-1Warrick practically sputtered with disbelief, wondering how on Earth his partner could be so relaxed and so accepting of an unacceptable situation.
"Have you completely lost it, bro? You hit your head on the way down? I'll be damned if I'm gonna sit here all cozy like, whuppin' your ass at poker while you bleed out in front of me. I have to go get help, Nick."
A small smile quirked up the corners of the Texan's mouth. "Where you goin', Rick? In case you forgot, our trail is a river of mud."
"So I take the trail on my ass. Whatever I hafta do, Nick. How can you just sit there--? Yeah, yeah, stop grinnin' like that. You know what I meant. I can't just sit here and do nothin'. When I get back down I'll try the cell again. You get a signal last night out here with Cyrus?"
"Never used my cell. But leavin' is crazy, Man. Just take a seat, and we wait until it dries up a little. You go off half-cocked and you'll wind up face first down the mountain."
The taller man was half-convinced, ready to fold up stakes and settle down for a bit when his eye caught the sight of blood trickling free from the third layer of gauze on Nick's leg.
"You're leakin' like a sieve, bro. It can't wait." He held up a hand to silence his friend's protest. "I can do this. Rain's slowed way down and the storm's movin' on and I'll --"
"Fine. Go."
Warrick rocked back a bit on his heels, his face conveying wary doubt.
'You lettin' go, just like that? Why?"
"Cuz I'm too tired to argue with you and I know when you get like this not even Gil Grissom himself could conjure the words to stop you. So go."
"Nick, this isn't a game I'm tryin' to win here. I need to do this." Why did it sound to his ear like a plea?
"So go then. But if you fall down and break your neck, don't come cryin' to me," Nick said, the side of his mouth curling. Then his brow knit and destroyed the attempt to put his partner at ease.
"You need me to do anything before I take off?" the lanky man asked softly.
Nick's pallid face tinted red and the half smile was back. "Since you're askin'…"
"Anything, bud. What you need?"
"All that damn water I drank…"
Warrick's face broke into a pearly-toothed grin. "You want the water bottle?"
"No! No, I'll probably have a good long while pissin' into a tube or a container soon enough. Get me on my feet."
Warrick's grin faded to be replaced by a reproachful look.
Nick raised an eyebrow. "You said anything, bro. C'mon. I can't wait much longer."
Shaking his head in frustration and amazement, Warrick walked over and stuck a hand out. "Not really sure how you're plannin' on getting up, all trussed up like a crown roast."
He shouldn't have doubted the stubbornness of the Texan. After flashing an evil look at the crown roast crack Nick planted one fist in the ground and grabbed hold of Warrick's outstretched hand with the other in a steely grip. Several grunts and groans later he was balanced on one leg, the other stuck out in front of him as he swayed back and forth.
"Alright, bro. Take her easy. You're wobblin' like a Weeble there. Just get your balance. I got ya." He moved his grip to Nick's wrist, holding the man temporarily in place while he stepped around him to snake one hand about his middle.
"Okay, now… three legged race time. You hop, and I'll try and keep your ass from hitting the ground. Deal?"
Nick gave a brief nod and puffed out a few pain-filled breaths.
By the time they got to the edge Warrick was practically carrying the shorter man, each jostle of his leg stealing a bit more of Nick's stamina.
"A'ight, bro. Now or never. Let fly." He loosened his hold on his partner's middle and planted both hands on his hips from behind, steadying him so he could stand. He heard the sound of Nick's zipper and politely turned his head to the side.
After a while of not hearing anything, but not sure if it was because his business was hitting the ground a thousand feet below them, Warrick cleared his throat. "How's it goin' there, buddy?"
"Stop talkin'," Nick grunted out.
"You plannin' on finishing up before the sun goes down, boss? You need to be--"
"I said, stop talking," the words ground out between clenched teeth. "You try standin' on one leg, your dick in your hand and some guy's hands on ya. It's… it's… disconcerting, man."
Warrick smiled behind him, laughing ruefully as he realized the position his poor injured friend was in. "Sorry, bro. I'd leggo but you'd be headed over the edge in a minute. Just think of rushing water… a wide open faucet, water gushing out the end…a raging river--"
"Yeah, yeah… I got it. I don't need your mind games. I got this."
"You sure? Cuz I could grab the bo--"
"I got it… thank you." About a minute later Warrick heard the ratcheting of metal teeth closing up.
"Monster back in its cage there, bro? C'mon, let's get you back down."
Arm back around Nick's middle he helped his partner back to his original spot against the cliff side.
While Nick sat there panting through the pain, Warrick folded his arms across his chest. "Was it worth it?"
"Yes. You can go now," Nick said, not even bothering to hide the bitterness in his voice.
Warrick, as he usually did, ignored the snippiness and cast a quick eye about their little shelf. The area was still relatively dry and Nick would be protected should the rains come back. "You need anything else before I head out, Nick?"
"Shove my bag over would ya?"
Warrick toed the knapsack over, then sent his over with a nudge. Nothing in either bag would help the man any further he figured, but if Nick wanted them the least he could do was make it easier on the poor guy.
"I still have a few hours of daylight. Plenty enough time to get down to the canyon floor and try the cell there. I'll take the Denali back out to the main road and either try again or flag someone down if the coverage won't pick up."
Nick nodded at him, eyes closed as he leaned his back against the wall. "Good luck."
Several seconds later Nick felt something light strike his chest and he looked blearily down at what had hit him. The empty water bottle. Warrick's back was already visible as he began making his way over to the mud-slickened trail.
An hour later, all Warrick had for his pains was clothing soaked once more by the light drizzle still dampening the air, and a new coating of mud on almost every inch of his body. And he'd only made it another few hundred feet down the trail.
Two months prior, the sight of his partner's body spread-eagle atop broken glass and bushes had resulted in a rushed call to home base, the words "officer down" resulting in the rapid dispatch of a rescue squad and several of Vegas' finest. It had felt like an eternity at the time, placing fingers on Nick's wrist, searching desperately for a pulse. He'd been unwilling to even try for the carotid and risk moving a potentially broken neck. Ten minutes later paramedics were on the scene, assessing vitals. Ten minutes after that, Nick was safely secured to a backboard and on his way to Desert Palms. What had seemed an eternity quickly turned into a flurry of activity he couldn't fully remember as he sat in a chair outside the ER room. Eons later, a doctor had emerged to tell the gathered group their colleague was going to be all right. At the time he had been consumed with anger that Nick's attacker had gotten away. Later, after the incident at Nick's house, when it dawned on him that Crane had been in the attic of the house the whole time, probably staring out at the gathered medics working on his partner, that anger had boiled into a nice hot rage. An ultimately impotent rage as Crane wound up experiencing a psychotic break after his capture and was summarily sent away to mutter at the walls of a padded room in a state mental facility.
Nick had recovered from his injuries and was back on the job a few days later, bandage gone from his head to expose a neat row of black stitches over a scabbed and healing cut, but the unwieldy wrist brace not gone yet for another couple of weeks.
Warrick had stood outside the room where Nick worked on his first day back, the Texan still confined to lab work until he was cleared for full duty. Watching Nick sucking in a breath as he leaned over the table to reach for a tool, the braced wrist hugging still healing ribs, Warrick considered going in to offer a hand. But going in and spending one-on-one time together would probably mean talking about what happened. And considering Warrick still felt like it was all his fault, he chickened out and kept on walking. Too bad Hallmark didn't make a "Sorry you got thrown out a second story window" card or what was really needed, "Glad to hear your stalker was put away and he only managed to kill one psychic in your living room."
Now here he was, faced with his partner down again, but no hurried calls for help, no passing him off to medics and an ER crew. It was him and him alone who was going to get Nick off the mountain.
He lost his footing for what felt like the hundredth time, his boot soles finding no traction in the silt-filled water that still coursed down the trail. Hands grabbed wildly for support, his fingers finally catching on a tuft of hardy grass springing from between two rocks.
Vegetation was weird up here. It had to be able to flourish under the harshest of conditions. Temps over a hundred and fifty in high summer were common, but it also wasn't unheard of to see snow this high up in the winter months. Days and weeks could pass without water, or water could descend from the heavens in torrential buckets, whisking away most everything in its path down the mountain side. Yet wherever the seeds could take hold, in the rocky soil, in the cracks between boulders, in the crevices that the winds chiseled into the canyon wall, life could be found. It was funny how resilient some things could be. He couldn't help but take another glance up the hillside; he couldn't see his partner atop the rocky shelf, but it helped focus him as he grunted and released his handhold to make his way down once more.
He took a second to try to clear his eyes of the sweat mixed in with the drizzly rain that gathered there. His clothing stuck to him like wet newspaper, chafing under his arms and at his belt line. Wet denim was no fun on other parts of his body either.
The path took another sharp turn and he planted his butt back on the muddy ground again in order to take the angle more safely. He sucked in a breath as he felt himself missing his turn, fingers scrabbling for purchase, his heart hammering again his chest. The whole trip had been punctuated with little bursts of adrenaline; every slip, every falter, the possibility of falling and failing. Failing his partner again. Fingertips fell into a rut in the ground and he hooked his fingers around a root, scooting his feet back in the right direction, heart slowing slightly as he righted himself and put himself back on the path.
It didn't help that his eye had almost swollen shut, taking away his depth perception, rendering his view down to two dimensions. The rock that had struck his cheek below his eye had been the most frightening thing he had ever experienced. Even after the initial shock, when he realized his eye had escaped harm, it hit him how close he had been to putting himself out of a job permanently.
Another break in the trail, not too great a distance, one he had easily leapt across when the footing was dry and sandy. But things couldn't have been more different or difficult now. He eyed the gap, measuring it up, literally pulling the flesh down from around his closed up eye, hissing at the pain. Two dimensions morphed to a blurry three and he gauged the distance again. Eyes scanned for a dry spot to land on, but every rock shone with rain cover, every spot of ground reflected back with muddy residue. He grabbed a hold of a gnarled branch on a thorny bush, spikes digging into the web of tender skin between his thumb and index finger. He stretched out one foot as far as he could, wishing that his lanky extra height would serve him well here. Maybe if he'd been NBA height he'd have been able to do it, but the four feet of space may as well have been a hundred. So, jump it, Brown. C'mon. You did track in high school, and yeah maybe it was senior year only, his growth spurt having hit so late, but you can do this.
He rubbed his hands together in preparation, planning a most ungainly belly flop if that's what it took to stick it, and reared back a step, pushing off the edge and clearing the gap easily.
Too easily.
Feet skated on muck and he windmilled his arms, his ass descending to hit the ground hard, his momentum carrying him right on past his desired landing spot and right off the edge.
Off the edge and into the arms of a squat grouping of prickly pear cacti five feet below.
"In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral
The church bell chimed, 'til it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they say, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early."
Nick checked his watch. It had taken him seventeen minutes to sing the whole song, all fourteen verses. While the original running time on the song was like six minutes, he hadn't remembered all of the verses the first time through and it took some mumbling and humming and figuring out the rhymes to get them all down. He thought he had it pretty much all right, although he hadn't heard the whole song in a few years.
He'd started that old time sucking standard, A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall, but he found himself singing the bastardized lyrics that Greg had made up years before,
"99 bottles of beer on the wall
99 bottles of beer
you swab one down
run it through CODIS
98 bottles of beer on the wall."
Somehow, that version wasn't as satisfying, and was too awkward to sing properly, plus it always sounded better when it was a busload of kids coming back from a game.
So he had switched to Bohemian Rhapsody, but he really didn't have the pipes Freddy Mercury had, especially for the operatic parts, and even though he was about as alone as a man could be, he found himself too embarrassed to even attempt it.
He wracked his brain trying to come up with long songs with multiple verses, anything to take his mind off the growing pain in his leg and the sight of the blood leaving the confines of the gauze and pooling on the sandy floor beneath him.
American Pie. Ah, that old standard, and that sucker had to run at least ten minutes. By the time he mangled and mumbled his way through it he'd have killed about twenty minutes. And that brought him some small satisfaction.
If only he could remember how the damn thing started.
Okay, Stokes. C'mon. c'mon. all right then, start with the chorus. Everyone remembers the chorus. Right? So why couldn't he remember… Bye bye …yeah …
"Bye, bye Miss American Pie drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry an' them good ol' boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye singin' this will be the day that I die, this will be the day that I die…"
Ooookay. Maybe not the wisest of choices.
He pounded his head against the wall behind him in frustration. His first inclination after Warrick had left was to sketch a little. Pencil in hand, he summoned up an image of the Cooper's hawk from the cover of his now destroyed guide. He roughed in an outline of the raptor, small head, long body, arrow straight tail feathers, then added in the small dark eye. It was as he started in on the details, the hooked beak and the curved talons, that he realized his hand was shaking. Badly. He closed and opened his fist, shaking it out a few times, but the second the graphite hit paper the tremors returned.
He had turned the page disgustedly and started making a list. He had always been a list maker, learning that little trick from his mom. A woman who was going to succeed as a Public Defense attorney and raise a ranch with seven kids and a very busy and hands off husband needed to bring organization out of chaos. And one of the ways she did it was with her daily lists.
Jillian Stokes would rise daily at 5am, kids and husband still snug in their beds, dogs asleep on the couch and at the table beneath her feet, and she would pour herself a huge mug of steaming hot coffee and begin her list. Sometimes it was only a few things. As the kids got older and started joining more activities, and Bill worked his way up the political ladder, the list grew longer. Ballet, tap, and gymnastics for the girls. Tae kwon do and baseball for the boys. Pick up the dry cleaning. Buy another five pounds of cold cuts- how did they go through so much lunch meat so fast? Dinner with the Attorney General. Better pick up another sack of spuds and make sure there's enough steaks in the freezer. Nicky's dentist appointment at 4pm. Maybe his brother can bring him.
As he had grown older, in his position as the youngest in the family, Nick had seen the pandemonium his mother dealt with, and usually with a calm voice and mellow demeanor. Somehow, every morning, kids got on the bus, brownbag lunches in hand, kiss on the cheek if Mom caught them on the way out the door. Later, there were grabs for the car keys and promises not to be out too late after school, and reminders of who had to work that night. And Nick observed all of this with what he wouldn't recognize until he became an adult as admiration. As a kid it was expected… no, taken for granted. But he saw the lists, and as he was usually the last out the door, always forgetting to grab his jacket or his homework, or his baseball mitt, he sometimes looked back to see his mom wipe a hand across her brow and turn from the door to finally run upstairs and start her own preparations to leave the house.
And thus Nick became a list maker himself. Just himself to manage, but with the double and triple shifts he worked it seemed like things would get lost in the shuffle. A reminder to himself to pay the water bill, or buy fish food, or pick up something for Mom's birthday and get it in the mail far enough in advance to make it in time. It saved him FedEx charges and his mother's hurt feelings.
So he started a new list. Give Warrick the key to the new place and give him the code to the security system. Make sure he feeds all the fish, not forgetting the ones in the small bowl in his kitchen like he'd done before. That was fun, returning home from a Christmas jaunt to Dallas to find his beta floating upside down. Most of his plants had been droopy and dry as well, Warrick not realizing with his decidedly black thumb that in the desert, pouring a Dixie cup of water over a plant once in a week wasn't sufficient.
Sighing, he realized that someone was going to have to pick up the Stacy Warner case. He pulled the map out of the pocket of his coat and unfolded it again. The wavy topological lines meant little to his untrained eye; he knew what denoted highland and what low, but had it not been labeled Diablo Canyon, he'd have never known it was the hellhole they were in now. He folded it back up and returned it to the pocket, and added make sure coat and map go with Warrick to get entered in as evidence to the list.
Only as he looked what he had just added, he found he could barely decipher the shaky chicken scratching on the paper.
So now he sang. Didn't require steady hands. But it did require a relatively clear head. And as he started in on Margaritaville he realized that, no matter that he had heard the song a billion times or more, he couldn't remember any of the words beyond something about looking for a lost salt shaker.
As his thoughts coagulated in his brain like cold melted cheese, clumping into thick greasy unyielding lumps, he felt something break free and register. His truck registration renewal was due in a week.
He fumbled the notebook and pencil stub back into his lap and managed to scrawl the word truck on the paper. It looked like something a five year old would write. A dyslexic five year old at that.
He let the notebook and pencil fall from increasingly numb hands and shoved his fists in the pockets of the coat, closing the down-filled garment tighter around him. The trembling in his hands spread to his limbs and he found himself shivering, his teeth joining the fun as they chattered against each other. He swallowed against a wave of nausea and held his breath through the next.
Reluctantly freeing a hand from his pocket he pulled his backpack over and fumbled open the white metal box. Taped to the inside of the top lid was a small booklet labeled Emergency First Aid. He thumbed open the yellowed and brittle pages covered in pictures of victims of various traumas: Bandages wrapped around heads coifed with seventies afros and slings hanging from shirts with butterfly collars. He laughed despite his discomfort. The booklet had been in the kit since he got it for Scouts and had never been opened before. Page three was what he needed.
Symptoms and Treatment of Shock
