Free Ditch Rider by Judith Van Gieson Page A

feed it.
    â€œ If I feed it it will never go away,” I said.
    â€œAt least it won’t look so hungry,” he said.
    ******
    The following night I woke up when my neighbor’s motion detector light flickered, went off, came back on again. My skylight was as bright as the moon and the light was turning the tree above it into a dancing shadow. The Kid groaned and pulled a pillow over his head. I lay still and listened. Except for my low-level anxiety hum, the night was very quiet; even the cicadas had ceased to scream. But the silence was filled with potential, and the potential I heard turned my spine to slush. I felt as if weights were pushing me deep in the bed.
    There was a pounding on the street door. I jumped barefoot out of bed, ran across the bedroom, the living room and the courtyard. The gray cat stood on top of the adobe wall arching its back. “Get down,” I yelled. I yanked open the door but found nothing on the stoop. All I saw was the streetlight turning weed shadows into stilettos. I looked up and down Mirador Road, but I didn’t see a car, a bike, La Llorona or anything else in motion. The cat obeyed my command and jumped off the wall, and the motion detector light flickered off. I began to wonder if it wasn’t the cat that had turned the light on in the first place and whether the pounding at the door had been a paranoid dream. I was about to go back to bed when I heard the squeal of a wounded animal on the far side of the courtyard. I stepped out the door and walked gingerly around the corner; my feet were still bare and the ground was full of prickers. I wondered whether I was going to find a victim of the gray cat or the victim of a human being. I found Cheyanne curled up in a ball between a piñon and the wall.
    â€œHelp me,” she whimpered.
    â€œCan you walk?”
    â€œI think so.”
    I took her by the arms and lifted her up. She was smeared with blood. It came off on my hands when I touched her, although in this light it looked more like dark water than red blood. I took her hand and led her through the courtyard into the living room, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the bricks and the floor.
    â€œWhat happened? Were you shot?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “Cut.”
    I took her into the bathroom and tried to stop the bleeding with a towel. Pieces of dried grass fell from her hair to the floor. She cried when I touched her, but I needed to find out where the blood was coming from if I was ever going to stop it. It seemed to be mostly face wounds, which bleed badly and could scar a girl for life. One towel soaked through and I grabbed another.
    â€œ Who did this to you?” I asked.
    Her answer was a familiar refrain. “Don’t make me tell you that. If I tell you they’ll kill me.”
    â€œWhere’s your mother?”
    â€œAt the casino.”
    It wasn’t as deep in the night as I’d thought if Sonia was still at work.
    â€œAnd Leo?”
    â€œHe’s at the trailer. Don’t tell him. Please.”
    I’d taped some gauze to the worst cuts and got a better idea of what she looked like, which was worse than any of the nightmare looks teenagers create for themselves. Her hair was stained redder than raspberry Jell-O. Her cheeks were dirty, her eyes were swollen nearly shut.
    The Kid appeared at the bathroom doorway. “I think we should take her to the hospital, chiquita,” he said, which was all right with me. I’d already used up my limited knowledge of first aid. Cheyanne didn’t protest, so we bundled her into the backseat of my car. When we passed the double-wide I saw that Leo’s truck was there, that Sonia’s car was not and that no lights were on. The Kid drove the Nissan through the canyons of downtown taking the corners like a race car driver. We had a good excuse for speeding if anyone stopped us, but nobody did.
    We took her to the ER at Presbyterian. The doctor