Fear No Evil(Alex Cross #29)(63)

“That’s midmorning,” Brayton said, staring up the steep path that led to the notch. “She’s tough, I’ll give you that.”

Lightning flashed again. The bolt hit the ridge to our right. The rain came in a deluge that swept toward us like a dark curtain.

“That’s it,” Sergeant Brayton said, turning Maximus around. “Not even Mr. Nose Wizard could follow a track in these conditions.”

The rain hit us and we were soaked before we reached the Christmas trees.

“The chopper can’t come for us in this kind of weather,” Mahoney said. “We’ll have to hike back.”

“Better we jog back, stay warm,” Sergeant Brayton said. “This is classic hypothermia weather.”

“What’s back up that trail?” I asked. “I mean, over that ridge?”

“Eight miles of wilderness and misery before you hit a web of logging roads.”





Chapter





72




Matthew Butler, Big David Dawkins, and J. P. Vincente ignored the rain, the lightning, and the thunder, totally absorbed in working on their burglar’s right thigh. They had Alison Purdy on her back below a tarp they’d rigged between several saplings to keep her and the wound dry.

Her pant leg was slit open. She had a piece of stick wrapped in a bandanna in her mouth, and she bit into it and screamed every time they probed the wound.

“Think I feel it,” Dawkins said. “But I’m going to have to go deeper, Alison.”

“Gimme more oxy,” she said, panting. “Everything in my bugout kit.”

Months before, as a precaution in case they ever had to escape the ranch on foot, Butler had insisted they stash packs filled with survival gear, medical supplies, ammunition, and new identity documents a mile up the canyon, off the trail in an old bear den.

They’d reached the den within an hour of the cartel’s retreat and began tending to Purdy’s wound, from a shard of grenade shrapnel within inches of her femoral artery. They put her in a tourniquet, doused the wound with antibiotic gels, and used blood-coagulant patches to stanch the flow until they could get her to a doctor.

With the three men rotating as Purdy’s assist, they’d climbed steadily out of Fell’s Creek Canyon and down into the far drainage. Even with the help of three men, Purdy had a hard time; she’d been weakened by the ordeal. Butler realized they were going to have to remove the shrapnel if they were to make it the last five miles to an old Toyota Land Cruiser he’d left covered with logging slash in the early spring.

Big DD groped in Purdy’s kit and found the painkillers.

“How many?” she asked.

“Six,” he said.

“Gimme all of them,” she said.

“Negative,” Dawkins said. “You’ll stop breathing. You get three now and three when we’re done.”

Purdy didn’t like it but nodded and held out her palm for the pills, which she threw in her mouth and washed down with water. “I wish this was vodka.”

“I bet you do,” Butler said.

They waited twenty minutes, until the rain began to subside, before trying again, using surgical tools to retract the wound and probe deeper with forceps. Even with the added painkiller, Purdy was weeping and biting down hard on the stick in her mouth.

Butler felt the tip of the forceps click against something. “Hold her, now,” he said to Vincente, who held Purdy down by her shoulders. “This is going to hurt.”

He spread the forceps, drove them deeper, and grabbed the shrapnel as Purdy writhed and screamed bloody murder.

“Hold her, I said!”

Big DD lay across her torso as Butler drew out a thin, jagged blade of metal about an inch long. To his relief, there was no pumping artery blood flooding the wound. “Got it,” he said. “Alison, I just need to sew you up now.”

Purdy was drenched in sweat and disoriented when Vincente and Dawkins got off her. Butler doused the wound again with saline and antibiotics, cleaned the forceps with alcohol, then used them to grip a fishhook needle that he used to sew the gash shut. As he was bandaging the wound, he heard thunder booming to their west.

“We’ve got more storms coming,” he said.

“Ride it out here?” Vincente asked.

“Negative—we definitely heard that helicopter before the first storm hit. Someone’s looking for us, so we go fast and hard under cover of the rain. And there’s a bigger med kit in the rig. I can give her IV antibiotics and morphine, get her comfortable.”

“You’ll have to carry me,” Purdy said. “No way I can take another step.”

“I’ll carry you, Alison,” Big DD said. “No problemo.”

“We all will,” Vincente said, taking down the tarp. He sawed two of the saplings and lashed the tarp between them. Ten minutes later, as the rain and wind picked up again, they lifted Purdy into the makeshift litter and set off.





Chapter





73




Thunderstorm after thunderstorm with violent lightning and driving rain battered south-central Wyoming that afternoon. It was nearly six before we exited the canyon behind the Circle M Ranch. We were all soaked, shivering, and hungry.