Outlaw Hearts(194)

He moved his hands over the man’s arms, ribs. “I don’t feel any broken bones,” he told Miranda, “but I don’t doubt he’s got more than one cracked rib. His ribs should have been wrapped.” He took out a stethoscope and listened to Jake’s breathing.

“He’s so hot, Brian, and his breathing sounds so labored.” Miranda smoothed Jake’s still-thick, dark hair back from his face. She leaned close. “Jake? You’ll be all right, mi querido. I’m here with you and I’m not leaving.”

Brian examined Jake for several minutes, pressing the stethoscope to his chest again. He looked across the bed at Miranda. “Sounds like pneumonia, Randy. We’ve got to get him into more of a sitting position or his lungs will fill and he’ll suffocate.”

Evie hurriedly gathered pillows from some of the empty beds and the three of them worked to prop Jake up higher. Randy and Brian wrapped his ribs, and Randy shivered with fear when he began coughing, a deep, prolonged cough that was obviously painful, from both the pneumonia and the cracked ribs. The pain was written on his face, and he groaned with every breath for several minutes after the coughing stopped.

“Dear God, don’t let him die,” Randy whispered, kneeling beside the bed. She took hold of his hand, which was closed into a tight fist, tighter than she had ever seen him close the crippled hand. He was clinging to the rosary beads.

“Lloyd,” Jake muttered. “Got to…help…my son.”

***

Jake breathed deeply for Brian, who held a stethoscope to his back. “He sounds a little less congested,” Brian told Miranda, who sat on the other side of the cot. He still could not get over feeling a chill at the sight of the scars on Jake’s back, always recalling the horrid vision of a grown man beating a little boy with the buckle end of a leather belt.

“This is one hell of a way to meet your father-in-law,” Jake said, lying back against the pillows. He glanced at Evie, overwhelmed by her utter beauty and by the realization she was a grown, married woman. “Have you really all been here for three days?”

“Slept right on the empty cots over there,” Brian answered. “Can’t you tell by our wrinkled clothes? They at least gave me shaving equipment. Randy and I used it to shave that grizzly beard of yours.” He grinned. “Randy told me what a handsome man you were. I knew you had to be because of how beautiful Evie is, but under that beard and all those bruises, it was hard to tell.”

Jake put a hand to his hair. “I’m a beat-up, half-crippled old man is what I am.” This morning was the first he’d awakened knowing who and where he was, and who had been talking to him in his dreams, that the woman he had thought was his mother was Evie.

A fit of coughing hit him, and he grasped Randy’s hand tightly until he could get his breath again. He held his ribs and lay back, groaning with pain, and Miranda brought his hand up to her lips and kissed it. Brian pulled up a chair and sat down beside the bed. “You should know you’ve got pneumonia, Jake, so you’ve got to stay in a sitting position. Don’t lie all the way flat or you could suffocate. If you take it real easy and they let you stay in this bed with plenty of blankets for warmth, you’ll be all right in time. What you really need is fresh air.”

Jake looked at his son-in-law, a handsome, clean-cut young man who he supposed had never seen any of the ugly side of life he had seen. He glanced at Evie, saw the glow on her face. “This man being good to you?” he asked.

“Can’t you tell?” She smiled. “We’re very happy, Father. That’s partly why I wanted you to meet Brian, see us together. It gives you that much more to come home to. By the time you’re free, you’ll have grandchildren to meet.”

Jake frowned. “You sure you want them to know me?”

Evie rolled her eyes. “Of course I’ll want them to know you. You’re my father, and you’ve been a very good father. That’s all that’s important. I’m proud of the man who raised me. I don’t care what he did before that.”

Jake smiled sadly, looking at Randy, squeezing her hand. “Lloyd does care. He’s throwing his life away because of my past.”

Miranda reached out and stroked his hair. “The warden told us what that prisoner said about Lloyd.” She felt him tensing.

“I’ve got to find a way to get to him, Randy. I can’t stay in this place four more years while he’s out there either drinking himself to death or risking being caught by the law and put in a place like this. If I didn’t have this need to find him and help him, I’d let myself die right now, or find a way to end my life for what’s happened to him.” He closed his eyes. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”