Page 52

Garrett unclips his seat belt. “Keep yours on.”

The alternate track starts on Garrett’s side, across a shallow ditch and behind a cable gate. I need thirty seconds to reach it. The man reaches me in six.

The bar hits the corner of my window. Safety glass crazes but holds. The second blow punches a hole above the lock, and glass rains across my shoulder and the console.

I turn my face away, keep my foot on the brake, and grab the satellite unit. “Transport vehicle boxed at the primary crossing. Attempted entry, driver’s side. Start emergency response.”

The hook comes through the hole and catches under the inside handle. The door unlocks. I grab it with both hands and pull, and the man levers the other way, and he is so much stronger than I am.

Garrett comes across the console.

He jams his right shoulder into the gap between me and the opening, grabs the frame with one hand, and shoves the bar away with the other. The man yanks the hook back. A jagged edge of window glass slices through Garrett’s sleeve above the elbow, and the fabric goes dark before I understand what I’m seeing.

The man pulls again. The door swings wider than Garrett’s body can follow. His shoulder slams into the pillar with a sound I will hear for the rest of my life. All the color leaves his face.

He doesn’t let go. He doesn’t let the man reach me.

I can’t win this on strength. So I change direction.

I let go of the door, slam the shifter into drive, and cut the wheel hard toward the service track. The sudden lurch tears the handle out of the man’s reach. Garrett falls back across the console as the front tires drop off the pavement into the ditch.

The cable gate is looped, not locked. I saw it in the transport photographs and confirmed it yesterday. The bumper pushes the slack center down and I roll the left tires over the flat cable without wrapping it around an axle. We climb the far bank with brush screaming down both sides of the car.

The track is too narrow for the cattle truck to follow. Behind us, the lead unit is already reversing toward the crossing.

“Direction?” the dispatcher asks.

I give her the track marker, our speed, the car’s condition.

And Garrett’s injury.

I say it like a line item. Right upper arm, laceration, heavy bleeding, possible shoulder injury. My voice is perfectly steady. My hands are not. There is blood running down his arm into his cuff and onto the console, and his right hand is hanging wrong, and he’s bracing his wrist against his thigh so the shoulder won’t move.

“Pressure dressing,” he says through his teeth. “Rear kit.”

“I know where it is.”

“Tessa.”

“I’m driving us out. You’re going to press your left hand on that arm and tell me if your fingers go numb.”

He does it. He doesn’t argue.

That frightens me more than anything else that’s happened this morning.

At the old loading ramp, the track widens. I stop only when the lead unit reaches the far entrance and dispatch confirms the deputy is contained at the crossing. I pull on gloves and open the trauma kit.

The cut runs along the outside of his upper arm, longer than my palm. The blood isn’t pulsing. I hold onto that one fact like a railing. I pack gauze against it, wrap it tight, and check his hand.

“Can you feel this?” I touch each fingertip.

“Yes.”

“Tingling?”

“No.” His jaw is locked. “Shoulder feels wrong.”

“That’s the medical description I expected from a man who tried to occupy the same space as a steel pillar.”