"What did you get yourself into? " she murmured. And it wasn't really a question for the unconscious man on her floor. It was a question for herself, for the choice she'd already made and could not now unmake. She put the flash drive back exactly where she'd found it and turned her attention to his leg. The angle told her it was broken, maybe in more than one place, and there was nothing she could do about that tonight, not with the storm outside and the nearest hospital 40 minutes away on roads that would be nothing but ice and drift by now.
She splinted it as best she could with a rolled magazine and strips torn from an old bed sheet, gritting her teeth against his groans, whispering apologies she wasn't sure he could even hear. It was almost an hour before his eyes opened again, properly this time focused and aware in a way they had not been in the snow. He looked at the fire. He looked at the blankets. He looked at his own splinted leg.
And then he looked at Margaret sitting in the chair beside him with her son's photograph still on the table and something in his face crumpled, not with pain but with something closer to disbelief. "You brought me inside," he said. His voice was raw but clearer now. "You actually brought me inside. " "You were going to die in my yard," Margaret said simply. "I wasn't going to let that happen on my conscience.
Do you know what I am? " He gestured weakly at his own jacket, at the patch she had already seen, at the ink crawling up both his forearms in designs she didn't recognize but understood well enough to know they meant something serious. "Do you know what people like me do to people like you? " "I know what the sheriff told me," Margaret said. "I know what the television tells everyone. I also know a dying man when I see one, and I know I wasn't raised to step over a dying man because I was scared of what he might be. " He stared at her for a long moment, and something in his exhausted, pain-wracked face shifted, softened before hardening right back into fear. "You need to get me out of here. " he said suddenly trying to sit up and failing, gasping as the movement jarred his broken leg.
"Right now. Tonight. " "Before Before what? " Margaret said, gently pressing him back down. "You are not going anywhere with that leg, young man, storm or no storm. Now, you tell me your name and you tell me why a diabetic man was riding a motorcycle through a blizzard because I did not drag 200 lb of a frozen stranger across my own front yard just to be told nothing. " For a moment, she thought he would refuse. His jaw worked.
His eyes darted toward the window, toward the door, toward every possible exit from a conversation he clearly did not want to have. But, whatever strength had been holding him together was clearly failing and exhaustion or maybe just a simple human need to not be alone with a secret this heavy one out. "Wesley. " He said finally. "Wesley Callahan. Wes. " "Margaret Doyle. " She said it like an exchange of terms in a treaty neither of them had fully agreed to yet.
"Now, the rest of it, Wesley. " He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the fear in them had a different quality, not the animal panic of a man simply afraid of dying in the cold, but something colder and more specific. "There's something in my jacket. " he said quietly. "You probably already found it being the kind of woman who patches up a stranger's leg without flinching. That drive isn't mine, not really.
I was supposed to deliver it 2 days ago to people who could do something with what's on it. I never made it. My bike went down on the ridge road. I don't even know if it was the ice or somebody ran me off and I've been trying to get anywhere, anywhere at all ever since. "Deliver it to who? " "Doesn't matter right now. " His hand found her wrist again, the same desperate grip from the snow, though weaker now.
"What matters is that if the wrong people find out I ended up here in this house with you, they are not going to knock politely and ask for it back. You understand what I'm telling you. I didn't ask to bring this into your home. I would have died out there rather than drag an innocent person into this if I'd had any choice about where I crashed. Margaret felt something cold settle in her stomach that had nothing to do with the storm outside.
What people, Wesley? His eyes went to the window again, to the black nothing beyond the glass where the storm raged on indifferent to the small human drama unfolding inside four wooden walls. "The kind who wear badges," he said, "and the kind who don't need to. " The fire cracked, the wind howled, and somewhere out in that impossible white dark, though neither of them could have known it yet, headlights were already beginning to move along the county road toward Blackwater Ridge searching. Margaret sat back slowly in her chair looking at the stranger she had pulled from the snow, at the fear that had not left his face even now that he was warm and alive. And she felt the shape of the decision she'd made an hour ago settling onto her shoulders like a weight she could not now put down.