Ellis caught Adan’s look in the rearview mirror. “You’ll live longer if you don’t.” They both knew what he meant. Adan looked at the road behind them and saw only dust.
At the wreck, Bobby Sotomayor sat outside the vehicle, awake and coherent. Santino Robles said he was groggy, but also aware of his surroundings. Raymond worked to stop the bleeding on both of them, especially on their heads and faces.
Hunter worked on preparing a makeshift cast for the broken forearm. She said to Raymond, “Both bones are fractured.”
“That’s lucky.”
Bobby moaned, “Lucky?”
Raymond said,
“Compared to being dead, yeah, lucky.”
“When you put it that way,” Bobby said.
Raymond asked Hunter, “How are you coming with that splint?”
“Almost there.” She held it up for them to see. She found a small cluster of soap yuccas, with the tall shafts still intact and not desiccated. They were dry, and still had strength to them with each stalk half an inch or a little less in diameter. She cut their length to fit the forearm, then put them around the break and wrapped all of it in adhesive tape from the roll in the small medicine kit.
“That should hold until we get you to a hospital. As it swells, these will give enough to not be uncomfortable.”
Raymond told Santino, “You look like you’ve been dusted with flour.”
“That one place, the pickup rolled into a large caliche mound, with my open door hitting right into it. Thought I was in a blizzard for a second or two.” Santino still hurt, but his sense of humor was there. Tough men, Raymond thought.
Raymond said to Hunter, “I’m going up and wait for Buddy.”
“Bueno.” She finished with the makeshift cast, gave it one last wrap of tape, and sat back on her heels. She looked at the two dusty men, “How are you two doing? What about inside, are you having any internal pain? You boys bounced around in that truck like two mice in a tornado.”
Bobby said, “We didn’t notice, we just enjoyed the view.”
Santino said, “Yeah, The sky, the ground, the sky, the ground…”
Hunter laughed, “You guys.”
A shout from above made them look up at Raymond. He said, “The Cavalry has arrived. And, we don’t have any prisoners in the vehicle.”
“What?”
“They’re not here, and neither are their backpacks with the drugs.”
“Adan?”
“He’s gone, too. There was another vehicle here, and they all got in it, then drove away. I back-tracked it and found where it hid, not far from here.”
“We weren’t down here that long.”
“What I thought. Somehow it was all rigged, this accident and everything.”
Buddy and Brandi peered over the edge at Hunter. Buddy said, “We’re coming. Don’t go anywhere.”
Bobby looked at Hunter, “Did he just say that?”
“Buddy likes to kid around.”
“All the time. You know how I keep that bowl of individually wrapped peppermint discs on my desk, in case someone wants one?” Hunter nodded. “He came to my office yesterday and while I was in the back, he superglued all of them together. You couldn’t tell by looking, but when I pulled one, the whole bowlful lifted out.”
She tried to hide her grin, “I know, you can’t stay mad at him.”