tylenol.
“Maybe you should take a couple of Tylenol,” Lynn suggested, rattling the bottle.
Jess snorted. “Honey, I could take the whole bottle and it wouldn’t make a dent.”
“Do you hurt a lot?” Rory asked.
“Some.”
That Jess was admitting to hurting at all told Lynn that her suspicions were correct: He was in a great deal of pain. She wrestled with the lid of the childproof bottle.
“Rory, can you open this?” Lynn gave up and passed the bottle to her daughter. From the age of three onward, Rory had managed to open every childproof container that had come her way. Lynn, on the other hand, was hopeless at it. While Rory worked on the bottle cap, Lynn fished another water bottle from the pack.
“Here, Mom.” Rory returned the open bottle, along with the lid. Lynn positioned the lid on her knee and shook two gel caps into her palm.
“You take these, for your head.” She passed the gel caps to Rory, along with the water, and shook out two more.
“And you”—she prodded Jess’s mouth with an index finger—“open up.”
He obeyed, and she popped the pills in. As she twisted the lid back on the bottle and returned it to the first-aid kit, she heard him swallowing water again.
Rory was quiet—resting, probably. Lynn freed a gauze pad from its packaging, smeared antibiotic on it, and gingerly felt Jess’s shoulder to locate the wound.
“Ouch!” He flinched. The swelling flesh all around it helped Lynn to find the raised edge of the bullet hole. It was high on his shoulder. Good. Given its location, the bullet had hit nothing vital.
She pressed the gauze pad firmly against it.
“Yeow!”
“Shh!” The sudden yelp made Lynn jump. “Don’t be such a baby,” she added crossly.
“Baby, my ass,” Jess muttered. “That hurt!”
“Hold this for a minute. I need to see if there’s a hole in your back.” She found his left hand, guiding it to the pad.
“Can’t you just bandage it up?”
“You already passed out once,” Lynn reminded him, her fingertips feather-light as they moved over his bloody shoulder blade. “From blood loss, I’m sure. If I don’t bandage this up right, who knows? You might even bleed to death.”
Jess was silent.
“I’ve got it.” She found another raised edge, sticky with gore. The bullet had passed all the way through, which, she thought as she smeared a second pad with antibiotic, was a good thing. She couldn’t imagine herself performing emergency surgery on Jess to remove the bullet—especially in the dark.
She had an even harder time imagining him letting her. At the thought of what his reaction to such a suggestion would be, Lynn had to smile.
“Could you hurry up?”
“Sure,” Lynn said, and pressed the pad to the wound with a tad more force than was strictly necessary.
“Ow!”
“You can move your hand.” She slid her hand under Jess’s. Palms flat, she applied direct pressure to both sides of the wound at once.
“Damn, that hurts.” He sounded like he was having trouble catching his breath.
“It’ll be over in a minute. Stay still.”
Blood soaked both pads. Lynn could feel the sticky wetness against her palms. She layered on more pads and applied pressure again. When the bleeding started to let up, Lynn taped the pads in place and wrapped Jess’s shoulder and chest in layers of gauze.
“There,” she said, finishing at last. “All done.”
“Thank God.”
Lynn had not realized how tense Jess’s muscles were until she felt them relax.
“Is it safe for us to go to sleep, do you think? For a little while?” Rory’s voice was small and tired.
“Absolutely.” Jess’s reassurance sounded too hearty to Lynn, but she hoped her daughter was too young or too tired to pick up on the false note. “We’re going to be okay, Rory, I promise. We’ll sleep the rest of the night, meet the Jeep tomorrow, and be safe on the ranch this time tomorrow night.”
You hope, Lynn added silently, but she didn’t say it.
There was no point in scaring Rory any more.
“What if they find
us?” Rory’s voice was smaller yet.
“They won’t,” Lynn said, proud of how certain she sounded.
“Your mom’s right,” Jess said. “The forest is too wild and the entrance to this place is too well hidden. You have to know where it is.”
Rory yawned, hugely, the sound so familiar that it made Lynn ache.
“I’ll get the sleeping bags,” she said. There were two, tied to the bottoms of the packs. Lynn presumed three would have been too cumbersome to carry. Not that it mattered, she thought as she rolled them out side by side. They were plenty big enough for her to share one with Rory.
She unzipped Jess’s for him and would have bundled him into it if he had not spurned her offer of help.
“I can manage,” he said. “Get some sleep yourself.”
Lynn suddenly realized how exhausted she was. Rory was already snug in their bag. As Lynn pulled off her boots and squirmed in beside Rory, she welcomed her daughter’s warmth.
She kissed her daughter’s cheek, then fell asleep to the sound of Jess’s sleeping bag being zipped up.
21
“No! Christ, no!”
Lynn woke to those words. They weren’t loud, more of a thick mutter that trailed off into incoherence. But under the circumstances they were enough to blast her from sleep.
For a moment she lay paralyzed, staring wide-eyed into the oppressive blackness and seeing nothing. Sounds assaulted her: anguished mumbling, soft thudding movements, heavy breathing.
Was Jess being attacked?
He was close; his sleeping bag was right beside the one in which she and Rory lay. If he was fighting off an attacker, there was no way she could be unaware of the intruder’s presence.
Jess was having a nightmare.
After the day they’d had, she wasn’t surprised.
Lynn turned on her side, careful not to disturb Rory, whose even breathing spoke of deep sleep. Unzipping the bag enough to get her hand out, she reached out to Jess.
What she touched was his chin, sandpaper-rough. She lost contact as his head moved. The murmurs grew louder.
She unzipped her sleeping bag, scrambled out, and leaned over him.
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