Page 83 of Never Stay Gone
“Shane?” Dakota tore off his own shirt, bunched it up, and shoved it against the exit wound. “Shane, can you hear me?”
“Dakota…” Shane coughed. He blinked slowly, and his eyes rolled around for a moment, searching.
Distantly, Dakota heard the wail of sirens, the long rise and fall. Finally. What sounded like every deputy in the Big Bend Sheriff’s Department riding to the rescue. He saw the cloud of dust rise from the highway, heard the crunch of a dozen tires thundering over gravel.
“I’m here.” Dakota ran his blood-soaked hand through Shane’s hair. “I’m here, I’m here.”
“I love you.” Shane’s head tipped back as he exhaled, and his eyes closed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Heath tookone look at Shane’s bloody body on the porch and ordered a medevac to the nearest trauma hospital. Brian, who once upon a fucking time probably thought it was cool to be named the department’s medevac organizer, nearly hyperventilated as Heath and Dakota loaded Shane into the back seat of Brian’s cruiser.
They squeezed in around Shane, slipping on the blood still coming out of him. Dakota ended up kneeling on the floor behind the front seat, squatting over boxes of shotgun shells, as Heath straddled Shane’s lap. “Drive, Brian!” Heath barked. “You know where to go.”
Out there, somewhere, was the medevac point, something Heath and Shane and Brian and the rest of the deputies had trained for. Was this their first time doing this outside of a training exercise? Judging by the way Brian’s hands were shaking, it was. Or maybe all that trembling, all that cussing coming from Brian was because this wasShanebleeding out in his back seat.
Heath and Dakota both held pressure, Dakota on the back, Heath on the front, as Brian tore off. Dakota braced himself as best he could and pressed his face against Shane’s neck and cheek, whispering into his lover’s ear. “Hang on, Shane. You just hang on, ’kay? I’m here with you, and so is Heath.” He tasted iron and salt, felt blood seep from the balled-up shirt he held to Shane’s shoulder. “You hang on, goddamn it. Don’t fuckin’ leave me like this. Not like this.”
Brian caught air under all four tires as he drove straight for the highway. Fuck the roads: there was a straight line to the evac point, and Brian was taking it. Fields and fences be damned.
When they made it to 90, Heath walked Brian, still shaking with adrenaline, eyes cow-wide, through setting the flares, spray-painting a marker, and then popping a smoke signal when the helo appeared out of the north. “You’ve done this, Brian. Remember your training,” Heath called.
Heath did it all while holding Shane’s blood-soaked chest beneath both palms and while Dakota was begging Shane to just open his eyes, one more time, to look at Dakota, to promise him he was going to hang on.
Dakota’s tears fell on Shane’s cheeks, mixed with Shane’s deep, dark blood.
The chopper’s skids brushed the dirt. Three flight medics leaped out and hauled Shane onto a stretcher, then raced back to the chopper. Brian followed, almost tripping in the rotor wash, and clambered in as well. Dakota saw one of the medics prep an IV for Shane. Another grabbed a bag of QuikClot.
He ran after them, fully intending to climb on board, to leap if he had to, to take Shane’s hand and hold on all the way to the hospital. Hold his hand until Shane’s eyes opened and he looked at Dakota again with that little smile and all that love in his eyes.
Heath held him back, though, as the rotors spun up and the helo began to lift. “You’ll be in the way!” Heath shouted into his ear. “You have to let them work on him. You have to let them go. Trust them!”
It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, harder even than walking away from Shane on Main Street all those years ago. Watching the helicopter rise and soar away, taking Shane from him, he sagged back against Heath, folding in half as his knees buckled. He hit the ground with Heath still holding on to him, Shane’s blood on both their hands, and Shane’s blood all over his face.
So much blood that, when Dakota’s tears fell, they ran like red rain, soaking the parched earth.
* * *
Heath drove Brian’s car—rickety,now, after its plow through the fields—back to Danielle’s house, where the rest of the department was processing the scene. Dakota went with him after a long talking-to on the side of the road, Heath telling him they needed tofocus. The doctors were doing their part, and now Dakota, Heath, and everyone else needed to do theirs. Get down to the business of revenge: for Shane, for Shelly, and for all the other girls. “This doesn’t end with that son of a bitch you killed, Dakota,” Heath said. “I know it doesn’t.”
Bennet, who had driven out of Fort Stockton like a fucking tornado after Dakota’s call, met them at the ranch. He clasped Dakota’s hand, then pulled him into a bear hug. He didn’t have to say anything.
It was while Danielle and her husband’s bodies were being carted out that Heath got the call. “Shane was taken straight to surgery,” Brian said, his voice wavering, cracking on the vowels. “But the doctors say he’s going to be all right. He lost a lot of blood, but they said everything else looks good.” Then Brian broke down on the phone, and Heath couldn’t get another word out of him.
But it was enough. Dakota felt the ease of terror’s hold on his heart. Felt the hot rush of rage replace the chill of his raw fear.Shane. My Shane. You hold on, goddamn it. I’m gonna nail the son of a bitch who Wayne was working with. He put that bullet in you, same as Wayne. I’m gonna run him down.
Dakota, Heath, and Bennet searched for the trail Wayne had to have left behind. They found his cell phone and a key to a rental Jeep in Wayne’s pocket, and, after a couple of hours, found the Jeep at the back edge of Danielle’s property. It was well hidden, positioned to make a getaway to the back roads without being seen.
“If we’d come across the scene like he was going to set it up,” Heath said to Dakota, “we never would have even looked to see if there was another vehicle out here.”
“It woulda worked. The way he was goin’ to make it all go down. It woulda worked.” Dakota kicked a rock off the rugged embankment, watched it tumble into the scrub.
Heath frowned and stared at some distant point on the horizon as Bennet kicked a dandelion. “No. I never would have bought it. Shane would never turn a weapon on you, Dakota. Not ever in his life. No matter what.”
Dakota didn’t know what to say to that.
“Drew Riggshasto know about all this,” Heath said. “This doesn’t just happen in a vacuum.”
