The young man looked surprised but took my directions and helped me field dress and bandage my wound. It was a temporary fix, but it would stop the bleeding and prevent any other objects from entering the cavity.
Cletus had hit muscle when he stabbed me. I wouldn’t know if he wounded something vital without an X-ray. I hoped there wasn’t nerve or tissue damage.
I can’t worry about that now.
“I need to make a phone call,” I told Roberto. “Do you have a phone I can use?”
He nodded and pulled out his cell from his jeans pocket and backed away from the truck a foot or two to give me space.
I smiled in gratitude and took his phone. I struggled to get a signal and lifted the cell in the air.
Roberto’s sharp inhale drew my attention.
Cletus stood behind Roberto and extracted a knife from between his ribs. Cletus then punched the blade in and out several more times in Roberto’s kidney, like it was something he’d done before. The young man tried to scream, but the pain overwhelmed him, and he fell to his knees, his hand going to his back and sliding through blood that began to pool at his feet. He collapsed on the ground in front of me, eyes dimming.
Cletus folded his knife up as I stared in shock, and then he grasped my arm where I’d been injured. I cried out in pain. By the time I thought to wrench free and run, my body balked. It had been through enough trauma and refused.
He slapped me hard with his other hand straight across the face causing me to drop the cell phone. “You fucking bitch!”
My vision was spotty and I struggled to remain upright. The maniac reached over the driver’s seat, turned off the truck, and pulled out the keys. He paused and then said, “Get in, sweetheart. We have some place to be. You’re driving.”
* * *
My fingers clenched the steering wheel of the diesel truck while Cletus sat next to me with his pocketknife in his hands, ready to use at a moment’s notice.
“Keep your speed at eighty. No one’s going to stop us around here,” he snapped angrily.
“Okay.”
“And don’t even think about pulling any more shit.” He sneered. “I’ll slit your throat if you try another stunt like that and tell them you died in the crash.”
His face was scratched from the car accident, but the idiot was more durable than Paul.
I’d once believed that every human life had value. That everyone deserved a chance to be saved.
How incredibly naive I’d been.
When people came to the hospital, it was my job to treat their injuries. It was supposed to end there, but I’d routinely gone above the physical repairing of human beings, wanting also to help battered women find new lives, new meaning.
But I couldn’t fix people like Cletus.
What made someone aid in the kidnapping and human trafficking of another person?
There were sliding scales of criminality, clearly. I’d excused Boxer and his club’s actions. Why? Was it because I loved Boxer? Because I’d been seduced by the idea of acceptance and family? Because even though they were criminals, they helped people?
Where was my own line?
What direction would my own moral compass point me in?
An innocent man had been murdered because he’d tried to help me. I’d carry that burden with me, just like I carried the death of my eight-year-old patient on my conscience.
“Turn up there at the sign,” Cletus commanded.
I was still running on adrenaline. My head throbbed. I was thirsty, hungry, tired, and scared. I did as he said and turned off onto a side road off the barren highway.
Fifteen minutes later, I drove the truck up to a massive wrought iron gate built into a ten-foot-tall wall that surrounded what looked like an old ghost town. Behind the gate, I could see pink adobe buildings, each decaying at their own rate but some still whole and appearing habitable.
I idled the truck at the gates and sat for a moment before Cletus made a phone call.