Mystic Cowboy(85)

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No!” Hubert shouted, no doubt afraid that once behind the counter Rebel would start stuffing painkillers in his pocket. “This will take about half an hour. You can wait in your truck.”

“Hubert!”

“I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder as he headed across the street. Open, the neon sign in the sales office announced.

His path was right there in front of him.

He just had to walk it.



By the time he got back to the clinic, it was almost noon. Nobody was outside waiting for him, and silently they offloaded the boxes. Damn, he thought as Madeline tore into the first one like a hungry animal, she looks like hell. He couldn’t see a lot of her—she had on that mask she was making everyone wear, her less-than-pristine doctor’s coat and gloves covered her arms, and she even had on one of those shower caps doctors wore in surgery. The only things he could see were her eyes, but that was enough to worry him.

The bags under her eyes were so purple that he was afraid for a moment someone had been beating up on her in his absence, but he quickly realized she was just that tired. Her eyelids weren’t even making it past half-mast, which gave her the air of being permanently pissed.

He didn’t want her to be pissed at him. “Madeline—”

Her head jerked up. She may look exhausted, but behind those lids, her eyes were still sharp—sharp enough to stop his apology in its tracks. He almost bit his tongue.

“Did that ass give you any trouble?” she said under her breath to him as he ripped open the box of IVs.

Wrong conclusion, again. The relevant conclusion, but still the wrong one. And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it right now. “Nothing I couldn’t handle. I’ve got the receipt.” Both of them.

She shot him a sharp look but let it slide. “Hang on to it. We don’t have time to file anything.” She scooped up a few bags of saline and IVs and went right back to work.

That’s right. They didn’t have time for filing and talking and apologizing and making up. They had work to do.

So he got to work.



“I think we’ve turned a corner,” Madeline said, the weariness dripping off each word as she chugged a Gatorade outside. Something about electrolytes, she’d said when she’d sent him to clear out the Quik-E Mart of all its sports drinks. Rebel thought she sounded worse than she did when she’d come looking for him during the hot part of the day. “Some of these people can be just as miserable at home.” She turned to look at him. “Do you want to be the chauffeur, or should we send Jesse?”

We. There was still a we. She’d been too tired to notice it, no doubt, and there was always a chance that she’d meant we in a medical-professional sense. But she was looking at him when she said it.

“Jesse.” Rebel didn’t want to leave, frankly. He wanted to keep close to her. She looked like a drowned rat. Plus, he was tired. In addition to the Rapid City run, he’d made peanut butter sandwiches—outside, away from the germs—for anyone who wanted one and tried to keep up with the patient files—although he knew Tara would probably have a cow once she started feeling well enough to see what he’d done to her carefully organized system. He’d called the priest at the church and Tim, at Madeline’s request. He’d burned sage and said prayers with anyone who wanted him to, which had been nearly everyone, despite the number of practicing Catholics in the clinic. When people felt that bad, it didn’t matter who was praying for them, as long as someone still cared.

In addition to his medicine-man responsibilities, he’d gone over Madeline’s Jeep—inside and out—with bleach and a scrub brush. He suspected she owed someone a new shower curtain because they sure as hell weren’t getting that one back. He’d burned it in the trash barrel, along with the steady supply of contaminated medical waste. He was probably single-handedly jacking up the pollution rate for the rez, but Madeline had been explicit, and he trusted her when she said to burn everything.

All in all, it had been one hell of a day.

It wasn’t like Jesse hadn’t also been pulling his weight. Both hospital beds had two kids lying toe-to-toe in them. Madeline didn’t want to put the little ones on the floor if she could help it, and Jesse took it upon himself to keep the kids as clean and as calm as he could. As he sponged down kid after kid, he told the old stories that Albert had raised him and Rebel on, of Iktomi and Manstin, turtles and bears. He held hands when an IV had to be moved or a shot given, and he didn’t complain once about being puked on. Albert would have been proud. Rebel sure was.