Dakota (27 page)

Lola turned, heedless of the tears washing her cheeks. “My dog. He’s here! He can help us.”

Tina clambered onto the chair and squeezed beside her, clinging to the narrow window frame for balance. “How?”

On any other topic, Lola would have welcomed the sudden skepticism in her voice. The girl needed to toughen up, and fast. But this was about Bub. “We could write a note,” she said. “Throw it from the window.” Ignoring the foolish optimism in her own voice, the deeper foolishness of her words.

Tina showed no such inclination. “Did you see a pen anywhere in here? Paper?”

“Blood.”

“What?”

Somehow, Tina had gotten the upper hand. Lola wanted it back. She raised her left arm to her face, tore at the soft skin of her inner arm with her teeth. Blood welled from the ragged cut. Lola lowered her arm, licked her teeth free of the coppery taste. The blood trickled toward her hand. “We’ll write with this,” she said. “We can use a scrap of sheet, or a shirt; hell, even our underwear, and throw it to him.”

Tina’s lips twitched in an almost-smile. “He’s a dog. Throw him woman-smelling panties with blood on them and he’s just going to eat them. Besides, even if he didn’t, what’s he going to do? He’s not one of those TV dogs my gran’mother talks about, the ones who always came to somebody’s rescue.”

“Lassie,” Lola said. “Rin Tin Tin.”

“Whatever. Even if he were, who would he bring it to? Someone in the man camp? You think they’d help any of us? Mama’s is the best thing that ever happened to them.”

Lola knew Tina was right. “But,” she said. Bub was her last link to home, to safety. Without him, she and Tina were alone, lacking—despite her brave talk—a single way out. She couldn’t see the dog anymore. She called through the open window. “Bub! Bub!”

Tina gave a yelp. A hard hand clamped around Lola’s neck. Dawg lifted her bodily from the chair with one hand, Tina with the other. “What do we have here? Trying to get somebody’s attention?” He threw Tina onto the bed first, then Lola, and stuck his head out the door.

“Mama? Would you mind coming on down here for a second? We’ve got ourselves a situation.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

F
or the first time, Lola saw the other girls.

Charlotte waited until the last man in the trailer had finished his business, sending him on his way without so much as a cold drumstick, then slapped a “Closed” sign on the door. She gathered the girls on couches in what appeared to have been designed as a central rec room for the modular unit but must have served as a waiting room for the men, not to mention a place where she could serve up chicken platters. Three round white plastic tables and matching chairs sat in the center of the room; there were more seats still at the counter that served as a kitchen divider. Charlotte stationed Dawg with the girls, and waited in the kitchen with Tina and Lola after summoning Thor by cellphone.

“You need to get on over here. Dawg caught our new guests hollering out the window. And that’s not the half of it. Wait ’til you see what I found.” She waited in glowering silence. Lola sneaked peeks at the other girls. She wanted to throw a blanket over them. They wore cheap nylon negligees, lace gone grimy, nipples showing dark through the translucent stuff. In her jeans and heavy sweater, Lola felt overdressed. She forced her gaze to their schoolgirl faces, noted the telltale dullness in their eyes. She reminded herself that, at least according to what she’d heard, most of these girls were known users. Maybe three squares, a warm, dry place to sleep, and a regular supply of junk without any hassle from parents or police was all it took to enslave a teenage addict. Lola looked at Charlotte and hated her a little more, something that until that moment, she hadn’t thought possible. Charlotte smirked, dimples digging craters in her cheeks. Lola imagined that her unspoken dialogue with Charlotte consisted of a single word on each side: “Die.”

“I have to know something.” Lola kept her voice low so the girls wouldn’t hear their conversation. “How’d you get into this line of work? I thought you were a nurse.”

“You know what they pay nurses over in the clinic?”

“I do, actually.” Lola thought back to the budget document, the obvious discontent of the county clerk and the librarian. She’d been right about the tension over old salaries versus new money.

“I did keep on nursing a while. But then Thor took note of all these man camps and suggested the fried chicken stand. Turns out Thor had been sharing his lunches with Dawg, who told him he was a fool to give away chicken that good for free. Pretty soon, I could afford to quit nursing. I still work a spare shift once in awhile so I can get the drug samples. But mostly now I spend my days frying up chicken. Everyone tells me my chicken makes the colonel’s taste like dogshit.” Charlotte puffed up like a pigeon at the remembered compliment.

“I’m still not seeing my way from frying chicken to running girls.”

“Oh, that,” Charlotte said, as casually as though she were talking about selling crafts at a church fund-raiser. “Dawg was all the time telling me how he used to work for a guy who ran girls, back where they didn’t have half the market as the patch. He knew there was extra room in the trailer. And then there was this one guy Dawg met over at The Train and started bringing to the camp for his meals.” Dawg’s head turned at the sound of his name. “Somehow, he got wind of how Dawg was pushing us to do this.”

It was Dawg’s turn to go all prideful. He stepped to the counter at the sound of his name, keeping an eye on the girls. “I used to see him down at The Train, mooning over an Indian girl who worked there. She wouldn’t have nothing to do with him. But he got me to thinking about how many mens like their meat dark.”

“Let me guess,” said Lola. “Fat little guy. Glasses. Sweaty.”

“The very one,” said Charlotte. “Smart, too. He said he could get girls. And he did. Not just any girls. Indian girls. Young, or at least young-looking. Seems the patch attracts a particular brand of pervert. Anyhow, you need to specialize, have a niche. That’s where the money lies.”

Spoken like a true entrepreneur, Lola thought. She wondered what it was about Charlotte that had made Dawg comfortable with floating the idea—to the wife of an officer of the law, no less—of running girls. Maybe it was a gut thing. The same way Charlie had said he could sniff out liars, maybe Dawg could detect folks willing to bend the rules, had divined the greedy, grasping thing within Charlotte that Thor foolishly left unfulfilled.

“We had the location, right in the man camp,” Charlotte said. “We had the cover—the chicken stand. And we had the space. I’d been thinking to knock out the walls between the bedrooms, turn this place into a real restaurant instead of a takeout stand. But it turns out they’re way more profitable as bedrooms.”

Lola let her babble on. Her mind returned to something Dawg had said. “What happened to that girl you saw dancing at The Train? The one the little guy liked?”

Neither Dawg nor Charlotte answered for a moment. “She was the first one came worked for us,” Dawg said finally.

Lola looked into the waiting room at Maylinn-Carole-Annie-Nancy. “Which one is she?”

Dawg opened his mouth to reply. “She quit,” Charlotte said.

Judith
, Lola thought.

There was one thing Lola still couldn’t understand. “How’d you get Thor to go along?”

Those ghastly dimples again. “We started small, just the one girl. I told Thor she was a runaway I’d met at the clinic who needed a safe place to crash.” Lola wondered how they’d lured Judith to the trailer. Tried to imagine at what point Judith had realized it was best to pretend to go along, to submit with an eye to eventual escape. Jan had called Judith’s brand a running heart. Grotesque as the brand was, it had epitomized Judith in the end. That big heart of hers had run straight home to her people. Despite everything, she’d hung on to that eagle feather, and she’d died free.

Charlotte nattered on. “By the time Thor realized what was going on, she’d been turning tricks for weeks. Then it was just a matter of pointing out a couple of facts to him.”

“Those being?”

“The only way for him to stop it would be to arrest his own wife.”

Implicating himself in the process, Lola thought. Charlotte didn’t even have to point out the unlikelihood of Thor convincing anyone he hadn’t known about the operation from the start. “You said there were two things,” Lola asked. “What’s the other one?”

Charlotte dipped a hand into her apron pocket and came out with her fingers wrapped around a wad of cash. “This.”

Lola saw lots of bills with multiple zeroes. Before she could estimate the considerable amount, a knock sounded at the door. Charlotte tucked the money away.

“It’s me,” Thor called. Dawg lifted a curtain and nodded to Charlotte. She hustled Lola and Tina to the couches with the other girls as the door opened. The room had been warm and, just like that, it was cold. Lola noticed that none of the underdressed girls so much as flinched. Whatever Charlotte was giving them was powerful stuff.

“What’s going on? Why are we closed? Do you know how much money we lose every hour we’re shut down?” Thor shed his coat, his cap, and his clown-size puffy gloves as he spoke. His face was red with cold. His nose dripped. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew. He was not, Lola decided, nearly as handsome as she’d thought when she’d first met him.

“You’ve only yourself to blame.” Charlotte’s voice dripped acid.

Thor walked to the counter that divided the room from the kitchen, studied a platter heaped with pieces of chicken and chose a thigh. He settled himself at one of the tables in the lounge and tore at it with his teeth. A long strip of skin pulled away with it and hung from his mouth. He sucked it in. “How do you figure?”

“You took this one on.” Charlotte pointed at Tina. Lola had worked on the reservation just long enough to find it rude when people pointed with their fingers, instead of discreetly with their lips or chin. “This . . . this . . . Miss Priss.” Charlotte fairly spat the words. Tina edged closer to Lola. “Those other ones. Nobody was surprised when they went missing. Nobody cared. But this one. Here. I printed this out at home. Take a look.” She slapped a piece of paper onto the table. Lola craned her neck. It was a story from the
Missoulian,
the largest newspaper in the western part of the state. “Missing,” read the headline over a three-column photo of Tina holding the basketball team’s championship trophy. “Near as I can tell, this photo ran in every single newspaper in the state.”

“So?” Thor lifted a shoulder. He took another bite. Chewed for a long time. “Needs more salt. No one knows she’s here. It’s not like she’s done any work yet. I don’t see the problem.”

“That’s because you’re an idiot.”

There it was again, Lola thought. The inevitable resentment of the girl who married the best-looking boy in the class, only to watch herself go to bloat over the years while he stayed fine as ever. It had to have nagged at Charlotte, especially when she considered the fact that she’d gotten them both into a business where no doubt Thor sampled the goods.

“She’s not going to be able to do any work. Not now, not ever. We can’t risk anybody seeing her.”

By the way Tina stiffened beside her, Lola could tell that she’d grasped the deadly significance of Charlotte’s words.

“What about the special customer? He paid in advance,” Thor said. “Real money.”

The hope leaping within Tina was practically palpable. Thor had found the only way, Lola thought, of making the prospect of the special customer seem, if not actually desirable, at least tolerable. Considering the alternative.

Thor’s hand flicked. The thigh bone sailed over the counter and landed in the sink. He licked his fingers and wiped them on the uniform Charlotte had laundered and ironed with such care. The skin around Charlotte’s eyes tightened. “It’s not like he’s going to tell anybody,” Thor added.

Charlotte hesitated. “Fine,” she said. “But after that—we can’t risk any more of their little escape tricks. We got lucky with that other one who got away.” The air went out of Tina.

“That’s not the only problem,” Charlotte said. “These two were calling out for help. Dawg caught them both at the window and Lola here was trying to talk to someone. She needs to be taught a lesson. Let her know she’s no better than the others. You know what I mean. Do it.”

Thor pushed his chair back, stood, and hooked his fingers through his belt loops. He went into the kitchen and turned one of the knobs on the stove. There was the smell of gas. It whispered and caught. Thor cranked the knob until the flame burned high. He extracted something long and straight from the tight space between the refrigerator and the wall. Tina gasped. Lola looked to her for an explanation, but Tina stared at the object in Thor’s hand. He held a metal rod with an oval handle at one end. He poked the other end into the fire, turning it this way and that, until the metal turned scarlet then glowed orange. He turned to Lola.

“It’s . . . it’s—” Tina’s whisper defined terror.

Her mouth opened and closed, fishlike.

“It’s—”

She tried again.

“It’s a branding iron.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

D
awg grabbed Lola from the couch and wrestled her into a straight chair, twisting one arm behind her back and extending the other before her. Thor approached. He slid up her sleeve, exposing the tender flesh of her forearm. The brand hovered a few inches above it, so close Lola could feel the glow, though not yet close enough to carry the blistering heat of her nightly candle-snuffing. She forced herself to look away, into Thor’s face. He smiled, open-mouthed. Lupine, she thought.

Thor turned the iron to display the white-hot heart shape. He moved it closer.

Lola willed herself still, even as her skin began to warm.
One thousand one,
she counted silently.
One thousand two.
“This is just stupid,” she said.

“How so?”

“That’s how you marked Judith.”

“So?”

“Whatever you do with me, someday I’m going to be found. And unless it’s years and years from now—and maybe even then—that brand’s going to be on my arm, the same as it was on Judith’s. Except that, unlike with Judith, a lot of people will know that I’d been staying with you and Charlotte. Put that heart on my arm and you might as well tie a tag to my toe that says ‘Thor Brevik did it.’ ”