Natural Evil (Elder Races #4.5)(4)

The sheriff was silent for a moment. Then he growled, “Fine.”

Rodriguez slammed out the front door. In ten minutes he was back. He slapped papers on the corner of the counter. He said to the vet, “Call me.”

Jackson nodded without a break in his work. The sheriff left without another word.

Claudia’s stomach was in a knot by the time Jackson finally got the rope cut away from the dog’s neck. They washed him next, cleaning him of sand and grit. There were raw wounds all over his body. Jackson’s aged face was set, his pale blue eyes burning. She had a feeling she looked the same way. He took X-rays, diagnosed broken ribs and wrapped them, and he had to cut out two bullets. They worked for a long time in a silence that was broken only by Jackson’s brusque commands. She did everything he told her to do, and she did it quickly.

Jackson’s medicine was mundane, which was to say, he did not use spells in any of his procedures. She didn’t sense any sparks of Power on him or anywhere in his house, but then her magic sense was almost nil. Most creatures, items and places felt mundane to her. She’d never bothered to try discovering if her spark of Power was enough to cross over to an Other land because, in part, she couldn’t sense the land magic of the crossover passages.

Finally Jackson finished working on the dog. When he removed the endotracheal tube, straightened and stripped off his gloves, she stretched her aching back and shoulders and stripped off hers as well, tossing them into the hazardous-waste bin by the back door.

Jackson opened his battered fridge and pulled out two Heinekens. He popped the tops off the green bottles and handed one to her. Claudia accepted it and took a swallow. She watched him dig into his shirt pocket to pull out a cigarette lighter and a pack of Camels. He offered a cigarette to her. She shook her head. He tapped one out of the box, stuck it between his lips and kicked open the back screen door to step outside. When he held the door open for her, she glanced at the bandaged, unconscious dog.

“He won’t be waking up for a few hours,” said Jackson. His pale blue eyes were keen.

She took a deep breath and stepped outside after him. She drank her Heineken and looked around the scene as Jackson smoked. She could see the back end of the modest row houses that lined the sandy two-lane street. To the north, rising foothills provided an elevated horizon. The brown land was sprinkled with dots of sagebrush, cacti and yucca trees. A few of the houses had small landscaped areas of improbable green.

Jackson’s backyard didn’t. It was the same brown as the rest of the desert. A small, battered trailer that rested on concrete blocks instead of tires took up most of the space in his yard. Bare concrete steps led up to the trailer’s door. The window coverings were raised. The trailer looked uninhabited, the parking space beside it empty.

A large part of the evening sky had darkened. She nodded toward it. “Weird.”

Jackson glanced in that direction. “Sandstorm’s blowing in. It’ll probably hit in another hour. Looks like we’ll lose cable again.”

She raised her eyebrows. “That happen often?”

“A fair amount. Cell phone reception is spotty here anyway, and it goes out completely in one of these storms. Sometimes we lose the phone lines too. If the phone lines go, it’ll take at least a day before we get them back.”

“Damn.”

“The storm might blow over in a couple of hours, or it might go all night. I knew one once that lasted a couple days, although that’s unusual. People watch DVDs, hang out in the bars, and there’s always a poker game somewhere.” He shrugged. “You get used to it.”

The storm didn’t look that far off. She guessed it would be blowing in very soon, but for the moment, the heat of the early evening pressed against her skin. Spring hadn’t officially arrived yet; the vernal equinox was in just a few days. She liked the summer and winter solstices, and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. They added a cadence to the year and made it feel balanced.

The heat would go out of the day quickly, especially now that the sun had begun to descend. She imagined the spring nights would get quite cold, but for now she was still comfortable with bare arms.

Jackson finished his cigarette, stubbed it out and tossed the brown butt into a coffee can by his back door. “I’d say you don’t talk much for a girl,” he said. “Except you don’t talk much, period. Those five words were the most you’ve said in a couple hours.”

She took a pull from her beer. “Ran out of things to say a few years back.”

Jackson grunted, tapped out another cigarette and lit it. He drew deeply on the cigarette and with evident pleasure. The glowing coal at the end flared bright red. “Why’s that?”

She lifted a shoulder. Too much blood, too much death. Her unit got shot at one too many times, and the last time almost none of them survived to walk away. Sometimes, she thought, things happen that are so bad you go deep inside, down past the point of screaming, into silence.

She finished her Heineken.

Jackson smoked. She liked the smell of the cigarette smoke. It was comforting. It reminded her of people she had cared for more than her own life, people she would never see again this side of death.

He asked, “So what’s the real story? You know that dog?”

“Nope,” she said. “I found him, just like I said.”

He said, “He should’ve died on that table couple times over.”