“Like John Wayne always said.” Beaudine gave a nervous laugh. “We’re burnin’ daylight.”
“Burning moonlight,” Quinn smiled. “If we’re not on the trail well before the sun comes up, there’s no way we can catch up to Volodin before the Russian hunter gets to him.” He threw more wood on the fire, and then untied the support line to take down the nylon tube tent, which he spread out like a tarp between the fire and the boulder. Positioning the headlamp in the center of his forehead, he stretched a pair of latex gloves from the first-aid kit over oily hands and sat on the second sleeping bag with his back to the boulder. The bag was still inside the vacuum-sealed wrapper and formed a two-by-two-foot compressed square that made for a perfect seat cushion.
“Okay,” he said, waving a gloved hand over the top of the tarp. “That should keep you dry and out of the snow. I need you to lie down here as best you can — on your back, so you’re looking up at me.”
Beaudine froze. “With my head in your lap?”
Quinn nodded. “That’s the idea.”
She moved grudgingly, maneuvering her bruised body so the back of her head rested on Quinn’s thigh. She peered up at him with the eye that wasn’t crusted shut. He smelled like wet wool and wood smoke — smells she’d never found particularly pleasant but were oddly comforting at the moment. He wore the headlamp but hadn’t switched it on yet, and looked down at her smiling, as if it wasn’t weird that he was patting her forehead in the middle of the Alaska wilderness. She knew he was merely assessing her wound, but the flickering firelight and her reclining vantage point made it feel tender, and the circles she ran in didn’t offer that sensation very often.
She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. “You ever sew anyone up before?”
“You’ll make seven,” Quinn said. “If you count myself, and the pig and two goats at field labs during Pararescue training.”
“Two people?” Beaudine said, her good eye flicking open. “You mean to tell me you’ve only stitched up two live people?”
“I’ve practiced on a lot of pig feet,” Quinn said, winking. “Look, stitches are a last resort in the field. We should really wait until we get back, but you’ll need both eyes for the work we have ahead. There’s superglue in the kit, and I’ll use it when I can, but it’s not likely to hold up on the deeper areas.” He held his hands back away from her face as if to get some sort of go-ahead to continue.
Beaudine sighed. “Well, two is two more than I’ve ever done, so I guess you’re the expert.”
“I am,” Quinn said, sounding sure enough of himself to calm her nerves a notch. He held a small syringe over her face so she could see it. “I need to irrigate the wound. Make sure we got all the crud out before I close it. I can probably get by with six or seven stitches above your eye and close this one over your nose with butterfly strips or glue.
“There a mirror in that kit?”
“It’s pretty small.” Quinn rifled through the pack that sat on the tarp beside him until he found a two-by-three Lexan mirror with a signaling pinhole in the middle. “You want to look at it before and after so you can sue me for malpractice?”
Small or not, the mirror did the job. Beaudine flinched when she saw the angry gash that ran in a diagonal red line across the bridge of her nose and up to her scalp. It was a scar she’d live with the rest of her life — and it was eerily familiar.
“Well, hello there, Merline,” she whispered.
Quinn had waited much too long to clean the wound and had to use several canteen cups worth of watered down Betadine and the syringe to work loose all the dirt and debris that had made it inside. He knew it must have been extremely uncomfortable, but Beaudine lay quietly as if she were napping.
“I got a feeling this is where it’s about to get real,” she said when he stopped irrigating. “Aren’t you supposed to give me a bullet or something to bite on?”
Quinn held up the Ziploc bag of snow so Beaudine could see it without moving her head. “You’ll still feel the sutures,” he said, “but the cold should numb the area up a little.”
As gently as he could, he held the baggie to the tender skin over the worst portion of the gash, just above her eyebrow. He took her hand and moved it on top of the bag so she could keep it in place before turning his attention to the small wax-paper envelope that contained the sterile cutting needle and suture material. There should have been a hemostat in the kit, but if Lovita had ever had one, he couldn’t find it. He’d have to make do with the tiny Leatherman Squirt he carried is his pocket virtually every day of the year. Absent a hemostat, the small pliers would serve as a passable needle driver.
Quinn pinched the curved needle with the tip of his Leatherman. Just under an inch in length, it was sharpened to cut rather than merely pierce, and attached to a foot and a half of black monofilament suture line. He moved the bag of snow and turned Beaudine’s head slightly, putting the wound perpendicular to his body to make it easier to work.
Beaudine’s good eye popped open and looked up at him. Her lips trembled slightly as she spoke. “I know this is gonna hurt,” she said. “But I’m pretty good when it comes to pain. Pain was a pretty normal thing in our house when I was growing up.”
“Who’s Merline?” he asked to pass the time.
“My mama.” Beaudine’s voice was stretched tight, as if he’d hit a nerve with more than the suture needle. “I was sure Jacques told you.”
“He said you had a rough childhood.”
“Did he tell you my daddy shot my mama in the head when I was eleven?”
“He did not,” Quinn said, needle poised a fraction of an inch from Beaudine’s wound. So that was what the cryptic message was all about.
“Just sew, okay…” Beaudine closed her eyes and fell back limp in his lap. “I guess that pretty much sums up all there is to know about me.”
“I doubt that, Khaki,” he said, driving the blade of the needle into pink skin along the center point at the deepest portion of the wound.
Beaudine’s lips trembled, but she didn’t flinch.
“She forgave him, you know,” Beaudine continued with her life story as if the telling of something so awful might ease the pain of her present situation. “Can you believe that? The son of a bitch shot her in the head, and she forgave him. Bullet went in over her left eye and sorta skirted around under the skin but didn’t go through the skull.” Beaudine gave a little shrug, almost causing Quinn to stick her with the needle where he didn’t intend to. She must have felt him pull back. “Sorry,” she said, looking up through a watery eye. “I’ll be still. Anyhow, Daddy did two and a half years in Angola state pen for attempted murder, but the parole board let him out on accounta Mama bawled her head off at his hearing. Worst part about it — well not the worst part, but a bad part anyhow — me and Jacques, we used to be really close, you know, when we were kids. My mama and his mama are sisters. But after my daddy got out of prison, Jacques’s father wouldn’t let my family come around. And who can blame him?”
Quinn kept sewing, unwilling to step into whatever this was with a question.
“They’re still together, you know, if you can believe it.” Beaudine tried to shake her head at the thought of such a thing and tugged against the needle, causing her to wince in pain. “Sorry,” she said again. “I guess it’s no wonder I’m a bitch…” She suddenly looked up at Quinn, both eyes wide the way he imagined she might have looked as a frightened little girl. “Sorry for vomiting up my past like that. Could you please talk for a while? Mama used to say words to me when things got really bad, it didn’t even matter what the words were, as long as I had something to hang on to during the worst of it.”