Tracey opened the box, chewing on her lower lip again while she took a quick stock of what they had to work with. There was a small bottle of alcohol, and some sealed swabs for smaller wounds. They had enough sterile bandages, that was a plus, and a couple of doses of aspirin which would help with the pain… and the fever, she hoped. There were several other items as well, but those were the ones that Tracey really wanted.

“Oh, that’s definitely gonna cause more trouble,” she assured Deschain with an apologetic little smile. “And cleaning it is going to suck beyond logic. My apologies.” She didn’t bother to ask him for permission before taking the wounded arm, though she did try to avoid both his hand and the red streaks. Now that she was able to look more closely, there were more of the streaks than she had seen before. They hadn’t shown up very well from that distance, not with his skin tone.

“I’m gonna have to take the handkerchief off to clean this, but I can already tell that you’re infected as shit. You really need a hospital.” If she’d been able to get to her home, Tracey would have been able to give him antibiotics, but that wasn’t going to happen. All she could do with the resources she had was to maybe hold off sepsis for a day or two.

“Mm.” He nods his understanding, watching her with his arm with a calm, focused expression. He doesn’t mind the way she grabs for his arm without warning or permission - she’s got a reason, after all - and so he lets her do it with no resistance, more curious about what she’s going to do with the things from her kit than concerned about his hand itself. At least, for the moment. His hand and his fever are problems he is already aware of and are not immediately dangerous, whereas learning about whatever’s used to heal in this strange, ancient, thriving world could well save his life, if she happens to use anything with whose operation he’s not familiar. If she starts to do anything right away while they talk, his focus on her hands and her tools will only deepen. 

That didn’t answer her curiosity, though to be fair it did answer a lot. Tracey had collected enough black eyes, skinned knees, bruises, scrapes and split lips from the Mullins brothers in her time to know that they both had hair tempers and IQ scores in the single digits. That whole family was screwed, in every cliché hick way one could imagine. You could almost hear banjos playing in the distance whenever they walked into a room.

She pocketed the keys and opened the door of the car. “Well,” she said, popping open the back door to grab the first aid kit. “You’re a fighter of some kind, worked that part out. You’ve seen battle, and I mean a real one, not rednecks trying to compensate for tiny dicks with firepower. Ain’t that weird to see wannabe cowboys running around wearing guns out in the open, either, not out here. Not like those, though. Man, my Grampies would have given his left foot just to hold something like you’re carrying.”

Tracey was smiling to herself a bit when she mentioned her grandfather. He hadn’t been a gun nut at all, but you didn’t survive Vietnam without understanding way more than Tracey ever did about firearms. She held up the kit. “Come on, let’s do something more sterile with your hand. I guess the biggest question is ‘How much trouble were you into before the Mullins’ pulled their guns?’ And don’t bother trying to tell me you weren’t, because you’re not carrying those to look scary. You’ve got a reason.”

“A man needs a reason to carry his own guns, here?” he asks as he gets out of the car behind her, but he looks thoughtful. How much to tell her? A little, at least - she’s clever enough to know that question’s there and curious enough to ask it, and if he doesn’t answer at all she’ll no doubt start to mistrust him. 

“I don’t know,” he says, honestly. There’s very little he knows that he’s certain of, at least about the particular situation she’s asking after. “My last gunfight before them was some while ago, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s not impossible there’s someone else who’d like trouble with me, but before your Mullins boys my biggest problem was tending to this.” 

He holds up his bandaged hand and goes on, partly for the chance of distracting her and partly because it’s true, and she might need to know it. “I don’t know if this’s going to cause me more trouble or not. Thought I felt a little feverish earlier but it’s hard to say.” 

Missouri.

Mut zou reh.

Tracey’s brows almost knitted together as she tried to make sense of that. He was mimicking her, that was clear enough, but filtered through the accent he had (What the hell WAS that accent, anyway?) her home state turned into something else completely.

The expression she gave him wasn’t refusal, not exactly. Tracey’s curiosity was certainly piqued, and that was always a dangerous thing. Mister Deschain, in her life for all of ten hours now if you counted the time they’d spent not talking in the cells, was one hell of a puzzle.

Everything he hadn’t been saying was telling her far more than anything he had, though. “You know we don’t know anything about each other, right?” she said. The eyebrow she had pierced years ago raised a bit at him. “I mean, I can work you out a bit, but it’s not helping me much. I know that you’re not from anywhere I’ve ever heard of, not the way you’re talking. I’d say that whole ‘Wild West Gunslinger’ get-up was the best Halloween costume I’ve ever seen, except that’s not a costume and Halloween isn’t for another month and a half. You’ve been living in that outfit for a while now, and you’ve gotten into some trouble with a capital ’T’ in it. Except you’re in the middle of the Midwest, and you’d have drawn attention if you’d traveled through anywhere to get here, especially if you’ve got the skills you apparently have to make people dead. That one’s bothering me a bit, by the way, that you could kill five people with revolvers and the cops didn’t even have a name for you.”

Tracey slowed, taking a turn onto a gravel road that looked like no one had driven down it in months. A rabbit darted out of the road ahead of them to safety. “You didn’t know what duct tape was, but you know what a car is… but you don’t know the right word for it. And you don’t know what a Neo-Nazi is? Man, those psycho pricks are all the hell over, and you don’t know who they are?”

Tracey’s chuckle didn’t have very much humor to it, but it wasn’t exactly unfriendly, either. “I mean, we’re kind of stuck with each other for a couple of days at least, and I’m glad you can take care of yourself and I won’t have to babysit you through it, but what the fuck is going on, here? And why is it going on in Missouri??”

“Is there some reason you shouldn’t meet me in Missouri?” He asks it blandly, not particularly moved by the list of ways in which he has failed to blend in here. It’s disappointing, certainly, he usually knows enough of local custom that any attention he attracts is at least partly deliberate - but a man can only travel so far, he supposes, before all his knowledge counts for nothing much. 

I am what I am, and so are you. Okay, so he was a philosopher on top of it all. Tracey gave her companion another sideways, disbelieving expression. Hell, though, it wasn’t as if he were an alien or anything, right? Right?

“You’re right,” Tracey finally admitted with a shrug. She hit the turn signal, even though there were no other cars on this stretch of gravel. The trailer park was out of sight by now, and the road that she pulled the car into was so tiny it was almost invisible unless you were right next to it. Branches scraped both sides of the car as they pulled slowly down the path. “You and me, we’re kind of in this together for the time being. I just wish I had more information, you know?”

“No hunting,” he says, simply. “They pulled their guns. I pulled mine. Is that the kind of information you’re looking for?”

He does have his suspicions that their trouble with him hadn’t been pure happenstance. Some of their phrasing, their accusations, had been more specific than they ought to be and Roland has a feeling they may’ve been set on him by someone who knew who they were looking for. But telling his one ally that there may be men after him and so she might be safer far from him wouldn’t do him any good, either. Besides, it’s only a suspicion.

“Or was it something else you had in mind? Ask whatever it is you need to know, I’ll do my best to answer.”

Missouri.

Mut zou reh.

Tracey’s brows almost knitted together as she tried to make sense of that. He was mimicking her, that was clear enough, but filtered through the accent he had (What the hell WAS that accent, anyway?) her home state turned into something else completely.

The expression she gave him wasn’t refusal, not exactly. Tracey’s curiosity was certainly piqued, and that was always a dangerous thing. Mister Deschain, in her life for all of ten hours now if you counted the time they’d spent not talking in the cells, was one hell of a puzzle.

Everything he hadn’t been saying was telling her far more than anything he had, though. “You know we don’t know anything about each other, right?” she said. The eyebrow she had pierced years ago raised a bit at him. “I mean, I can work you out a bit, but it’s not helping me much. I know that you’re not from anywhere I’ve ever heard of, not the way you’re talking. I’d say that whole ‘Wild West Gunslinger’ get-up was the best Halloween costume I’ve ever seen, except that’s not a costume and Halloween isn’t for another month and a half. You’ve been living in that outfit for a while now, and you’ve gotten into some trouble with a capital ’T’ in it. Except you’re in the middle of the Midwest, and you’d have drawn attention if you’d traveled through anywhere to get here, especially if you’ve got the skills you apparently have to make people dead. That one’s bothering me a bit, by the way, that you could kill five people with revolvers and the cops didn’t even have a name for you.”

Tracey slowed, taking a turn onto a gravel road that looked like no one had driven down it in months. A rabbit darted out of the road ahead of them to safety. “You didn’t know what duct tape was, but you know what a car is… but you don’t know the right word for it. And you don’t know what a Neo-Nazi is? Man, those psycho pricks are all the hell over, and you don’t know who they are?”

Tracey’s chuckle didn’t have very much humor to it, but it wasn’t exactly unfriendly, either. “I mean, we’re kind of stuck with each other for a couple of days at least, and I’m glad you can take care of yourself and I won’t have to babysit you through it, but what the fuck is going on, here? And why is it going on in Missouri??”

“Is there some reason you shouldn’t meet me in Missouri?” He asks it blandly, not particularly moved by the list of ways in which he has failed to blend in here. It’s disappointing, certainly, he usually knows enough of local custom that any attention he attracts is at least partly deliberate - but a man can only travel so far, he supposes, before all his knowledge counts for nothing much. 

Tracey stared over the steering wheel, a long moment of thought followed by a shrug. She hadn’t had a plan the last time she’d run away from yon lawkeepers, and she didn’t have a plan now. Hell, she hadn’t had a chance yet to make a plan, had she? Everything had fallen apart within a few minutes, from “well, this sucks” to “run for your life.”

“In my experience,” Tracey finally said, “plans never work. You saw what happened in the cop shop. My plan was to give you the first-aid kit, then sit quietly back in my cell and laugh at that cop when she got all confused and panicky trying to work out what had happened. Would have been a riot, if she’d actually smoked the whole thing, and you might not be so likely to get gangrene and die.

“Now?” Tracey sighed, shrugging again and shaking her head a little. “If we can get help from Matt, only real plan I’ve got from there is to get your hand dealt with and figure it out from there. Once you’re reasonably healthy and back to… whatever you were up to, killing Neo-Nazis is a totally valid cause to work towards if that’s your thing… then I’ll… um… do something else. Probably not in Missouri, I’m gonna have to be as far away from here as I can get for a while.”

If history repeated itself, then she would probably sit in some abandoned building until an idea came to her, back to living out of her backpack and hip-deep in the sort of chaos that nobody should even have to think about. But she didn’t want to think about that now. She wanted a cup of tea and twenty minutes of peace that weren’t going to come.

“You could come with me,” he says simply, not wanting to explain what exactly that’ll entail until he’s gauged her personality a little more precisely. “I don’t know where I’m headed from here, but I haven’t seen anything in Missouri yet that needs staying for.” 

He says Missouri carefully and a little oddly, trying to recreate the way she’d said the word but stressing the syllables a little oddly. “I don’t know what Neo-Nazis are but there could be more of those in our path too, I suppose.” 

She’s expressed some good feeling toward the idea of killing them, after all, which could indicate a troublesome attitude if it wasn’t countered by the generosity of trying to get him aid for his hand, and then in trying to see to his health - the health of a stranger - when plenty would’ve blamed him for their current troubles and left him to be captured again. 

It doesn’t occur to Roland to thank her for this. But it is relevant, important to try and know who she is before he starts relying on her to help with the rest of his quest. 

Not that who he relies on is really up to him, especially not now. But it’s important to know her, anyway. 

Tracey couldn’t suppress a small laugh, not under as much stress as she was at that moment. Roland Deschain. That wasn’t a cowboy name. That was a bad fantasy novel name, something you’d expect in a sword-and-sorcery book that went directly to mass paperback somewhere. Her chuckle faded when she glanced at his hand, though. Gods, what had happened to this guy? That needed a hospital. That needed doctors, with actual degrees and experience and loads of equipment that Tracey was only marginally familiar with. They had a first-aid kit and handkerchiefs.

Deschain was… oddly blasé about the wounds, though. Military, the word flashed through her head. No, he hadn’t swaggered enough to be military, though any moron could see that he’d seen violence before. He wasn’t a cop, either, that was easy enough to tell. That left the side of the law that Tracey was already too familiar with. He certainly hadn’t had any qualms about breaking out of jail after killing Neo-Nazis.

“I was in a wreck last night,” Tracey explained to him. On the other side of Highway 50, after they were past the pastures, the road descended into a forested area. Here and there a small gravel road would shoot off to the side. Tracey had already slowed down to keep an eye out for deer. “Some jackass in a pickup ran a stop sign and smashed the front end of my car. I clocked my head on the side window pretty bad. The concussion is mostly cleared up now, but the cops just arrested me for driving drunk without looking. I could have cleared it up with a doctor, but by the time that got taken care of… yeah, they’d kick me out of school long before it was over.”

She’d been almost done, too. Another year, and Tracey would have had her degree. She punched the steering wheel, as angry with the futility of fighting the charge as she was at the fact that it had happened in the first place. “FUCKING hate cops, man. Useless assholes, the lot of them! Five years! I’ve been fighting tooth and nail for five years to put my life back together, and one bigoted dumb shit redneck pig can’t be bothered to check for a concussion and takes it all apart!”

She stopped for a moment to try to calm down. It was just like before, wasn’t it? Panic sent you barreling down the road, but reason kept you alive on it. Reason, and knowing stuff. “You told the chick cop that you wanted to go home. Where’s home?”

He pays more obvious attention to her when she starts the explanation, his work on his hand slowing as his attention’s diverted to deciphering it. He does a fair job, he thinks, because unless he’s missed something the root of it’s not too unfamiliar; many of the gunslinger boys, back in another life, would have been sent back to their rural homes if they misbehaved too badly, deemed unfit for the schooling and the honor of the position, and their families’d have felt the shame of it for generations after.

He watches her set her temper loose, briefly, and then he watches her rein it in again. Then he sets himself back to wrapping his fingers.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, eyeing the roll of silver not-rope in his lap with distaste. She clearly means him to fasten the wrapping with it, but figuring out how to manage that with two working hands would have been a pain in the ass, let alone one. “I was lying. Hoped it’d keep her calm.”

He decides to ignore the not-rope, bringing the handkerchief to his mouth so his teeth can help him tie it off. “Now your schooling’s done, and yon lawkeepers are all set against you, what will you do?”

Tracey unlocked his side first, before circling around the front of the rusty gold machine to the driver’s side. It was already way too hot, August always was in Missouri. She hoped that Isaacs had kept her air conditioner in repair.

Soon, though, the Takura was backing out of the parking spot and pulling onto the road, a two-lane blacktop that ran north to Highway 50. At the Cowboy’s question, Tracey’s smile turned decidedly mischievous. “Not to KC,” she chuckled. “I know every back road in this area. Highway P runs up to the lake. We’ll leave the car in a cornfield or something, treat that hand, then head east on foot if you’re up to it. There’s an old abandoned farm north of Knob Noster I know, and…”

Here, though, Tracey sighed. Her smile grew a bit tight at the thought she didn’t want to think. “I’ve got one possibility at getting some actual help,” she admitted. “If he’ll pick us up and give us a hand, we might get to Saint Louis.”

The car pulled to a stop, obeying the red sign at the intersection with a four-lane state highway. The morning commute was already in motion, students from Sedalia heading to Warrensburg for summer classes and locals heading to Sedalia for work. Dozens of cars dashed back and forth, though there were no other buildings in sight. There were only fences, blocking off a field of soybeans and a pasture full of healthy black and brown cows. The soybeans were starting to turn gold in the late summer. The cows… well, Tracey’s face soured a bit at the smell of the pasture drifting in through the car’s fan. At least the breeze through the vents was cooling down, that meant the A/C was going to be good.

“So, who are you?” she asked. “I’m Tracey Rutledge, born and raised out here, but you’re sure as hell not. Oh, and dig in my bag, there’s a clear plastic pouch in the bottom. Should be a couple of hankerchiefs in there, you can use them and the duct tape to patch your hand up until we can actually bandage it right.”

He pulls his attention away from the view outside full of living, healthy things in favor of digging in her purse. He eyes the clear bag a moment, rubbing it carefully between his fingers, before he starts unwrapping his own bandages. 

“Roland Deschain,” he says, knowing that’s not what she’s really asking. He hasn’t decided yet whether to tell her the truth; he knows so little about how much this world knows, how it thinks, and seeming like a madman isn’t an impression that’s easy to fix. He finishes unwrapping the torn rag from his fingers, balls it up, and inspects them. The gashes are ugly, deep, and the fingers themselves are inflamed and swollen. Not much point in making sure his bandages are clean, maybe, but he starts wrapping a hankerchief around them anyway. 

Cartomobile, Sai, these words started to file themselves away in Tracey’s mind, right alongside the accent that was getting more noticeable when the Cowboy buckled his belts… Oh, that wasn’t a good way to carry those, not now… But that was a discussion for later, once they were safely on the road and away from the immediate danger.

“The car? Yeah, of course,” Tracey nodded. AH, there were the keys! She smiled and pulled them out of the purse, thankful to be out of there. Even in this extreme situation, digging in another woman’s purse was just… invasive. It was wrong, worse than reading a teenaged girl’s diary or digging in someone else’s underwear drawer.

“Kansas City is sixty miles from here,” she explained, winking the eye that Isaacs wouldn’t be able to see. “We can’t walk that before the whole county’s on us, but if we can get that far it’ll be easier to stay free long enough to figure out the next step.”

Tracey paused on her way to the door to take her bag from the Cowboy, muttering a “thanks” out of habit. She already felt more loaded down than she wanted to be, but she hung the backpack on her arm in hopes that it would hide Isaacs’ gun belt. Even walking five feet towards the car would be dangerous with that thing out in the open, especially since the coffee shop on one side and the antique store on the other would be opening soon. It was risky enough making that walk with a man who looked like he’d come out of the wrong end of Lonesome Dove.

“I’ll drive,” she smiled at him, heading for the door. “Put my bag in the front seat with you, throw the rest in the back and we’ll sort it out later.”

She kept her fingers crossed that no one would see his guns, or that they wouldn’t worry about them if he was walking out of a police station.

Roland walks out of the police station with enough confidence that anyone who looked at him might be forgiven for thinking he was supposed to be doing it. Might be, would be, if it wasn’t for the entire rest of him. Roland does have a sense that there’s a great deal about him that doesn’t fit in here - that’d be hard to miss - but what he doesn’t have is any idea what to do about it, or any time to figure it out. So he does what he’s always done, operate as if he is doing exactly what he ought until ka or coincidence tells him otherwise. 

He feels a little better than he did in that cell. He still doesn’t know what to try and do from here but events are, at least, unfolding. This is at least a direction, even if he doesn’t know what direction that is just yet. 

So, he leaves the building. He walks toward the closest of those large, oddly new looking machines, and if they make it inside without incident he might judge it close enough to safe to distract her with talking. 

Tracey and Isaacs actually reacted simultaneously at that one. Isaacs gasped, her face twisting up into an expression that reminded Tracey of the time Mrs. Ellis had joked that Gramma Irene’s cheesecake would be healthier if she used artificial sweetener instead of sugar. It didn’t belong on a cop. Isaacs didn’t belong in a cop shop, either,

As for Tracey, who was already on her way over, she paused just long enough to call an only half-serious “OI!” at the Cowboy. She would have looked far more insulted if the ribbing hadn’t drawn a small smile to her face. She’d needed that smile, though. It cut through the horror of what she was doing a bit… namely, pulling the edge of the duct tape free to restrain a police officer.

“You do this, Rutledge, you’re throwing your whole life away,” Isaacs tried to tell her.

“And a DUI charge won’t cost me my scholarships?” Tracey countered. Even if she did manage to pay a doctor to clear her, by the time it was over her school career might be as well. “Hands behind the back, please.”

It didn’t take very long to tape Isaacs’ hands, and to tape over her ever-protesting mouth. Tracey herded the woman into the jail cell and breathed a sigh of relief as soon as she heard the lock click.

“Right, we need to get out of here before the other one gets back,” Tracey told the Cowboy almost immediately. She picked up the gun belt on her way to the desk, reaching for Isaacs’ purse to look for car keys. The plastic bag with Tracey’s phone, wallet, and pocket litter was still on top of the desk, unprocessed. She scooped that up as well. “Grab the red box and the backpack, would you?”

A part of him notes Rudledge’s amusement. If she’s able to take an insult that way that speaks to her emotional stability, at least a little, and that’s a good thing to know about if he’s going to be relying on her. Again he doesn’t understand the rest of what they said, the d-you-I or the scholar ship, but that’s not what matters. What matters is strapping on his gunbelts, which would take longer if he treated his injured fingers as carefully as he ought. But there’s little time for careful and so he buckles it fast, the deepened lines at the corners of his tight closed lips the only sign he’s being a little rougher with his hand than he should be. 

Well, that and the fresh blood that starts to stain the shreds of his shirt he’s wrapped around them. But that doesn’t matter just now. What matters is tucking the red box into his purse, gathering up both his purse and hers, and then watching her. He’s paying a great deal more attention to her now than he was only a few minutes ago in those cells; he is very aware how dependent he is on her knowledge here. It’s not a comfortable position to be in, but for the time being it’s the only one he has. 

He watches her a moment, makes sure she’s ready, then moves cautiously toward the door. “You mean to take that cartomobile, don’t you?” he asks, then makes a frustrated noise. Damn it, that’s not what she’d called it. “That machine at the front of the building?” 

Tracey didn’t want to take her eyes off of the cop to see what the Cowboy had, just in case she decided to try something heroically cop-like. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. Luckily, Officer Isaacs’ Midwestern upbringing decided to rear its helpful little head.

“It’s the silver one,” the older woman said, a bit hesitantly. “The wide roll.”

Tracey’s eyes widened a bit in disbelief, and she stammered for a moment. “Thanks,” she finally said. “You know we’re gonna have to take your car to get out of here, though, right? Mine got totaled in the wreck.”

Isaacs shrugged. “Hey, you drove drunk.”

“I hit my freaking head, lady!” Tracey snapped. As nervous as she was, she was still getting sick of this. “Still hurts, thanks for giving a shit!”

Tracey’s irritation shut Isaacs down for a moment. The gun helped. All of the “helpfulness” was gone, though. “You don’t know which car is mine, anyway.”

“Is it the 1986 Takura Spirit that’s illegally parked five feet from the front door of the police station?” Tracey’s voice sounded a bit like she was speaking to a particularly dense child. Isaacs’ shoulders slumped a bit. Tracey shook her head. How did this woman even become a cop?

While Isaacs was staring at the floor, Tracey glanced sideways at the Cowboy. She sighed again. He couldn’t really work duct tape with one hand hurt that badly, could he? “If you think you can hold the other gun on her one-handed,” she told him. “I’ll work the tape.”

“Of course I can.” He rises and takes the other gun before handing the not-rope over, careful to hold the gun on the woman before he does anything else. He holds it low, still pointed at her, but easier to hold up before his arm gets tired. “You may as well take her gun. I’ll be wanting mine back once we’re through here.” 

Other than that one suggestion, he asks no questions. He doesn’t quite know what they mean when they talk about cars, although he has a suspicion. He doesn’t know where Rutledge wants to go in one, although it doesn’t matter. He wants that aid kit she’d been talking about, but knows getting it will have to wait until their gaoler is safely tied. 

Lady Sai? Officer Isaacs, who had been looking at the Cowboy as he spoke, shot a questioning glance at Tracey, who simply shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I don’t actually know him,” the girl admitted.

“You’re gonna go to prison for him, though?” Isaacs asked, voice shaking. “Only a couple of ways for this to end, you know. Prison’s your best hope.”

Tracey hesitated a bit, her bottom lip catching in her teeth in a very young-looking expression. “I, ah, I really wish you’d just gotten the damn first aid kit, lady.” Her own voice wasn’t exactly steady, though to her credit her hands were. Tracey wasn’t familiar with guns at all, she hated the things, but frightening situations were very much something she was used to. “Now, you drop that gun belt on the floor and unlock Wyatt Earp’s cell, okay?”

Isaacs reached for the buckle, and slowly lowered her belt to the ground. While she did, Tracey spoke to the Cowboy without taking her eyes off of the cop.

“Look in my bag, there’s a roll of duct tape in the bottom of the main pocket. Get her hands and her mouth, then stick her in one of the cells so she can’t scream for help or follow us.”

Inside Tracey’s head, her better sense was screaming at her to put that thing down before someone gets hurt you moron, but she kept the revolver aimed at Isaacs. This is it, she was thinking. This is where everyone gets proven right about you. All that time spent trying to stay out of this kind of mess, and you fuck it all up with one dumbass move.

Roland obediently goes to her purse once his cell is unlocked - and it’s a proper purse, he can tell, although he doesn’t recognize many of the things inside it. He recognizes the paper, which he is very careful with, he recognizes the clothes - and he has to guess at what it is he’s looking for. What he’s been sent to get is a term he doesn’t recognize, although anything used to tie will be coiled and by this logic it only takes him a moment to hold up the two different rolls of tape he finds there. 

It takes five minutes to smoke a cigarette, Tracey was thinking to herself. Seven if I count how long it’s going to take her to even get it out of the pack. When the lock clicked open, Tracey figured she had about six minutes of safety, give or take. 

She chuckled over her shoulder at the Cowboy’s first question. “Be glad she’s stupid,” Tracey replied, without really looking at him. Her focus was far more intently occupied in scanning the room for a red box, or a cross shape. “Back in the ‘Burg, they’re a little smarter, but meaner. And Sedalia cops are just assholes, straight-up. Isaacs strikes me as the type who’s never had to actually act like a cop, though. She’s a moron, but seems pretty… AH!”

There it was, in the “evidence corner.” The first aid kit was under the Cowboy’s guns, with Tracey’s backpack leaning against it. “Not planning on leaving,” the girl told him, slightly absently. Four minutes. She started walking towards the corner. “I can get out of what they’re pinning on me, but not if I have a resisting arrest charge. You get bad enough to pass out, though, and five bucks says you’ll be listed as a ‘suicide’ on the death certificate before Officer Shakyhands even works up the nerve to check on you.”

Whatever Tracey had been planning, however, was unraveled in the first click of the back door’s latch. Her hands were actually on the medical supplies, pulling them out from behind her bag when she heard it. She dropped the box as the one detail she’d missed flew through her mind. STUPID, STUPID, STUPID!!!! The smokes were in the drawer, not her purse! It does indeed take five minutes to smoke a cigarette… unless one is quitting and only smokes part of one.

Looking back later, Tracey wouldn’t be able to say exactly why she did what she did. There wasn’t actually any thought involved, just the sensation of something moving suddenly out of her own control. She had felt this sensation exactly once before, as a teenager, and it hadn’t exactly left her life unmarked. The sandalwood gun cleared its holster in the time it took for the door to finish opening, and Officer Isaacs returned from her moment of calm to find one of their shooter’s guns aimed at her by a wide-eyed college student. The policewoman immediately raised both of her hands.

Resisting arrest was suddenly the least of Tracey’s problems.

“The key to these cells, if you don’t mind,” Roland says cooly. He has no particular desire to get out but he’ll have to eventually, and this opportunity is one he’d be a fool not to take advantage of. “I don’t intend to hurt anybody once I’m out, lady sai. I only want to go home.” 

Continued from X, with @kaserasera.

Isaacs snorted at his comment, actually putting her phone down long enough to turn and look at the two of them fully. “Yeah, right. They’re more of her type than mine.” The cop nodded in Tracey’s direction, earning rolled eyes and a raised middle finger from the younger woman. The Mullins Boys had been the sort of Confederate-flag-waving morons that collected AK-47s and complained about “white genocide,” hardly people that Tracey would have been spending time with. They’d actually had more than one fight in the past, back when Tracey had been more into recreational arson than tutoring sessions.

The tone of the Cowboy’s voice caught Tracey’s attention, though. Well, the effort behind it did, anyway. Her eyes narrowed a little, and her head cocked to the side in an expression that, had anyone been looking, didn’t seem to belong on someone who Isaacs apparently thought was some kind of booze-addled dropout. Once she was looking, really looking, she saw the slight greyish tinge on the Cowboy’s face, mostly around the lips, that was where it usually started. The cloth wrapped around his right hand matched what was left of his shirt, except for the red splotches on it. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, that was good. It meant that if he had a fever, it was coming and going rather than just getting worse.

She got off the bed, ignoring the slight dizziness that was still lingering in her brain, and walked towards the bars separating their cells. That wound wasn’t from the arrest, unless he’d been in here for way longer than she’d thought. That wrapping had been there for at least a day, probably more. And it hadn’t been clean when he’d put it on, either. That was obvious as well. “You don’t look too good, man,” Tracey said.

“Don’t get too close to those bars, Rutledge!” Isaacs warned her, standing up. “He’s dangerous!”

Tracey barely glanced at the cop this time. “He’s bleeding and sick. Do you just not have a first-aid kit in here, or what?”

“Get. Away. From the bars!” This time, Isaacs had a very shaky hand on the butt of her sidearm. Tracey raised both of her hands in a mock-surrender pose, then took a few steps back. Isaacs took her hand away from the gun, though. She sat back down at her desk, face white and trembling a little.

“God-damned idiot kids…” the woman muttered. She opened the lowest drawer in her desk, rummaging around for a moment before pulling out a battered red and white box and a lavender lighter. “You know what, Rutledge, you do whatever you want. Get yourself killed in my jail, see if I care.”

He watches Rutledge at the lock, his gaze focusing on her more cleanly than it had a moment ago. She’s moved up in his mental ranking of people who may be important in this place - though maybe not for much longer. Only until she leaves. She’s got no reason to free him - and he’s not got enough reason to want to be free to ask. Survival, maybe; but he thinks he’s got a while before his condition’s very dire. Still, finding medicine’s the closest thing to a goal he’s got, so he may as well at least try for some.

“Are all the lawmen in this place so stupid?” he murmurs, then shakes his head a little with a frustrated sigh. That’s not what he needs to be saying just now. It’s not relevant to much. He goes on in a clearer voice, now addressing her. 

“If you see, ah...” What had she called it? “Any aid kit in this place I’d like it if you’d give it to me before you leave. Can’t pay you for the service, but I’d be grateful.” 

For @kaserasera

Tracey aimed all of the hatred her aching body could muster at the fluorescent light set in the ceiling. Well, no. Some of it was reserved for the oscillating fan that creaked so agonizingly as it turned, the closest thing that this podunk town had to an air conditioner for a place like this. And some of her ire was for the middle-aged woman in blue who sat on the other side of the bars, sipping ice water and ignoring her charges in favor of what sounded like YouTube makeup tutorials on her phone.

Officer Isaacs, it seemed, was doing triple-duty as jailer, dispatch, and secretary at the Montserrat police station. Tracey hoped that she got to take turns with the other cop in town driving the car, and wasn’t relegated to the police station because she was the woman. Even the word “station” didn’t really apply, did it? Tracey had driven past the place before, it was a repurposed storefront with the “cells” retrofitted in between the back door and the restrooms. Thinking about it, she and the man not saying a damned thing in the next cell were probably the first people to have been in here this year.

Tracey hadn’t even been drunk, that was what she was mad at. She blinked at the ceiling again, if you fall asleep you’re screwed, and wished for anything that would make the headache stop. At least the swelling was starting to go down, not that the cop had bothered to check her head. No, a twenty-something with a parking pass for the local college, slurring and stumbling after that wreck, could only have one real explanation, couldn’t it? The swelling, the confusion, it was all mostly gone now. That was a plus, meant that the concussion likely hadn’t been totally awful. She was still facing down a DUI charge, though, after all the work she’d put into not getting in trouble these days. Technically, a doctor could go to court and it would all be thrown out, but that was going to be an even bigger hassle.

Tracey sat up. She rubbed sweat from her forehead with one hand and glanced at the wall, where the other prisoner’s “evidence” was hanging on the coat rack on the opposite wall. Damn, where had he gotten cannons like that? They were practically antiques, but they still made the police Sig Sauers look like Nerf products. Even Tracey, who was nobody’s expert on guns, could see it.

The death of the survivor had shaken him. That’s what the door had said - the survivor - and that’s who Roland had found, a military man who’d seemed wholly suited to the kind of quest for which Roland had needed him. Maybe it’s not the death itself that’d shaken him, so much as what it means, so much as the fact that he doesn’t know what to do now, or where to go.

The Tower, of course. Always the tower. That’s where his path ends and on that he has never wavered. But how? How to get there from here, now he’s failed to draw the man he was meant to? What next hasn’t been a problem he’s had for a very long time, not since coming back to himself piece by piece in King’s Town, before he’d gone back to Gilead and set off from the place that’d used to hold his home for the very last time.

Ka. He has to trust in ka. Of course. But it’s a fool who thinks trusting in ka is an excuse to avoid his own decisions. That’s the trouble. Ought he wait for an opportunity to come along, or should he go looking for it? Go back to the beach somehow, start again?

“Why?” he asks mildly, his absent gaze on his guns across the room. “Any stagecoach nearby worth robbing?”

“Not for about a hundred-fifty years,” she chuckled in her Missouri drawl. “Most people these days rob gas stations, and you’ll have to go to the city to find one of those worth your time.”

The smile was not the only sign of trouble most people saw on Tracey. The shaved head and piercings were a red flag, and the spiderweb tattoos covering one arm and shoulder were another. Too much eyeliner, a dog collar (with a piece of bent wire sewn inside that just proved how professional these cops were in not taking her jewelry), torn clothes, it was as if someone had given her a checklist of ways to frighten Pettis County’s nice, upright citizens. Of course, in the midwest, the melanin genetics had gifted her with was what turned a lot of police heads first. Sometimes Tracey imagined that she could be wearing a three-piece business suit and still get stopped thanks to that.

Officer Isaacs’s head actually turned slightly towards them now, her eyes not leaving her phone screen. “Hey, shut up in there!” the cop called over. “Don’t give him ideas, Rutledge! He’s already killed five people! You’re from Sedalia, you know Dirk and Jim Mullins? ‘Cause they’re dead now.”

If Isaacs had been expecting Tracey to be outraged and grief-stricken by this news, she was to be sorely disappointed. Tracey’s face lit up instead. “You killed the Mullins Boys?” She asked. “Dude, can I shake your hand?”

“RUTLEDGE!”

Besides, it’s the guard whose goodwill he needs to gauge. Goodwill might get him water for his sore throat, maybe even medicine for when this illness, this infection, worsens - although he expects medicine about as much as he expects to be let out. Of the two options, medicine’d be preferable. There’s no point in being out in a world like this one if he doesn’t know where to go in it.

For @kaserasera

Tracey aimed all of the hatred her aching body could muster at the fluorescent light set in the ceiling. Well, no. Some of it was reserved for the oscillating fan that creaked so agonizingly as it turned, the closest thing that this podunk town had to an air conditioner for a place like this. And some of her ire was for the middle-aged woman in blue who sat on the other side of the bars, sipping ice water and ignoring her charges in favor of what sounded like YouTube makeup tutorials on her phone.

Officer Isaacs, it seemed, was doing triple-duty as jailer, dispatch, and secretary at the Montserrat police station. Tracey hoped that she got to take turns with the other cop in town driving the car, and wasn’t relegated to the police station because she was the woman. Even the word “station” didn’t really apply, did it? Tracey had driven past the place before, it was a repurposed storefront with the “cells” retrofitted in between the back door and the restrooms. Thinking about it, she and the man not saying a damned thing in the next cell were probably the first people to have been in here this year.

Tracey hadn’t even been drunk, that was what she was mad at. She blinked at the ceiling again, if you fall asleep you’re screwed, and wished for anything that would make the headache stop. At least the swelling was starting to go down, not that the cop had bothered to check her head. No, a twenty-something with a parking pass for the local college, slurring and stumbling after that wreck, could only have one real explanation, couldn’t it? The swelling, the confusion, it was all mostly gone now. That was a plus, meant that the concussion likely hadn’t been totally awful. She was still facing down a DUI charge, though, after all the work she’d put into not getting in trouble these days. Technically, a doctor could go to court and it would all be thrown out, but that was going to be an even bigger hassle.

Tracey sat up. She rubbed sweat from her forehead with one hand and glanced at the wall, where the other prisoner’s “evidence” was hanging on the coat rack on the opposite wall. Damn, where had he gotten cannons like that? They were practically antiques, but they still made the police Sig Sauers look like Nerf products. Even Tracey, who was nobody’s expert on guns, could see it.

The death of the survivor had shaken him. That’s what the door had said - the survivor - and that’s who Roland had found, a military man who’d seemed wholly suited to the kind of quest for which Roland had needed him. Maybe it’s not the death itself that’d shaken him, so much as what it means, so much as the fact that he doesn’t know what to do now, or where to go.

The Tower, of course. Always the tower. That’s where his path ends and on that he has never wavered. But how? How to get there from here, now he’s failed to draw the man he was meant to? What next hasn’t been a problem he’s had for a very long time, not since coming back to himself piece by piece in King’s Town, before he’d gone back to Gilead and set off from the place that’d used to hold his home for the very last time.

Ka. He has to trust in ka. Of course. But it’s a fool who thinks trusting in ka is an excuse to avoid his own decisions. That’s the trouble. Ought he wait for an opportunity to come along, or should he go looking for it? Go back to the beach somehow, start again?

“Why?” he asks mildly, his absent gaze on his guns across the room. “Any stagecoach nearby worth robbing?”