Bones

“?Dejala!” I said sharply. “Leave it!”

He looked up at me rebelliously and held on.

“?Dejala!” I repeated.

Gently, he set it down, but hovered over it.

“Bien, muy bien.”

He watched me warily, as if I might want to take it from him. When he seemed ready to pick it up again, I said, “?Donde esta Ben, Bingle?”

He looked up at me, cocking his head to one side.

“Where’s Ben? Come on, show me. ?Donde esta Ben, Bingle?”

The question wasn’t as easy to answer as it might seem. I wasn’t sure where Ben had fallen. The grasses and flowers of the meadow were tall enough to hide his body.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but it would still make it hard for Bingle to pick up any scent in the air. It didn’t deter him; he came with me when I started to weave a path between where Merrick and Manton lay and the place where Ben had run out of the forest.

We had only covered a few yards when Bingle took off, then ran back to me, barking.

“Bien, bien — callate, Bingle,” I said, afraid that Parrish might hear him. “?Donde esta Ben?” I asked again, and he took off once more — stopping every few feet this time, to look back at me.

I had no doubt that I was being asked to hurry up.

I praised him, even as I dreaded taking a closer look at another body.

Ben Sheridan’s motionless form lay faceup near a large rock. His face was covered in blood. His left pant leg was also soaked in blood.

Bingle started licking him. There was no response.

Suddenly something David had said about Bingle came back to me. Bingle won’t lick a dead body.

I knelt next to Ben, placed my fingers on his neck and felt for his pulse.

“Bingle,” I said, struggling not to weep. “?Que inteligente eres!”

Ben Sheridan was alive.

I was determined he would stay that way, come hell or high water.

We got both.

18

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 18

Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains

First things first. It’s a bitch when you can’t just call 911. When simply being conscious makes you the closest thing to a doctor in the house, rule number one is the toughest rule of all: don’t panic.

Two problems made it hard not to panic. The first was that it looked as if the only thing between “Ben Sheridan” and “dead” were the words “not yet.” The second was that Parrish could come back over that ridge at any moment, and if I hadn’t managed to get Ben Sheridan out of the middle of the meadow by then, I was certain we would become two more ducks in his shooting gallery.

So I forgot about the smell of death all around me, forgot about the fact that I had just seen seven good men slaughtered mercilessly, forgot about the rain — and forced myself to concentrate on first things first.

First aid lessons came back to me.

I leaned my cheek close to his mouth. I felt his breath. One relief after another. He was breathing, he had a pulse.

I called his name several times. He didn’t respond. Bingle barked at him. He moaned — softly, weakly. I waited. Nothing. I commanded Bingle to sit and stay. The dog obeyed. Ben stirred, almost as if he thought the command was for him. This brought to mind something a first aid instructor had once said to me — that consciousness wasn’t an ON/OFF switch. An unconscious person may respond to pain, or to commands. So I gave it another try.

“Ben, open your eyes!”

Nothing.

Get on with it, I told myself. Check for bleeding.

The wound on his head had clotted; it didn’t seem to be a deep cut, but there was a good-sized knot beneath it. The other obvious wound was the one on his leg.

I suddenly remembered a time when I had watched Pete, my husband’s partner, work frantically to stop a victim’s head from bleeding — only to later realize that her lungs had been filling with blood — a bullet had made a much smaller wound through her back.

I checked Ben as best I could for less apparent injuries. I wasn’t able to discover any, but I did find a pair of unused latex gloves in one of his shirt pockets. I put them on, got my knife out again and cut the pant leg away.

Under other circumstances, the damage to his lower left leg might have horrified me. After all I had seen just a few minutes before, it had no power to shock me. It was a through-and-through bullet wound, a shot that had entered sideways, from the inside front of his leg between his knee and ankle, and exited on the other side — the messier side. It seemed to have broken at least one of his lower leg bones. The wound had bled profusely — at least, to my inexperienced eye, there seemed to be a lot of blood — but there was very little bleeding from it now.