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I keep one hand flat on his chest, steer with the other, and I think.

The gauge house is an hour through water from the nearest road, and the kit is in the gauge house. I can't carry him an hour through water. I can't carry him across a parking lot. By the time I got there and back with the Pelican case, I'd be kneeling over a dead man.

The hospital in Alexandria is forty minutes, if I could get through the roadblocks, which I can't. They'd take one look at the stab wound, the gunshot residue on both of us, and the white dress with river water in it, and call every trooper in Louisiana.

Then I see the sign.

It's small and hand-painted, green on white, nailed to a post at a crossroads I've passed a hundred times in my life without looking at it. BOEUF RIVER VETERINARY CLINIC — LARGE & SMALL ANIMAL — DR. P. LACOUR, DVM. An arrow pointing down a gravel road.

Delilah and I took a stray cat there when I was nine. It had been hit on the highway, and we carried it three miles in a shoebox, and Dr. Lacour set its leg on a steel table under a big round light and let us watch.

I turn down the gravel road.

The clinic is a low cinder-block building at the edge of a hayfield with horse pens out back and a painted sign over the door of a cartoon dog in a stethoscope. Dark. Closed for the weekend. No cars in the lot. I pull the welding truck around back beside the loading chute where they bring in the cattle and kill the engine.

"Silas." I put my face close to his. "I need you to walk."

Nothing. His eyes are half open, the whites showing. I slap him. Hard. Then harder.

His eyes come open all the way, unfocused, and he looks at me like he's trying to remember who I am.

"Ten steps," I tell him. "That's all. Ten steps, and you can lie down."

He doesn't answer, but when I drag him out of the cab, he gets his feet under him. I don't know how. I get his arm over my shoulders and we go across the gravel like two drunks leaving a bar. He’s so heavy I think my spine will crack. The back door is steel with a deadbolt. I prop him against the wall, pick up a cinder block off a stack by the horse pens, throw it through the window beside the door, and reach in through the broken glass to turn the knob from inside.

An alarm starts to shriek. I let it. Every deputy in Harlowe Parish is watching the courthouse burn.

The surgery room is at the end of the hall. I know it the moment I see it: the steel table, the big round lamp on its jointed arm, the glass-fronted cabinets along the walls full of bottles and packets and instruments in sealed pouches. It smells like my childhood memory of the place. Rubbing alcohol and wet dog and something medicinal underneath.

I get him onto the table. It's too short. His boots hang off the end. I flip the switch on the wall, and the round light blazes on over him, white and total, and in that light I see him properly for the first time since the chapel.

He's gray. Not pale. Gray, the color of dishwater. His lips are blue at the edges. The whole left side of his shirt and his jeans down to the knee is dark and stiff and shining, and where the tape was, there's nothing but a sodden black mess of gauze that's slid half out of the wound.

I find scissors on the tray and cut the thermal off him.

Something falls out of it onto the steel table with a small tin clink. A photograph in a tin frame. The girl in front of the strawberry field. I pick it up and stand it on the instrument tray where he'd be able to see it if he opened his eyes.

Then I look at the wound.

It's two wounds, really. The first one Roy made, low on his left flank below the ribs, and the second one the guard in the chapel drove in on top of it, so that the edges are ragged and torn and the hole is wider than my palm. It's not welling anymore. It's running. Dark, steady, pooling on the steel under his hip and trickling in a thin stream off the edge of the table onto the linoleum.

My hands start to shake.

I close them into fists. I stand there under the light and make myself breathe, four counts in, four counts out, the way I used to breathe on the bus leaving Alexandria when I was seventeen with blood still under my fingernails. I think about the gauge house. I think about him sitting on the concrete floor with a curved needle, pushing it through his own arm without a flicker. Clean it. Find the bleed. Close it. Work it through as if these are somebody else's hands.

"All right," I tell the empty room.

I start pulling open cabinets.

It's all here. I don't know what half of it is, but I know enough. Suture packs, sorted by size, in plastic bins. Scalpels. Hemostats in sealed pouches. Gauze, rolls and boxes of it. Saline in liter bottles. Lidocaine in little amber vials with animal doses written on the labels in black marker. Antibiotics for horses. A drawer of syringes. And in the cabinet by the door, on a steel hook, bags of clear fluid with tubing coiled beside them, LACTATED RINGER'S printed across them in blue.

I've watched people start an IV. I've never done it. I tie a length of rubber tubing around his upper arm the way they did to me in the emergency room in Baton Rouge when I cut my hand on a broken bottle, and I slap the inside of his elbow until a vein comes up, pale and thin and flat. The first time, I miss. The second time, I go through it and blood swells under the skin. The third time, dark red blooms in the little chamber of the catheter, and I nearly sob. I tape it down, hang the bag on the lamp's arm, open the clamp wide, and watch the clear fluid start to drip.

"Stay with me," I beg him.

He doesn't answer.

I pull on a pair of blue gloves from a box on the counter. They're too big. I draw lidocaine into a syringe and inject it all around the edges of the wound the way he did for my eyebrow. Needle in, push, needle out, and he doesn't flinch. And that frightens me more than anything has frightened me tonight. I flush the wound with saline, the whole liter, holding the bottle high and letting it pour in and out, and the water that comes back runs pink, then red, then pink again.