The deputy looked at the girl on her hands and knees in the snow. He looked at the one big cowboy boot she wore and the loop of belt making its dark smile in the snow. He looked at the running shoe on her other foot. He seemed not to have the breath or words to speak.

“What did you find, Donny?”

The deputy lowered himself to his knees beside the girl, as if to pray, or beg. The girl watched him with her wet eyes.

“Did you find him?” she whispered.

“Find who?”

“The man,” she said.

“All I found was Billy,” he said.

Her eyes searched his. Then her head dropped again heavily, black hair spilling to the snow.

Kinney looked from the girl to his deputy. “Tell me, Deputy.”

“Sheriff, I think we need to get this girl to a hospital.”

“I know it. Tell me what you saw up there.”

“Sheriff, I don’t know if I can.”

“By God, Donny.”

The deputy shook his head dismally. He reached to touch the girl’s shoulder but stopped himself. “Miss?” he said. “Can we take a look?”

She did not answer or move. Then, in silence, she pivoted onto one hip and shifted around to sit in the snow with her arms stiff behind her and her legs stretched out, and thus arranged she raised the single boot into the air before the deputy, as if proffering it. As if in some weird invitation of undress.

The deputy handed the shotgun to the sheriff.

“What are you doing, Deputy?”

The deputy took the boot in his hands and began, gently, to pull. It came off more easily than Kinney would’ve predicted and when it slipped free he did not understand what he was seeing. At the end of her white thin leg there was no foot. There was the heel—and nothing else. A stunning illusion. As if the rest of the foot were still inside the boot. The deputy tilted the boot and the blood ran from it like oil and Kinney looked again and saw the black sooty wound and he smelled the seared meat smell of it.

“My God,” he said.

The deputy tilted the boot farther and something heavy slipped along the shaft from bootheel to mouth and landed in a dark clot on the snow.

“What is that?”

“I think it’s his socks, Sheriff. Billy’s socks.”

Kinney looked at him.

“He got shot, Joe. He didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

Kinney frowned. He adjusted his hat. Then he handed the shotgun back to the deputy and slipped an arm under the girl’s knees and the other around her back and rose to his feet lifting her easily.

“Don’t,” she said. “I can walk.”

“I know you can, sweetheart, but this will be faster.”

“Let me help, Sheriff.”

“No, she don’t weigh nothin. Grab that belt there and get it on her leg.” The deputy did so. “Higher,” said the sheriff. “Just below the knee. Pull it tight. Tuck in the end. Are you in pain, sweetheart?” he said, and even as she shook her head he said, “Jesus, what a question.” To the deputy he said: “Now watch our backs with that shotgun, Donny. Anything else moves in these woods you go ahead and shoot the sonofabitch.”

The girl hooked one arm around his neck and with her face to his chest he turned and they headed down the mountain, moving slower than they might have, not for the weight of her but for the care he took not to jostle her or allow her to come into contact with any branch or bough or to himself slip on the steep trail. She was not bleeding badly and he didn’t believe she’d lost much blood, and if she’d not gone into shock by now he didn’t believe she would and his sole desire in the world was to deliver her gently and safely to the cruiser.

The girl for her part rode in his arms like a child to whom sleep has come no matter what, no matter where, though it wasn’t sleep she surrendered to but something more absolute, more exquisite, which was abandonment. Abandonment of thought and of fear and of responsibility and of strength. She surrendered to abandonment and in her surrender she felt the downhill pull of gravity and she believed that the man who carried her was in fact a man-shaped sled or toboggan and she its only passenger. Sailing down the mountain slope with the song of speed in her ears, beat of his heart against her ribs, whole unto herself but also belonging to the snow and the wind and the moon and the mountain. Altogether more effortless and fleet than she’d ever been in any footrace and putting nothing but distance and more distance between herself and the life up there, which was no life but only the momentary interruption of life, and every second on this man-sled delivering her farther and farther from shack, chain, sleeping bag, Monkey. Down and down the great slope, the sweetest ride, joy of speed, down and down and unstoppably down.

64

They came around a final bend and found the El Camino broadside to the road as before and the cruiser beyond it downslope. Both the sheriff and his deputy were breathing harshly. The full moon hung above them on its high sweep, and on the deputy’s wrist a small round face lit from within told them it was just midnight. The deputy unlocked the cruiser and opened the rear door and went to the other side to help the sheriff arrange the girl along the bench seat, her body so meager in the folds of clothes. He saw something protruding from one of the jacket pockets and after a moment understood that it was a shoe. The other running shoe.

“How’s that, Caitlin?” said Kinney. “Can you ride like that?”

She nodded, gazing around the interior as if it were the cockpit of a spaceship. Kinney told the deputy to start up the cruiser and get the heat going, then he had him radio Summit County for ambulances and officers. When that was done the deputy came around again and stood behind the sheriff who was still tending to the girl.

“You want the emergency kit, Sheriff?”

Kinney looked more closely at the wound in the dome light. The blackened curled lip of skin with its bright scarlet fissures. “No, I’d rather spend the time driving toward the EMTs. And anyway I don’t believe we can do much better than what’s been done.” He reached for the belt below her knee and noticed for the first time the silver oval of buckle, the snakehead with its ruby eyes, and for a moment it froze him, as the face of a true viper would. Billy had put it on that morning, or whenever he’d gotten up. Mindlessly fastening the buckle and getting on with his day. Then Kinney thought of the girl’s father, Grant, and the boy Sean, down on the ranch. Going about their day, their night, with no idea, just no idea. He uncinched the belt and watched for the blood to seep from the wound and cinched it again.

What in the hell, he thought. Just what in God’s own hell.

“Sheriff,” she said as he was withdrawing from the cruiser. She’d removed Billy’s glove. She held out her bare fist. He reached in and cupped his hand and the keys dropped into his palm.

“He gave them to me,” she said.

“Okay. You lie still now. We’re gonna get you to the hospital before you can say boo.” He moved to shut the door and again she said, “Sheriff.”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry. What I did to him.”

He didn’t understand. “Hush, now,” he said. “Don’t talk.”

“Sheriff?”

“Yes?”

“Do you have a phone?”

“There ain’t no signal up here, sweetheart.”

“Can I just hold it?”

He found the phone and she closed her bare hand around it and rested her fist on her chest.

He shut the door and handed Billy’s keys to the deputy. “I need a favor, Donny.”

“Ask it, Sheriff.”

“I need you to stay up here with this car. Just stay here with the shotgun and don’t do nothing else but keep an eye out. If there’s another man up here I don’t want him getting by you, is that clear? You put him down before he gets by.”

“I will, Sheriff.”

“It won’t be long before Summit County gets here.”

“Don’t worry, Sheriff.”