The Night Ranger Read Online Free

“Listen—” She saw at once she’d grabbed him too hard. He yelped and looked up at her with such hatred that she felt an almost electric shock tear through her. She let go and he tore off into the mess of tents and disappeared as the other kids shouted at her.
    She spent the afternoon in her trailer. She plowed through
Maus
start to finish and then tried to distract herself with
Cosmo
and
Elle
and
Yoga Journal
. She had the magazines stuffed in her backpack like a twelve-year-old’s porn stash. She shouldn’t have lost her temper. She should have let the kids run themselves out and then gone back to her stupid reading. She just wanted to help and she didn’t know how. She couldn’t deliver a baby or dig a well. She couldn’t even unload the trucks. A forty-pound bag would knock her over.
    Where was Hailey, anyway? Her best friend had deserted her. On her birthday. She lay on her cot, buried her face in her pillow until she heard footsteps enter the trailer.
    “Gwennie? Happy birthday.”
    “I have a headache.”
    “No, you don’t.” Hailey tugged at her legs. She had no choice but to sit up. She fake-swiped at Hailey’s face and Hailey responded with a long hiss. In the bars in Missoula, they made a striking pair. Hailey’s dad was black, her mom white. She was tall and light-skinned, with big brown eyes. Guys liked her. Lots of guys. Hence Hailey the Heartbreaker.
    “Where have you been?”
    “Taking care of cholera patients. Which basically spells cleaning bedpans. I told you I’d be at the hospital today.” She held a canvas bag.
    “You did?” Gwen felt stupider than ever.
    “Come on, tell Dr. Hailey.”
    “I can’t even.” But she did.
    “So you grabbed his arm,” Hailey said when she was finished. “Trust me, that kid’s been through worse.”
    “It’s not that. Do you know what this is?” She held up
Maus
.
    Hailey flipped through it. “The Holocaust, right? The mice are the Jews and the cats are the Germans.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “I don’t know, some world history class I took freshman year, maybe.”
    “Well, I didn’t.”
    “Gwen. I don’t know how to say this straight out without sounding condescending, but you are not dumb. You just never bothered to study.”
    “It’s the same.”
    “It’s not. If you were dumb, you wouldn’t be upset about any of this.”
    “This place—”
    “Look, we’re not the Army or anything, we’re not even getting paid. We’re volunteers, we’re doing our best. If nothing else, we’re witnesses.”
    “Witnesses to what? I can’t even get anyone back home to understand what’s going on here. They send these dumb emails like
God’s work, keep it up,
and that’s all they want to know.”
    Hailey unzipped her bag. “Time to put the pity party to bed. Guess what I have in here.”
    “Hailey, I’m serious—”
    “You want your birthday present or not?” Hailey reached into the bag and pulled out a bottle of Patrón and a jar of margarita mix. “Do not ask what I had to do to get these.”
    “Tequila?”
    “Come on. Let’s drink our sorrows away. Just like real aid workers. And if Owen or Scott stop by, I’m telling them to get lost.”
    It was a fun night. The next morning, Gwen’s head was screaming, but even so she felt better. She came into the canteen, choked down a glass of water. Owen and Scott sat at the center table spooning down oatmeal, a replay of the day before. Neither looked glad to see her. She liked that.
    “So Scott wants us to take a run to Lamu,” Owen said.
    Moss had told Gwen about Lamu. She made the place sound like paradise. It was an island a few miles off the Kenyan coast, on the Indian Ocean. Turquoise-blue water and an old port. But the Somali border was only about fifty miles away, and not long before, bandits had attacked a resort close by. They’d killed an English tourist and dragged his wife back to Somalia, where she’d died in captivity. Since then, most Westerners had stayed