“McKenzie…”
As soon as he was close enough, I lunged forward, grabbed him by his shirt and his upper arm, pulled him over the top of the bar, and threw him as best as I could onto a round table. The table collapsed under his weight. I clutched my left side.
Dammit, that hurt, my inner voice said.
Evan shook his head and tried to rise from the barroom floor. I moved to his side, grabbed a tuft of his blond hair, yanked his head up, and punched him in the jaw with all my strength. A vast pain rippled all the way up my arm from my knuckles to my shoulder. A spray of blood jetted from the side of Evan’s mouth, and he sagged against the floor. I shook my right arm.
That hurt, too.
It probably hurt him more, I told myself.
One can only hope.
Sharren was taking quick, short steps in Evan’s direction. She seemed to be trembling. I held up my hand to keep her from coming nearer.
Evan was slumped onto his side. I gripped his shoulder and rolled him over so I could see his face, so he could see mine.
“I’m going to ask you once and only once—”
“Don’t hurt me,” he said. Blood splattered from his mouth as he spoke. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”
“Evan—”
“It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault. He made me do it. I’m not responsible. You can’t blame me. I was just following orders. I was just doing what I was told. McKenzie—”
“Whose orders?”
“Don’t hurt me.”
“I’m calling the police,” Sharren said.
“Go ’head,” I said.
“No,” Evan said.
“No?” Sharren said.
“Evan doesn’t want the cops,” I said. “He doesn’t want to be an accessory to kidnapping and maybe attempted murder, too. Do you?”
Evan shook his head.
“Whose orders?” I repeated.
“He said you wouldn’t leave town of your own free will so you had no one to blame but yourself for what happened.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Miller.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Is he the one who kicked me?”
Evan hesitated before he answered. “Yes.”
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t; maybe it was both of them, my inner voice said. Does it matter?
“Not one damn bit,” I said aloud.
“Huh?”
“Evan, you’re getting off easy.” From the look in his eye, I don’t think he believed me. “I don’t know how badly hurt you are, only it could be considerably worse, trust me. At the very least, I could send you to federal prison. At the very least. Do we understand each other?” He nodded. “Fortunately for you, I happen to be in a good mood. I’m in a good mood because in a couple of hours alot of bad things are going to start happening to a lot of bad people. If you speak to anyone, tell anyone I’m back, especially Miller, some of those bad things are going to happen to you. Understand?”
He nodded his head again.
“Say it,” I said.
“I understand,” Evan said.
I turned and started for the exit. Sharren called after me.
“McKenzie, where are you going?”
“To the hospital.”
Nancy Gustafson did everything a doctor would have done. First, she examined my eye, even though it was my ribs that were killing me. Next, she pushed on my chest to determine where I hurt—which hurt like hell, by the way. She watched me breathe and listened to my lungs to make sure air was moving in and out normally. She listened to my heart. She checked my head, neck, spine, and stomach to make sure there weren’t any other injuries. All the while, she said reassuring things like “A blow that’s hard enough to crack a rib is hard enough to injure your lungs, spleen, blood vessels, a lot of other body parts.”
Then there were the inevitable X-rays. She secured mine to a light box and pointed. “Look,” she said.
I followed her finger from my perch on the examination room table. There was a fracture no thicker than a single strand of hair across two of my middle ribs.
“I bet that hurts,” Nancy said.
“It does,” I said. “What can we do about it?”
“Very little, I’m afraid. There’s no cast or splint. The ribs will have to heal on their own. It should take about six weeks. The best we can do is make you as comfortable as possible while you wait.”
“How?”
Nancy cut four long strips of two-inch-wide adhesive tape. She placed two of the strips directly over my damaged ribs, stretching the tape from my sternum to my spine. The other strips were placed on either side of the ribs.
“The tape should help decrease your pain a bit by restricting the movement of the ribs,” she said. “We don’t want to wrap around the entire chest because that’ll restrict breathing. Breathing is important. You want to take deep breaths, and you want to cough every once in a while. It’ll hurt. It’ll also prevent secretions from pooling in the lung; it’ll prevent pneumonia, so man up, okay?”
Man up? How about a little compassion, lady?