When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [33]
He parted the curtain and saw Frannie O’Neill with the serious frown she usually wore for his benefit. She always managed to look good to him.
What now? What did she want?
He stepped into his jeans, zipped his fly, buttoned up. More impatient banging on the door. Where was a clean shirt? To hell with a shirt.
“I’m coming.”
He opened the door, but before he could ask what crime he’d committed Frannie started to speak a blue streak of fast, barely intelligible words.
“I need your help,” she said. “Please. I really need you to help, Mr. Harrison.”
Mr. Harrison? “Sure. No problem. Shoes,” he said, and ducked inside to grab his sneaks.
He followed her, bare-chested, as she sprinted ahead of him to a rocky gorge a few hundred yards back into the woods. He could hardly keep up with her. She could really move on those long legs of hers. Mr. Harrison was it now?
“What the—” He stopped in midsentence.
It took him only a second or two to recognize what it was that was hanging from nasty metal jaws and jangling chains.
“Oh, Jesus, Frannie.”
The fox was a sickening sight, and he finally understood why she hated hunters so much, why she had been so mad at him since he arrived—with a gun.
The poor animal’s reddish-brown coat was soaked and spattered with fresh blood. The fur and flesh on its foreleg had been stripped forward from elbow to paw by the teeth of the leghold trap. Its breath was coming hard. Its intermittent barking was hoarse and weak.
“I can’t reach her,” Frannie panted. She was out of breath. “I tried it by myself. No use.”
She looked as if she were going to break down, and Kit felt choked up with the same emotion. What had happened to the young fox was cruel and heartbreaking, and it made him angry, too. How could anybody do this to an animal?
“What do you want me to do? How can I help?”
She held a syringe clasped tightly in her hand. “I have to get this into her leg.”
“Okay. I got you.”
Kit skittered down the steep, muddy slope. He surveyed the gorge from top to bottom. Then he climbed back up.
He squatted above the fox that was suspended about three feet below the edge. He measured and weighed the animal with his eyes. Then he quickly scanned the underbrush for a fallen branch.
“This could work,” he called to Frannie.
It was about three feet long and only a couple of inches in diameter.
She looked perplexed. “What are you doing? What could work?”
It was easier to demonstrate than to explain. Kit lowered himself until his face and shoulders were hanging over the lip of the gully.
“Please be careful,” he heard her say.
He brought the stick close to the fox’s mouth. She was spraying foam with every exhaled breath and her eyes were dulling over. Kit wondered if she could even see him.
He touched the wood to the fox’s lips.
She snapped wildly, clamped her teeth hard around the branch, tried to break it in two.
Would the damn branch hold? Kit slowly, slowly, eased the fox up, up… and finally over the edge of the embankment.
“Stick her, now,” he gasped.
Frannie was right there. She jabbed the needle into the animal’s hind leg. Pushed the plunger. The fox kicked, then collapsed as the drug took effect.
Kit caught the animal as it dropped like a furry, stuffed animal into his arms.
“Well done,” said Frannie. “God, we did it.”
She took the fox from him and gently laid it down on the ground. Kit yanked open the trap’s trigger mechanism and Frannie carefully released the animal’s leg.
“Very well done. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. You’re a great paramedic partner.”
“You’re welcome. It was nice working with you. What a team. Glad we could help Foxie Lady.”
And wonder of wonders—Frannie O’Neill finally gave him a smile.
It was almost worth the wait.
Chapter 33
YAHOO, MOUNTAIN DEW!”
Max was flying again. She couldn’t resist the fluffy clouds, the high-pitched whistle of the wind, the perfect, deep blue skies over the Rockies. Who could? She drifted calmly, effortlessly, as she surveyed a lake below, the wooded slopes of surrounding