Moving carefully around the vehicle in a wide semicircle, Gabe assessed the situation, confirming there was only one person inside the car. A woman. And she wasn’t moving.
Was she in shock, or—
Gabe pressed his lips together, contemplating his next move. He wanted to call out, to ask the woman if she was all right, but that might startle her. Much as he wanted reassurance that she was alive, he didn’t want to risk her making any sudden moves that could throw off the car’s fragile equilibrium.
The most logical thing was for him to drag the woman out of the car, but that had an extremely risky downside to it.
What he needed to do, Gabe decided, was to drag the car away from the edge and back onto solid ground again with all four tires firmly planted on a flat surface.
Easier said than done.
Gabriel pushed his hand through his hair. He had to find a way to hook up her car and his 4x4 so that he could pull the sedan away from the edge of the ravine with a minimum of risk.
He thought of calling Mick, the town’s best mechanic. The fact that Mick was also the only mechanic in town didn’t in any way affect the fact that the man could perform miracles with vehicles of all sizes and shapes. Taking out his cell phone, Gabe looked uncertainly at the teetering sedan.
How long had it been like that? More to the point, how much longer could it stay that way?
But even as he pressed one of the preprogrammed numbers on his keypad, he didn’t know if he had enough time to wait for Mick to get here.
What if the rain started up again, full force?
He glanced down at the screen and saw that he had only half the number of bars that he usually did. The storm was probably responsible for that.
A gravelly voice answered on the other end. Rather than a formal greeting, the man said, “Yeah?”
“Mick, it’s Gabe Rodriguez.”
At hearing the name, Mick’s voice softened just a touch. “What can I do for you, Deputy?” Mick asked, putting special emphasis on Gabe’s new title.
“You can get yourself out here about ten miles out of town, by Lazarus Ravine. I’ve got a car all set to go over the edge and I need a tow.”
“Yours?”
“No—”
“Belong to anyone you know?”
“No—” Again, he didn’t get time to finish.
Mick’s approach to life was very cut-and-dried. “Then what’s the problem?”
“There’s someone in it.” As he spoke, he looked into the sedan again. The woman hadn’t moved. Maybe that was just as well. If she came to—if she was able to come to—she might panic. One wrong move might prove fatal, not to mention her last. “I don’t think she’s conscious from what I can see. But if I try to get her out—”
“She’d fall into the ravine. I get it. Sit tight. I’m on my way,” the man promised. And with that, the connection was broken.
Sit tight. Ordinarily that would have sounded like good advice. Gabe thought. But in all good conscience, he couldn’t take it, not when a woman’s life quite literally hung in the balance.
He was torn.
Anything he could do might result in making it worse, he reasoned. Still, he didn’t feel comfortable about just sitting here and waiting for Mick. A lot could happen in that short amount of time.
Right about now, hauling the town drunk into one of the jail cells to sleep it off was beginning to sound like an enviable alternative to this.
He continued to stare at the sedan.
He hadn’t heard any sounds coming from the woman inside so he still didn’t even know if she was dead or alive, but went with the latter.
Feeling somewhat anxious, Gabe returned to his 4x4 and began to look through both the cab and the cargo area, searching for either a really thick, strong length of rope or, better yet, a chain that he could use to hook up to the victim’s car.
He finally found a length of chain all but hidden at the back of the cargo area. It was buried underneath a large pile of his belongings, which had been there since he’d moved into town a few months ago. He’d yet to sort through them and decide whether to bring them to his new living quarters, leave them at the ranch in case he decided to move back or just throw them out.
A triumphant, strongly voiced “Yes!” escaped his lips when he saw the chain. Pulling it out of the truck bed, he vaguely remembered that he’d used the chain to help remove a rotting tree stump on Eli’s property. That had to be over six months ago, he realized.
“That’ll teach Alma to stop nagging me about never putting anything away,” he muttered under his breath, even though there was no one around to overhear him.
At the time, he’d secured the chain around the stump and then anchored it to the back of his vehicle. Once he was sure it would hold, he slowly coaxed the stump out of the ground by driving away in almost slow motion.
It had taken close to half an hour and three separate tries, but finally the stump had come out of the ground. Most of its roots were still attached.
“Here’s hoping we have the same luck here,” he said to himself. Gabe looked into the sedan one more time. The woman inside still hadn’t moved. How long had she been like that?
He was wasting time, wondering instead of doing, he admonished himself.
Working as fast as he could, Gabe secured one end of the chain to the rear bumper of the woman’s car and the other end to his truck’s front bumper. Offering up bits and pieces of a prayer his mother had insisted that all her children learn by the time they were old enough to talk, Gabe got in behind the wheel of his truck, threw it into Reverse and ever so slowly backed up.
He never took his eyes off the sedan and its still passenger.
The ground was exceedingly wet after the storm and traction not what it could have been, but of the two vehicles, his, fortunately, was the heavier one. Otherwise, he might have found himself sliding toward the one in jeopardy, not away from it.
He held his breath as his truck continued to slowly move away from the edge of the ravine.
Little by little, inch by inch, the sedan began to tilt toward him, away from the ledge, until finally he managed to get all four of the vehicle’s wheels on the ground. Still in Reverse, he got the sedan far enough away from the edge of the ravine so that it no longer was in any danger of tumbling into it.
The second he got the other vehicle securely on flat ground, Gabe quickly turned off his engine and jumped out of the truck. Rushing over to the banged-up sedan, he found that the doors on both sides were jammed shut. Rather than attempt to wrestle with them, trying to pry one of them free, he took out the firearm that the sheriff had issued to him.
Turning it around so that the butt of the weapon was facing the window, he struck at the windshield as hard as he could. Two attempts later, the glass finally cracked. Under the forceful pressure of his hand, the small, spidery cracks began to spread out. As they did so, they weakened the glass enough so that when he swung the hilt of his weapon against it, the windshield finally shattered. Parts of it fell into the car.
Which left the rest for him to deal with. Moving quickly, Gabe removed chunks of the glass until he’d managed to clear a sufficiently large enough opening for him to snake through. He made it into the passenger seat, glass fragments clinging to his hair, casting small rainbows.
The woman was still strapped into her seat. There was blood over her right eye thanks to