NOBODY GOES THROUGH POLICE-ACADEMY TRAINING WITHOUT having the deadly risks inherent in traffic stops drilled into his or her head, but this wasn’t a traffic stop. This was a motor-vehicle accident, and Garth was coming to offer assistance. As a consequence he was totally unprepared for the barrage of bullets that slammed into his bulletproof vest. They hit like hammer blows, knocking the breath out of him.
Looking for cover, he tried to retreat back up the bank. Instead he lost his balance and fell. As he plunged to the ground, the last shot came, and a searing pain shot through his body as a bullet penetrated his upper left thigh. He hit the ground hard and then lay there, dazed and unmoving.
Garth tried to make sense of what had just happened. He knew that his assailant hadn’t used an automatic or a semiautomatic weapon. Fearing that the shooter might be reloading, Garth managed to extract his weapon from its holster, but by the time he had it in hand, his attacker had disappeared. He had gotten away clean. As for Garth? He was pretty sure he was dying.
Once when he and Grandpa Jeb had been out in the desert gathering up dead mesquite—sawing it and splitting it to sell—the head of Garth’s hatchet had come loose, burying the blade deep in his upper thigh, only inches from where this bullet had hit him.
At the time of the accident, Garth and Grandpa had been miles from the nearest hospital or ER. Garth still remembered how Grandpa Jeb had whipped off his belt and wrapped it around Garth’s leg, using it as a tourniquet.
“Cry if you want to, but don’t you faint or pass out on me,” Grandpa Jeb had ordered. “You’ve got to hold this tight long enough for us to make it to the hospital in Wilcox.”
Gritting his teeth, Garth hadn’t cried. Later, after sewing up the wound and giving Garth a tetanus shot, the doctor told them that if it hadn’t been for Grandpa Jeb’s tourniquet, Garth would have died that day.
Lying wounded in the cold and dark, Garth decided this was the same thing.
At Sheriff Brady’s insistence, these days all departmental vehicles were equipped with state-of-the-art law-enforcement first-aid kits—plastic pouches packed with all sorts of first-aid necessities, including tourniquets, pressure bandages, and packets filled with a powdered blood-clotting agent. All of that was right there in the back of the Tahoe, but from where Garth was at the bottom of the ravine with the Tahoe parked up top, it might as well have been on another planet. The only way to get to the kit was to climb up after it, and the tricky part was living long enough to make the climb.
Not willing to give up and die, Garth knew that he needed to stop or at least slow the bleeding. Recalling his grandfather’s lifesaving actions, Garth attempted to remove his belt. Because he was lying on it, that wasn’t easy. Once he did, when it came time to fasten the tourniquet around his leg, he was so shocked by the amount of blood he found on his pant leg that he had to fight to keep from blacking out.
“This is bad,” he told himself aloud. “If I die, too, Grandma Juanita will kill me.” The utter absurdity of that statement made him burst out laughing, making him believe that he was going into shock.
Just then a monster silently materialized out of the darkness and hovered over him. Standing silhouetted there backlit by the pulsing blue-and-red glow from his light bar, he could make out no facial features on the terrifying apparition. The creature boasted an enormous head and a bulky body, perched on top of what appeared to be pencil-thin legs.
Garth remembered one of Pastor Mike’s long-ago sermons where he’d talked about the angel of death. That’s probably what this was, Garth concluded now, the angel of death, sporting a huge explosion of hair instead of wings and come to collect Garth and take him home—not home to Elfrida and Grandma Juanita but home to heaven, where he’d spend eternity with Jesus and with Grandpa Jeb.
But then, to Garth’s amazement, the disturbing figure dropped to the ground beside him and spoke.
“You’re hurt,” a woman said in a surprisingly gentle voice with a distinctly southern accent. “Please don’t die on me. What can I do to help?”
He could see that she was a black woman, or maybe a girl instead of a woman. That’s why he hadn’t been able to make out her face. Now, though, the pain in his leg was so all-encompassing that it was difficult for him to speak.
“There’s a first-aid kit in my patrol car,” he managed at last. “It’s in the back on the right-hand side, just inside the hatch. I dropped my flashlight. If you could find that . . .”
He’d been searching for it in the dark and unable to locate it. Without a word and with no hesitation at all, the woman walked a few steps away, picked up the missing flashlight, and handed it to him.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, “but give me your phone so I can call for help.”
“The phone won’t work,” Garth told her. “We’re too far out of town. No cell service. Hurry, please.”
She left then. He switched on the flashlight to look at his blood-soaked thigh and immediately wished he hadn’t. Just the sight of it sickened him.
Watching her climb the bank and feeling as if his very life were leaking out if him, the time it took seemed like forever. It wasn’t that steep, and it shouldn’t have been that much of a struggle, but it was, and although it might have been only a matter of seconds before she finally reappeared, for Garth it felt like a lifetime.
Trying to help her navigate the descent, Garth aimed the flashlight in her direction. His rescuer wore a leather jacket that was several sizes too big for her, but other than that she appeared to be naked. Her feet were bare, and she was so painfully thin that she reminded him of photos he’d seen of starving prisoners hanging listlessly on the fences of Nazi concentration camps.
“Turn off the light,” she told him. “It’s not helping. I can see better without it.”
That surprised him. How was she was able to see in the dark when he couldn’t?
“Do you know anything about first aid?”
“No,” she said. “Do you?”
With him giving directions, she used the scissors from the first-aid kit to cut off his pant leg. They replaced the belt tourniquet with a proper one. Latisha cut open one packet of the clotting agent and sprinkled the powder into the wound. Then, donning latex gloves, she applied pressure to the wound for the specified amount of time—a seemingly endless three minutes—before covering the wound with a layer of compression bandages.
During the entire process, it was all business between them—a period of total concentration with no small talk. By the time they finished, Garth realized that the sky was gradually turning gray overhead. His leg still hurt like hell, but thanks to her he might live long enough to see the sunrise.
As the light changed, he realized how very young and frail she was, and barefoot, too. And underneath that bulky, oversize jacket, she was entirely naked—an awkward reality for him but one she didn’t appear to notice.
Once the bandaging was complete, she sank down onto the ground beside him with her whole body quaking. It was easy for Garth to attribute the chills to her state of undress. He had a spare uniform in the Tahoe. It would be huge on her, but no more so than the jacket she was already wearing. Still, he hesitated to mention it.
“Thank you,” he said instead. “My name is Garth—Garth Raymond. What’s yours?”
“Latisha Marcum.”
“You’re shaking,” he said. “You’re freezing, and you’re probably in shock.”
“I’m hungry,” she answered. “I need some food, but I lost my kibble in the wreck. The container broke.”
“Your kibble?” he said. “What’s kibble?”
“Dog food,” she answered. “I brought some kibble along, and water, too, but the containers either spilled or broke during the wreck.”
“Wait, you eat dog food?” he asked in disbelief.
“It’s all he ever gave us to eat.”
“He who? The guy who shot me?”
Latisha nodded. “We called him the Boss,” she said simply. “That’s what he made us call him.”
That was when the light finally dawned. Garth had heard some of the talk when he’d come on duty that afternoon—idle speculation that the field of bones might have something to do with a serial killer who first abducted young women and held them prisoner before murdering them. He realized now that Latisha had to be one of those, but instead of being dead she was a survivor.
“How long were you with him?” he asked.
Latisha shrugged. “What month is it now?”
“The end of November.”
“Since March, then,” she said. “He picked me up in New Orleans a while after Mardi Gras ended. He drugged me, put me in the cab of a truck, and brought me here. I’ve been here ever since.”
Garth took a breath. “Thank you so much for the help,” he said. “We’ve stopped the bleeding, but it hurts like hell, and I might still go into shock. We need to get me to an ER as soon as possible. Can you help me make it back up the bank?”
Without answering, Latisha got up and walked to the far side of the wrecked truck. She came back a few minutes later wearing a pair of boots that appeared to be at least two sizes too large. Then, with shoes on her feet, the two of them began the long, slow climb out of the ravine. It was a daunting struggle. The clotting powder seemed to be working, so Garth loosened the tourniquet, releasing a storm of pins and needles into his bloodless leg. When he tried to stand on it, though, the pain was excruciating. The only way to get the job done was for him to scoot along on his butt while Latisha guided him from behind, pushing him as needed.
They made it finally, but the superhuman effort cost them both. Crawling on his hands and one good knee, Garth made it as far as the Tahoe. There, panting and exhausted, he propped himself against one of the back wheels to rest and catch his breath.
“You’re bleeding again,” Latisha observed.
It was true. Blood was beginning to seep through the layer of bandages.
“Is there another packet of clotting powder?” he asked.
“Three more,” she said, “but I left the first-aid kit down below. I’ll go back down and get it.”
Once again the trip down and back seemed to take forever. When she returned, Garth was redoing the tourniquet. After removing the bandage, he saw that the bleeding wasn’t as serious as it had been before. Even so, together they repeated the entire process. The pressure Latisha applied during the required three-minute wait hurt like crazy, but Garth was grateful for that. You had to be alive to know that it hurt.
Initially his idea had been to head for the nearest ranch house and use the residents’ landline to summon help. Now, though, he realized it would make more sense to drive west on Geronimo Trail until they caught a signal and could call for help from there. That way a 911 operator would be able to send an ambulance and EMTs to meet them somewhere en route. Closing the distance would mean saving time, but considering the amount of blood he’d already lost, there was still a very real possibility of his going into shock. Garth knew he was in no condition to be behind the wheel.
“Can you drive?” he asked.
“I suppose,” Latisha replied ruefully, “but not very well. I already wrecked one car tonight.”
“That’s because you were going too fast for conditions,” he told her. “We’ll take it slow—slow and steady wins the race.”
At last the three-minute hold time was up. With Latisha standing next to him, Garth occupied himself by applying the new layer of bandages. Not wanting to embarrass her, he was careful to keep his eyes focused on what he was doing rather than on her when he spoke.
“There’s one other thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“We’re probably going to run into some other people. There’s an athletic bag in the back of the SUV, right next to where you found the first-aid kit. It’s got an extra uniform in it. You might want to put some clothes on.”
With a gasp of shocked surprise, Latisha scurried away from him. She reappeared a few minutes later wearing both the jacket and his uniform. She’d had to roll up the pant legs to keep them from dragging on the ground. One of the boots, now devoid of its shoelace, flopped loosely on her foot.
“I had to use the shoelace to hold up the pants,” she explained. “They kept falling off.”
“Okay,” he said, “I think I’m better now. Let’s do this.”
Again it took both of them working together to get him up off the ground and boosted into the Tahoe’s passenger seat. While Latisha went around to enter on the driver’s side, Garth opened a plastic bag. As she slipped onto the seat next to him, he handed her a sandwich.
“This is one of my grandmother’s meat-loaf sandwiches—the last one I brought along,” he told her. “If you’ve spent months eating nothing but dry dog food, this is gonna taste like heaven.”
He expected her to grab the sandwich and wolf the whole thing down at once. Instead she took a single careful bite, chewed it, swallowed it, and then put the remainder of the sandwich back in the plastic bag before handing it to him.
“Wait,” he objected. “You mean you don’t like it?”
“I love it,” she replied. “I’ve never eaten anything better in my life, but I’m used to eating one piece of kibble at a time. If I eat the whole thing, I’ll make myself sick, and I don’t want to waste a single mouthful.”
“Okay,” he said, placing the bag on the console. “When you’re ready for bite number two, let me know.”