Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: Witness Down

"Is he alive?" I said.

"He's alive." The apprentice dragged in a breath. "His hip's broken. Three ribs. They took him to the hospital in Kalispell."

"Did he see the driver?"

"He won't tell us. He says he'll only tell you."

The barn had gone silent around me.

Twenty wolves stood among the balloons and watched my face.

I handed Patsy back her phone.

"Somebody ran an eighty-one-year-old man off a canyon road," I said. "To keep him out of that hall."

Fraser was already digging his keys out of his pocket.

"Then let's go get him into it," he said.

We drove north in the dark.

He didn't sing this time.

He kept his hand on my knee the whole way, and I kept mine on top of it.

The hospital room smelled of bleach and lilies and old man.

The old reader lay flat on his back with a pin in his hip.

His two canes leaned in the corner.

"You're late," he said.

"It's a three-hour drive."

"I did it in two and a half this morning. Before the canyon."

I pulled a chair up to the bed.

"Who was driving?"

"Never saw a face. I saw a truck in my mirror with no plate. Then I saw the sky." He shut his eyes. "Then a man leaned in my window to see if I was dead."

"And?"

"And my nose was two feet from his arm." He opened one eye. "Chewing tobacco. River mud on his boots, and not Flathead mud. Yours. And plaster."

"Plaster?"

"Fresh. The kind they set a broken bone in."

Fraser went very still at the window.

"His wrist," Fraser said. "I broke a man's wrist on a dock in August."

"Then you know who he is." The old reader looked at me. "Now get me those clerks before the pills make me stupid."

The Moon Court's clerks drove up from the valley the next morning.

There were two of them, a man and a woman in good wool coats.

They carried a video camera and a fat black book of pack law.

Gregor's lawyer came with them.

He was a Missoula wolf in a gray suit, with soft hands and a hard smile.

He smelled of hotel soap and new leather.

Under that, faint, he smelled of something I'd slept beside for five years.

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