Ada Bell’s body lay in the unheated laundry annex, resting on a wooden staging bench covered with a clean white canvas drop-cloth.
Gideon had set a kerosene lantern on a milk crate at her head, its wick turned down to a pale blue bead to save oil. The air in the annex was cold enough to see one’s breath, smelling of dry lye soap, bleached cotton, and the faint, bitter iron of frozen blood. Outside, through the high wire-glass window, the afternoon sleet had turned into heavy, silent flakes of snow that drifted down onto the gravel court, burying the dark tire tracks from yesterday’s retreat.
In the motel breezeway, thirty-five living people were breathing the air of twelve rooms.
Mara stood in the doorway of Room 6, watching Luis Ortega kneel on the worn green linoleum beside an army cot. The room smelled of carbolic acid and sweat. Donald Vance lay on the cot with his bandaged foot elevated on a stack of phone books, his teeth gritted as Luis carefully peeled away a strip of yellowed gauze that had adhered to the carpenter’s torn heel. A thin, foul line of pus drained onto a paper towel.
“Cellulitis,” Luis muttered, not looking up. His shirt sleeves were rolled above his elbows, his forearms smudged with soot from the kitchen stove where he had been boiling his forceps. “The puncture from the axe rusted through the wool sock. If I don’t debride the necrotic tissue and keep this foot clean…
