Running Dark by Joseph Heywood

titties,” Gumby mumbled from the floor.
    The woman lowered the sheet to reveal pendulous breasts hanging off an emaciated frame.
    The deputy pointed his pistol at her. Service stepped gingerly inside and snapped the covers off the bed. There were two crossbow bolts by the woman’s left leg.
    The deputy handed Service a pair of cuffs. Service handcuffed the woman, got her up, and draped a blanket around her shoulders.
    The other deputy was still staring at the knife lodged in Eugene’s back.
    â€œYou okay, Gumby?” Service asked, trying to soothe the boy.
    â€œHer-him punch,” he said.
    Service knew what a stabbing felt like initially. “Just once?”
    â€œTwo, three times. Her-him don’t punch hard. How come hurts?”
    Service knelt beside the boy, asked the deputy to help him. They tilted the boy slightly, got his shirt untucked. In addition to the knife stuck in him, there was a stab wound and a slash. The slash wasn’t bleeding much. The stab wound was bleeding steadily, but not spurting. Artery intact, he told himself, and steady but not heavy flow from the protruding knife, which looked to be in deep. Was there organ damage? No way to tell. Most vital organs were buried deep inside the body and not easily reached by anything other than cataclysmic force. In Vietnam a chaplain once proclaimed this was by God’s design. If so, Service told the man, God must have planned on people wreaking violence on each other, which made humanity’s flaw either a screw-up on the part of humankind’s creator, or a matter of malevolence, neither of which he thought much about. The chaplain called him a blasphemer. So be it, Service thought: To live you had to deal with life as it came to you, which meant bumping heads with assholes and understanding you were mortal.
    Mehegen was suddenly kneeling beside Service, her hand on Eugene Chomsky’s face. “Don’t move. It’s gonna be okay.”
    The boy stared up at her with wide eyes as she continued to talk softly to him. Mehegen glanced at Service and gave him a look that chilled his blood.
    â€œWhere’s the fucking medevac!” Service screamed.
    Mehegen took his arm and led him out to his Plymouth. The ambulance was coming up the road, bumping and sliding, lights flashing. Service leaned against the grille while Mehegen poked in his pockets until she found his cigarettes. She lit one for each of them.
    The ambulance attendants moved quickly, and Service half-listened to them barking orders at each other and the deputies as they brought Eugene out of the cabin, loaded him, and raced away.
    â€œMedevac?” Mehegen asked. “Did Scotty beam us elsewhere?” Service had no idea what she was talking about. “Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Star Trek . . . on TV?” she prompted.
    He shrugged. He didn’t own a television. He walked over to the sheriff’s cruiser where Ivan Rhino sat glowering in the backseat, and then moved on to the next vehicle where the woman was in custody, the blanket still draped over her.
    A deputy interrupted him. “You’d better step back inside,” he said.
    A second bedroom in the cabin was littered with firearms, fishing rods, a couple of salmon nets, boxes of ammo stacked up, two chain saws, and piles of tools. Service studied the mess, said, “There’s a boat on a trailer, a couple of snowmobiles, and an Indian motorcycle under tarps in the wood line behind the next camp.”
    He went back outside and opened the door of the car where the woman sat. “Ma’am, what’s your name?”
    The woman turned her head away and he turned to a nearby deputy. “Find any ID?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    No ID, and where was their truck? How did the caller know the men’s names, and identify the truck, but not mention the woman? Was she a late arrival? If so, how did she fit in?
    Service told the deputies he would drive up to Marquette later