AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Bruno still wears his jacket, over two layers of shirts. Blood soaks the front of it, but when I open it, there’s little staining below. I pull up both his jersey and undershirt and wince. Unlike with the mystery woman, there are no stab wounds, but the damage might be worse. A deep purple contusion mars his ribs, and something pokes against the skin of his torso. April can warn me against practicing medicine, but I’m going to say that “something” is a broken rib, and if it is, we might have internal bleeding.
I touch the bruise. It’s big and it’s ugly. A blunt strike? Could be a blow or a fall. I check his hands. One moves in a way that tells me his wrist is broken. When I shine the light on his palms, there’s embedded dirt and several puncture wounds. I move up to his head. His face is fine, but I finger the back of his skull and my hand comes away bloody.
I’m touching the wound, feeling the size of it, when my flashlight beam catches something around his neck. I pause and reach to find a thin cord, light brown, blending with his skin color in the darkness. It’s looped off to the other side of his neck.
A necklace? The cord is rawhide, and together with the skins, it gives me pause. I pull up the other side of it and lift what looks like a piece of bark that had fallen to the side, maybe when I unwrapped him.
I tug the bark. The cord runs through it. I finger the piece. It’s maybe the size of my fist.
Why would someone tie—?
It hits then, and I turn the bark over to see someone has burned letters into the underside of the bark.
I shine the light down and read the single word.
LEAVE
A crackle of brush sounds, Dalton breaking through with, “It’s me.”
I glance up to see Pierre struggling along behind. I set down the bark message and focus on the man lying in front of me.
“Please tell me this is actually Bruno,” I say.
“It is,” Pierre says.
“Contusion on the right lower rib cage,” I say. “Possible rib fracture. Another contusion on the back of his skull, with what could be a serious loss of blood. One broken wrist. Damage to his palms suggesting a fall.” I quickly amend, “Which could be an accidental fall or falling to the ground after being struck.”
“Got it,” Pierre says.
The man might have been hesitant with our mystery woman, but here he dives in, all business, checking vitals and assessing damage. It’s only when he goes to examine the lower extremities that he pauses.
“Did you wrap him like that?” he says.
“No,” I say. “He was found wrapped to his neck. There’s board bracing behind his head and under his back. Someone brought him here.”
Pierre only nods and keeps working. When he notices that rawhide necklace, he hesitates. I tug it off and show the message.
“From whoever dropped him off, I presume,” I say.
Again, there’s no hesitation. We have a seriously injured patient. There isn’t time for curiosity about anything that doesn’t directly affect Bruno’s chance of survival.
“Rib fracture,” Pierre says. “Two, possibly three ribs affected. One is badly fractured. There’s the possibility of internal bleeding, but I hope not because…”
“Because you aren’t trained to deal with that.”
“Not to deal with it, and not even to diagnose it without proper equipment. I know there’re some in the clinic, but it’s been arriving in boxes that I don’t open, because I wouldn’t know how to operate it anyway.”
He keeps unwrapping Bruno’s legs as he talks. That’s when he does stop for a moment, his gaze going to the pant leg, soaked in blood. There’s a tourniquet below his knee and then bindings below, but even without removing the binding, we can tell by the protrusion what lies below. A compound fracture, the bone breaking through the skin.
“We need to get him back to town now,” Pierre says.
Dalton and Pierre carry Bruno back while I jog ahead with Storm. I reach the edge of Haven’s Rock and stop short as my gaze swings around the town. It’s pitch-black, as it should be, especially at this hour, but as I look, I realize I have no idea where to find Yolanda.
I’d expected she might be staying in our house before we arrived, and that would have been fine, but it’d been obvious no one has occupied it. There are apartments over most of the service buildings, and those will be the next best homes. I survey my options and then run to the most obvious choice. The town hall/police station, with Anders’s new apartment over it. I run inside and up the stairs, only to find a place as unused as our house.
I run back down and straight to the nearest residence building, where I bang on the door. It takes a minute. Then the door opens, and the guy who stands there is maybe in his late twenties, wearing a pair of very small briefs.
His gaze travels down me. “Well, hello there. You must be new.”
