Mystic Cowboy: Men of the White Sandy, Book 1 (30 page)

“Well?” Terstrip snarled, his lip curling up in distaste. “Who the hell are you?”

“Jonathan Runs Fast. Dr. Mitchell sent me to pick up the supplies.” No need to give this man more to glare about. He held out the list.

Terstrip looked at him like he’d taken a dump in the middle of the sidewalk. “You’re an
associate
? You look like a dirty hippie. A
girl
hippie.”

So much for politeness. He knew it didn’t have much on Madeline’s sneer, but he didn’t have to look mean. He just had to look a little dangerous, so he smiled. Terstrip froze. Smiling always threw people off. “I’m just here for the supplies.”

Unfreezing, Terstrip scooted behind the counter. Gun or baseball bat? Rebel hoped baseball bat. They were a lot easier to dodge than bullets. “You dirty Indian, you’ll probably just steal the stuff, try to get high or something. I outta call the police on you, on all your kind.”

To hell with
looking
dangerous. He was feeling a whole lot of dangerous. Terstrip started to duck under the counter, but Rebel moved before he could get anywhere and had the man by his Sunday-best lapels. “Too bad that they’d never find me. You know Indians. We all look alike. But they would find
you
.”

“Take your hands off me!”

That’s better
, Rebel thought. Proper fear. Terstrip started to stink with it.

“I’m just here for the supplies,” he repeated, aiming for more menacing this time. Too bad he hadn’t brought Nobody. Nobody could do menacing like nobody. The man was a professional at it. Rebel was a rank amateur in comparison. However, Terstrip didn’t know it. His eyes widened even more. “And then I’ll leave.” He let go of the man and got ready to dodge lumber.

“What’s going on in here?”

The sound of a soft voice whipped him around to see a petite woman with big, artificially blonde hair standing in the doorway. She had the kind of sweetheart face that said she’d turned a lot of heads back in her time, Even now, her generous curves were still a sight to appreciate.

He felt a sigh of relief try to escape. A woman like that—even if she was married to this asshole—was someone he could handle with his eyes closed. He whipped off his hat and let Jonathan’s eyes do the talking for him. She blushed. Oh, yeah. He knew how to handle a pretty woman. “Ma’am, I was just
thanking
your husband for opening up for us today.” He let his accent drawl on a little. Most every woman he’d ever met had a secret thing for a tall, dark, mysterious stranger. “The clinic has just been flooded with sick children.”

A manicured hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, goodness, what happened?”

Rebel stepped away from the counter, just in case Terstrip took advantage of this distraction and tried to bash in his brains. “Ma’am, we were at a church picnic, and most everyone got food poisoning. My niece...” He drifted off. It didn’t take much work to get choked up. He’d tried real hard not to think about what Nelly had looked like when Madeline found her, because she’d looked terrifying enough when he’d pulled her from the back seat of the Jeep. In that crystalline moment, he’d seen the sickness had come, but not with the silent, sterile whiteness of his smallpox vision. If he didn’t get the hell out of Dodge, and soon, Madeline would be fighting a losing battle with a death of moaning and retching and shit that reeked to high heaven. And he didn’t have to be a medicine man to see that Nelly would be first. “The children are suffering, ma’am. The doctor needs more supplies or we might start losing them...”

Mrs. Terstrip looked like she wanted to hug him. “Oh, you poor thing. Church picnic, you say?”

You poor thing
. The words scraped over his ears like steel on flint.
No
, he yelled to himself.
You’ve got her where you want her. Just reel her in, and then you can go.
“Ma’am, the St. Francis parish on the far side of the White Sandy reservation.” He didn’t have a problem with Catholicism on the whole—they did good work and educated a hell of a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t get anywhere, like Tara. However, they’d only added classes in Lakota culture to the curriculum a year or so ago. That was why Tara and Tammy and whole bunches of people didn’t speak the language. While it was true that he hadn’t been at yesterday’s picnic, he’d gone to one or two in the past. “It was a fundraiser for a new school,” he added, trying to sound mournful. “I’ve got the money to pay for the supplies, but I’ve got to hurry. My niece...she’s only five, ma’am.”

“Oh, goodness.” This time, she did touch him. She patted his arm with sympathetic sorrow, but Rebel couldn’t help but note that her touch lingered for about two seconds longer than it should have.

A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do
, Madeline’s voice whispered in his ear. He gritted his teeth through the appreciative smile he was favoring Mrs. Terstrip with.
And sometimes
, he silently replied,
a man’s got to do what a girl asks him to.
He realized that no matter how hard this was for him, it had been a thousand times harder for her, but she’d done it anyway, for him. He saw exactly what kind of first-class jerk he’d been. Later, after the dust had settled and everyone was out of the woods, he owed her the biggest apology ever. He, of all people, should know about faking it. Like he was doing right now. “I do appreciate you took time away from your own worship to help us out.”
This is it
, he thought. Going for the kill. “You truly are doing God’s work today.”

Her hand was now resting on his biceps, and, given the warm weight of it, she was about ten seconds from squeezing. “Bless your heart,” she said, her eyes watering.

“Kathy!” Terstrip snapped from behind Rebel, making them both jump. “What the hell are you doing? This man is a criminal.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Hubert.” Any trace of the caring-mother figure disappeared in a heartbeat. “You heard him. He needs his stuff.” She let go of Rebel and marched back to her husband. “Why are you just standing around? Go on, get moving.”

Mission accomplished
, Rebel thought as he kept his victory grin to himself. As the two of them traded snipes behind the counter, he wondered what would be the best, least dangerous way to make it up to Madeline. Flowers weren’t enough, and she never wore jewelry. While he tried to come up with something that would convince her to take him back, he found himself looking out the front door at the manufactured-home lot. There, gleaming in the morning sun, was a pristine white house on cinderblocks. The porch ran the length of the house and was wide enough for some chairs. Or even a recliner.

The vision he’d had in the sweat lodge yesterday—although it felt like a lifetime ago—floated back through his mind and seemed to merge with the house he was looking at. He saw himself sitting on that porch in the early evening sun as Madeline pulled up in the Jeep. He saw her get out and rush up the porch, where he met her with a kiss. He saw the two of them settle back into the recliner and watch the sun finish setting.

He saw home.

Shaking back to reality, he glanced back at the Terstrips. Hubert had a couple of boxes on a wheeled cart.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No!” Hubert shouted, no doubt afraid that once behind the counter Rebel would start stuffing painkillers in his pocket. “This will take about half an hour. You can wait in your truck.”

“Hubert!”

“I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder as he headed across the street.
Open
, the neon sign in the sales office announced.

His path was right there in front of him.

He just had to walk it.

By the time he got back to the clinic, it was almost noon. Nobody was outside waiting for him, and silently they offloaded the boxes.
Damn
, he thought as Madeline tore into the first one like a hungry animal,
she looks like hell
. He couldn’t see a lot of her—she had on that mask she was making everyone wear, her less-than-pristine doctor’s coat and gloves covered her arms, and she even had on one of those shower caps doctors wore in surgery. The only things he could see were her eyes, but that was enough to worry him.

The bags under her eyes were so purple that he was afraid for a moment someone had been beating up on her in his absence, but he quickly realized she was just that tired. Her eyelids weren’t even making it past half-mast, which gave her the air of being permanently pissed.

He didn’t want her to be pissed at him. “Madeline—”

Her head jerked up. She may look exhausted, but behind those lids, her eyes were still sharp—sharp enough to stop his apology in its tracks. He almost bit his tongue.

“Did that ass give you any trouble?” she said under her breath to him as he ripped open the box of IVs.

Wrong conclusion, again. The relevant conclusion, but still the wrong one. And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it right now. “Nothing I couldn’t handle. I’ve got the receipt.”
Both of them
.

She shot him a sharp look but let it slide. “Hang on to it. We don’t have time to file anything.” She scooped up a few bags of saline and IVs and went right back to work.

That’s right. They didn’t have time for filing and talking and apologizing and making up. They had work to do.

So he got to work.

“I think we’ve turned a corner,” Madeline said, the weariness dripping off each word as she chugged a Gatorade outside. Something about electrolytes, she’d said when she’d sent him to clear out the Quik-E Mart of all its sports drinks. Rebel thought she sounded worse than she did when she’d come looking for him during the hot part of the day. “Some of these people can be just as miserable at home.” She turned to look at him. “Do you want to be the chauffeur, or should we send Jesse?”

We
. There was still a
we
. She’d been too tired to notice it, no doubt, and there was always a chance that she’d meant
we
in a medical-professional sense. But she was looking at him when she said it.

“Jesse.” Rebel didn’t want to leave, frankly. He wanted to keep close to her. She looked like a drowned rat. Plus, he was tired. In addition to the Rapid City run, he’d made peanut butter sandwiches—outside, away from the germs—for anyone who wanted one and tried to keep up with the patient files—although he knew Tara would probably have a cow once she started feeling well enough to see what he’d done to her carefully organized system. He’d called the priest at the church and Tim, at Madeline’s request. He’d burned sage and said prayers with anyone who wanted him to, which had been nearly everyone, despite the number of practicing Catholics in the clinic. When people felt that bad, it didn’t matter who was praying for them, as long as someone still cared.

In addition to his medicine-man responsibilities, he’d gone over Madeline’s Jeep—inside and out—with bleach and a scrub brush. He suspected she owed someone a new shower curtain because they sure as hell weren’t getting that one back. He’d burned it in the trash barrel, along with the steady supply of contaminated medical waste. He was probably single-handedly jacking up the pollution rate for the rez, but Madeline had been explicit, and he trusted her when she said to burn everything.

All in all, it had been one hell of a day.

It wasn’t like Jesse hadn’t also been pulling his weight. Both hospital beds had two kids lying toe-to-toe in them. Madeline didn’t want to put the little ones on the floor if she could help it, and Jesse took it upon himself to keep the kids as clean and as calm as he could. As he sponged down kid after kid, he told the old stories that Albert had raised him and Rebel on, of Iktomi and Manstin, turtles and bears. He held hands when an IV had to be moved or a shot given, and he didn’t complain once about being puked on. Albert would have been proud. Rebel sure was.

Still, someone had to be the driver. He headed into the clinic to delegate. “Jesse, Madeline says Tara and Tammy and Terry can call go home. Can you take them?”

Jesse looked at Nelly, who was sleeping fitfully. “She stays?”

Nelly was still hooked up to two IVs, although Madeline had taken her off the oxygen. “For now. I’ll keep an eye on her, okay? It won’t take long, but we’ve got to get some of these people out of here.”

For a second, Jesse looked like he normally did, pouty and whining and angling for the easy way out of everything. But then he squared his shoulders, his eyes gleaming with a new purpose. “As long as no one dies on me...”

Rebel couldn’t help but chuckle. “I don’t think Madeline would send them home if she thought they were going to do that.”

Jesse leaned over and kissed Nelly’s forehead through his mask. Rebel never thought he’d see the day—Jesse being a real father to his daughter.

The situation seemed to have stabilized. Madeline began discharging patients with a fervor that struck Rebel as religious. Everyone went home with a four-week supply of antibiotics, explicit orders to finish all four weeks and some Imodium.

Finally, they were down to four kids and two elders still on IVs, which meant that for the first time in a long time, everyone was either on an exam table or a bed. Jesse had returned from one of his runs with bags of chips, candy bars and soda from the Quik-E Mart and handed them out like he was Santa. Nobody was making another pass of the place, using his mop as a crutch. The man was a night owl to begin with, but even he was slowing down.

By comparison, they were the ones in good shape. Madeline was…well, Rebel wouldn’t say collapsed at Tara’s desk, but she was damn close. Her gloved hands were propping up her masked face, but even with all that, her head was only four inches off the desk. She looked like a zombie in a lab coat.