Home by Nightfall (23 page)

“Okay, everyone in?” Cole asked as he slid behind the wheel. They drove back to the house to pick up the boys. “Susannah, you stay down in that truck bed so your head isn’t sticking up over the sides.”

She scooted in close to Tanner beneath the quilt, trying to give her warmth—what little she had—to him.

Cole turned the truck and this time pulled up to the back porch at the house. “Josh, Wade, get out here right away!”

The boys appeared, sleepy and rumple-haired, but dressed.

“What’s going on?” Josh asked, his wide eyes focused on his uncle. “What’s the matter with Uncle Tanner?”

Wade stared too, but couldn’t utter a sound. There was enough blood to frighten an adult, much less a child.

“It only looks bad,” Susannah lied, making a supreme effort not to dissolve into panic herself. “We’ll try to explain on the way. Just get in here with us
now
and mind everything we tell you to do.”

“What about Uncle Riley?”

“Riley will stay here in case any news comes through or anything else happens. I think Shaw is still asleep.” She spoke as if the plan had already been discussed but really, it was an order to Riley as well.

The kids scrambled into the truck bed as well. “This isn’t a joyride,” Cole said. “Stay flat to that bed.”

He drove with his rifle on the floor beside him. They slipped and skidded their way down the road to Cole’s house. His cargo huddled together behind him like refugees from a war that had suddenly arrived in their yard. Susannah directed the boys to cling close to Tanner, who was now fading in and out of consciousness.

Through the wooden planks on the sides of the truck, she saw the sage-green-with-cream house that Cole had built for Jessica years before they married.

Again, Cole pulled right up to their front porch, driving across the lawn. “Everyone wait here and stay down,” he repeated. “I’ll get Jess and we’ll go to her office. She’ll want to work on this with all of her gear close by.”

They waited. Susannah looked at Tanner and her heart felt like a chunk of ice within her rib cage. “Josh, Wade, stay close to Uncle Tanner,” she repeated. “It’s cold and he’s hurt. He needs you to help him keep warm. But be very careful and don’t jostle him.”

“Aunt Susannah, why would someone want to hurt him?”

She looked at Wade and then at Tanner. Last night, he’d seemed invincible. Now he lay beside her, his lifeblood draining
away because someone had pointed a gun at him. Tears burned her eyes. Yes, she wondered, why would someone want to hurt him? Who in the world would want to kill Tanner? It didn’t make any sense—he had no enemies, kept to himself, had a kind heart that she now realized also beat with a love for her more passionate and complete than she had ever guessed, and he was a good worker and substitute father to the boys. Who? Riley’s face rose in her mind again as she tucked the quilt around them all. He’d had a lot of problems and still struggled with a troubled mind—but he couldn’t have pulled the trigger. He just couldn’t have.

Josh asked in a trembling voice, “Aunt Susannah, is he going to d-die?”

“
No
, honey, he’s
not
going to die. We won’t let him.”

Jess came rushing out of the house, wearing her black wool hooded cape and with her hand tight on the bag’s grip. She reached over the side panel and pulled down the quilt to look at her patient. His sweaty, gray-white pallor made Susannah try to swallow the huge knot of fear that had formed in her throat. Tanner sighed an involuntary groan. Jess’s expression was grim. “No bubbles of blood around his mouth, at least.” She covered him again. “All right. We’ve got to go.” Cole handed her into the front seat and he slid behind the wheel.

The truck inched forward as Cole waited for the tires to grab the slick drive. Behind them, Susannah saw bright-red drops on the white snow between the tracks and realized Tanner’s blood was leaking through the floorboards of the truck bed. Tears blurred her vision but she blinked them back, doing her best to stay focused on the moment.

They were on the road again.

Never had five miles seemed so far. The snow wasn’t deep but it presented just enough trouble to keep Cole from driving faster.
And it was bitterly cold. The east wind in the open back of the truck bit with the sharp teeth of a bear trap. None of them was really dressed for this weather, but the emergency had left no time to think about that. Tanner wasn’t even wearing a coat. Susannah chanced a glimpse now and then to see where they were. At last they were on Powell Springs Road, approaching the left turn to Jessica’s office on Main Street.

They pulled up to her door and with some effort on everyone’s part, even the boys’, they managed to carry Tanner into the back examination room and put him on the table.

“You kids get a fire going in the stove, then go sit in the waiting room in the front and watch for Granny Mae’s café to open,” Cole said. He took two dollars out of his shirt pocket and gave it to Josh. “When it does, go over there and get something to eat. Tell her I sent you and that we’re here.”

After she rolled up her sleeves, put on her apron, and washed her hands, Jessica made quick work of cutting off Tanner’s shirt. “Cole, can you roll him up on his side?”

When he did, both Jess and Susannah stared at the ugly red hole over his right shoulder blade. A big red blotch stained the sheet beneath him and blood still poured from the wound, but at a slower rate. Susannah hoped that didn’t just mean he was running out.

“Goddamn it, this hurts like hell,” Tanner uttered in a slurred, impatient voice.

“I’ll take care of that right away,” Jess said. “He needs a dose of morphine before I start poking around. With any luck, the bullet missed the lung. Susannah, will you take his pulse?” She had helped Jess in the temporary hospital during the influenza epidemic and had learned a lot of on-the-fly nursing.

Jess administered the painkiller and Tanner sighed. Satisfied, she stuck a finger in the wound, earning another groan from Tanner,
but a less audible one. “I can pull out the bullet and stitch this up. But I have to find it first.” She felt around a bit more and shook her head. “I’m not getting it. I’ll need a probe. Susannah, pulse?”

“One hundred twenty and kind of thin.”

Jess went to her glass-fronted cabinet and took out gauze, clean instruments, and a metal can. “I’ll need your help, Susannah, so get washed. Cole, after we administer the ether, I need you to hold him right where he is, but I’m warning you, if you faint we’ll just have to push you out of the way.”

The worry and tension on Cole’s face changed to indignation. “I’ve never fainted in my life! Not even that time I had to cut those twin foals out of a mare, and they’d been dead for three days.”

“Never mind—you sound like your father now. All I’m saying is that if you want to get Granny Mae to help—”

He gave her an exasperated look.

“All right, all right. Take off your coat and wash your hands. Susannah, the instrument tray and the ether…”

Cole let Tanner roll gently to his back and went to wash. Susannah put the cone over his nose and mouth and Jess dripped the pungent canned liquid onto the padding. She kept a close watch on his reaction. It made him cough but it began to take effect. “Ether can be tricky, but it beats putting a patient through surgery with no anesthetic.” After a moment she said, “All right, let’s fix this.”

Susannah said a silent prayer and squeezed Tanner’s hand.

She and Jess stood on one side of the table and Cole stood on the other in front of Tanner.

Under anesthetic, his body, which had been rigid with pain, relaxed, and Cole had to steady him. Jessica selected a probe from the wheeled tray and began a careful hunt for the bullet. Susannah heard the metal tool scrape along bone and clenched her teeth.

“Damn it,” Jess swore to herself in a low voice, “where is it?” She felt her way through his right shoulder until there was a distinctly different sound. “It’s all the way up here.” She touched the point of his shoulder left of the joint. “It must have slid along the scapula until it hit the infraspinatus fossa.” Her baffled assistants took her word for it. “I don’t know how it got in at that angle. It’s not lodged in the bone, but it’s torn so much muscle. I’m going to have to open this to repair it and clean it out. Part of the shirt fabric is probably in there with the powder and what-all. Susannah, mind the ether.”

Carefully, Susannah let a few more drops of the anesthetic drip on the cone she held to Tanner’s nose and mouth, trying hard to keep her hands steady.

Jessica grabbed a scalpel and made a quick four-inch incision, exposing the damaged flesh. Blood pooled up and she tamped gauze into the wound to clear the field.

Finally, with a pair of long forceps she plucked out the chunk of lead. “Got it!”

They stared at it and then sighed. She dropped both into an enamel bowl.

“I’ll save it in case he wants to see it,” Susannah said as Jess began cleaning and repairing the wound. When at last she snipped the final suture, Susannah asked, “He’ll live?”

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to make an incision—this will take longer to heal, and he lost a lot of blood. But he should be all right.” Jess hesitated, then added, “As long as infection doesn’t set in. I’ll keep him here with me for a while where I can watch him.” Then she began bandaging him.

Cole went to the coat tree and put his jacket back on. “Now we have to find out how this happened. And believe me, I will.”

“Shit, we’ve gotta hide out somewhere until this settles down. I didn’t expect anyone to shoot back at us.” Bert Bauer picked the seat of his pants from between his buttocks and peered over the brush he and Rush were hiding behind. The wind still howled like a crone from hell and bit through his jacket. Worse, the sky was lowering again.

Rush shook his head. “If that shot was meant for us, a blind man was holding the gun. It hit the wagon wheel. He might have done us a favor.”

“I think it’s gonna snow, too, and we can’t light a fire in here. Someone will see it and half the county will be looking for us. We don’t even have horses!”

“Shut up, Bauer, and let me think,” Rush snapped.

After shooting Grenfell, they’d slipped off into denser cover with a canopy of tree branches that kept most of the snow from hitting the forest floor. But they’d left tracks in the thin white crust that were like arrows pointing out their escape route. Suddenly the plan that had seemed so brilliantly simple turned out to be amazingly stupid.

“Anyway, more snow will help cover our tracks.” Rush hunched his shoulders to huddle deeper into his coat. Overhead, the wind thrashed the boughs of the evergreens, and the leafless
branches of poplars and maples clattered like dry beans in a cigar box.

“We shoulda gotten all the money up front before we did this. How can we hang around here to arrange a meet-up now?”

“You better decide which you want more—your neck in a noose with another seventy-five bucks in your pocket, or your freedom. The way I’m seein’ it, freedom looks a hell of a lot better than jail time. And if Grenfell is dead and we get caught, we’ll swing. I’m not about to let that happen to me.”

“
If
you’d got him with one clean shot instead of wingin’ him, those people wouldn’t have been driving all over the countryside, cutting off our ex-cape. They’d be busy with his dead body.”

Rush turned and stared at Bauer with that cold glare of his for so long Bauer began to fear that he’d shoot him next. Finally, he said, “All right, I’m getting out of here to the one place I can think of. It’s not the best, but it’ll have to do for now. You can come along or not, it don’t make no difference to me. Unless I get sick of your whinin’.”

He turned and cut across the needle-covered forest floor, heading south. Bauer looked around at the emptiness, then took off after him.

• • •

Susannah sat at Tanner’s bedside, isolated in a corner of the back office beside a window and behind a folding hospital screen. The stove was close by and as long as they kept the fire going, they’d be warm. He was too unstable to climb the stairs, and Jessica wanted him where she could check on him. He’d emerged from the anesthetic hours ago and drifted in and out of consciousness. She’d
told Susannah that the next twenty-four hours would be the critical indicator of his recovery. At one point, she’d stopped to give her a glass of water and a spoon.

She put a hand on Tanner’s forehead and looked at his bandages. “We need to get some fluids into him. That blood loss took its toll. I’ve been reading about intravenous fluid treatment for cases like this but I’m not set up for that here.”

Whenever she could, Susannah dribbled water into his mouth, a spoonful at a time. He looked downright awful—pale and weak—and she was desperately frightened for him. Tanner was always strong and active. Just last night he’d held her in his arms and made love to her with strength and tenderness and fierce urgency. Now he lay in this bed, swathed in bandages, and she didn’t know what would happen next.

She didn’t have time for regret now, but regret came to her invited or not. She wished she’d had the last few weeks to live over again. She should have handled the problem with Riley differently. Trying to do the right thing had gotten them nowhere. Well, he’d gotten part of his memory back, but that might have backfired in their faces. It was hard to think that Riley might have had something to do with this, but it was possible.