Reese was slumped inside the cab, still in his seat belt, head back and his eyes closed. He was covered in blood.
I pushed in beside the trooper. “What happened? Is he all right?”
“Judge Knott?”
The trooper was Ollie Harrold, someone familiar to me from traffic court. “Ma’am, you shouldn’t—”
“He’s my nephew. Is he alive?”
I touched Reese’s face and a fresh trickle of blood ran down from a cut on his chin. “Reese?”
“Deborah?” Reese’s eyes opened a crack. “Oh shit,” he groaned. “Just what I need.”
“What happened, honey?”
He closed his eyes and his face got that mulish look.
The exterior of the truck wasn’t badly damaged, but the interior looked as if it’d been vandalized. The radio and CD player could have been hit with a hammer, and the padded dash and soft vinyl upholstery were slashed to tatters. Blood and mud were everywhere.
I looked at the trooper. “Who did this?”
“That’s what I’m trying to ascertain, ma’am. I just got here myself, but he don’t want to tell me.”
“Reese Knott,” I said sternly. “You better say what happened here and I mean it.”
“Oh shit,” he groaned again. When he touched his face, his hand came away with more blood. “I’m gonna have to get a goddamn tetanus shot, ain’t I?”
“Reese!”
“Look, I didn’t know it was going to end up like this, okay? But this buck come jumping out of the woods and fell down right in front of me.” His eyes fell on his smashed CD. “Oh Jesus, look at that! Cost me almost four hundred dollars to get it installed.”
“Forget about the damn player. What about the deer? Did you hit it?”
“No. Some hunter must’ve shot him, and he got that far before he went down. I thought jumping the ditch must have finished him off. He had an eight-point rack, Deb’rah. The one A.K. took doesn’t have but six.”
“And?”
“Well, I couldn’t hear nobody coming after him. Deer can run miles sometimes from where they get shot. Everybody knows that. And why should I leave him there for the buzzards to pick? So I got out my tarp and wrapped it around him and stuck him up here in the cab.”
“Why not in back?”
“It’s full of light fixtures I just picked up from our wholesaler in Makely.” His eyes met mine and he gave a shamefaced shrug. “Besides, I was afraid the guy that shot him might come along and spot the antlers.”
He closed his eyes again and I gave him a poke.
“I swear to God I thought he was dead, okay? But I hadn’t hardly turned on this road when he rared up under that tarp and started tearing hell out of things. Out of me, too. You ever think about how sharp them damn hooves are?” He touched a torn and bloody spot on his upper thigh where the jeans were ripped “Oh, God, I bet I have to get stitches. I hate getting stitches. He just wouldn’t be still, kept kicking and raring, antlers flying—it’s a pure wonder he didn’t poke my eyes out with them antlers. God knows he poked me everywhere else. I tried to turn him out, but I couldn’t reach around him to open the door ’cause he was trying to come through the window on my side. Next thing I know, the truck does a one-eighty into that signpost and I’m sitting here in the ditch before I finally get the damn door open.”
“Oh, Reese, you idiot.”
“Look at my head liner,” he moaned. “Look at these seats! I’ll have to get the whole inside—you know what it’s gonna cost? And I bet my damn insurance—”
Trooper Harrold had trouble keeping a straight face when I turned to him.
“I observed him driving erratically,” he told me as formally as if we were back in court. “Before I could put on my blue light though, he landed in the ditch and I saw a buck go bounding up the ditch bank. I thought at first he’d swerved to miss it and—”
He was interrupted by the sound of sirens and more flashing emergency lights.
Dwight Bryant pulled his departmental cruiser up behind Reese’s truck and a rescue ambulance stopped a few feet away.
A tall, strongly built woman slid out from behind the wheel. A stethoscope dangled from her neck and she carried a cervical collar. “Want to give me some room here?” she said, motioning us away from the cab of the truck. “Is this the victim?”
“Victim?”
“Somebody called in and said a man out here in a white truck’s been shot. He the one?”
“I reported the accident,” said Harrold, “but I didn’t call for an ambulance yet and he wasn’t shot.” He looked at the paramedic who had strapped the cervical collar around Reese’s neck as a precaution before taking his vital signs. “Was he?”
“Not that I can see.” She gave an exasperated twitch of her head. “People call in the wrong things all the time.”
“We got the same call,” said Dwight. “What happened? Reese take that curve too sharp?”
I started to tell him but we had to step back out of the road as a pickup drove slowly by. All of a sudden, it screeched on brakes and two angry hunters jumped out. Both were dressed in brown camouflage jumpsuits and bright orange hunting caps and one of them slammed the hood of Reese’s truck with the flat of his hand so hard that it left a dent.
“This is the bastard, all right. See them diamond treads? Where’s my buck, you dickhead?”
Dwight and Trooper Harrold both moved forward to intercept him, but the hunter banged the truck hood again. “We found where it come out of the woods and saw the blood where somebody stopped and picked him up. Same tire marks. What’d you do with it, asshole?”
His buddy pulled at his sleeve and pointed up on the bank about thirty feet away. To the casual eye, the sticklike object projecting up out of the dead weeds might’ve looked like fallen twigs, but the hunters recognized antlers and they headed up the bank.
The door of yet another pickup banged and I saw the familiar uniform of a wildlife officer. “You find it?” he called to the hunters.
“Yeah, this is it,” they called back.
The EMS paramedic had signaled for the stretcher.
“He’s probably okay,” she told me as her assistant maneuvered the stretcher into place, “but that cut on his face needs stitches and so does the one on his thigh, so I want to transport him to the hospital.”
“Have I got to go?” Reese asked her anxiously.
“I strongly advise it, sir,” she said. “In my opinion, you may have sustained internal injuries and you could have a closed head injury. You don’t want to risk a blood clot, do you?”
Reese started to argue, but about that time his eyes landed on the wildlife officer who was approaching and he clutched at the paramedic’s arm. “Yeah, I’ll go with you.”
The officer walked over to us and he seemed surprised as he spotted me. He’d testified in my court just this week. “You know this boy, Judge?”
“My nephew,” I said as they eased Reese out of the cab and strapped him onto the stretcher.
“He able to talk to me a minute?”
The paramedic nodded and the officer leaned over and looked at Reese.
“Son,” he said, “you got a permit to take deer?”
Reese moaned and closed his eyes.
“Which hospital y’all taking him to?” I asked.
“Dobbs Memorial,” the paramedic said and briskly trundled the stretcher over to the waiting ambulance.
I gave the warden Reese’s name and address and he scribbled out a citation.
“I need to see his driver’s license,” said Trooper Harrold.
“You’re not going to charge him, too, are you?” I objected.
Harrold thought about it a minute. “One-vehicle accident? No property damage except to himself? I guess there’s really not a whole lot I can charge him with unless it’s operating a vehicle with a loose deer in the cab.”
“Seat belt violation?” Dwight suggested helpfully. “Passengers are supposed to be fastened in.”