Dakota (26 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“D
on’t you move,” Dawg commanded. “I’ll get something to clean that up with.”

Lola couldn’t even look at Tina. The idea that the girl had been forced to submit to hideous carnalities with Dawg would become far too real if she did. Tina seemed to understand. “He hasn’t touched me.”

Lola dragged her sleeve across her mouth and met Tina’s eyes. “He hasn’t? Are you sure?” Lola brushed Tina’s hair away from her neck, looking for a telltale pinprick, thinking that Charlotte could just as easily have drugged Tina, too. In fact, Lola wondered if she drugged all the girls as a way of keeping them compliant.

Tina’s lips, dried and cracked, twisted in a sort of sarcasm that was a relief from her panic of minutes earlier. “They’re saving me for someone. Someone who’s paying big money.” Lola watched the fear return to her eyes as she imagined what lay in store.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. He’s driving over—they didn’t say from where. Just that he should be here t-t-tomorrow.” She pushed the words past fresh sobs.

“It takes a day to get here from just about anywhere. Even Magpie,” Lola said. Magpie. On the border of the reservation that had seen so many girls go missing over the last year. Lola couldn’t imagine that, no matter how much money was involved, and no matter how badly drug-addled the girls, they’d willingly jump at the chance to prostitute themselves—especially not so far from home. Turning the occasional trick with a Glacier-bound frat boy was one thing. But an army of roughnecks, day and night, was another matter entirely. Lola thought it unlikely that their addictions were so far gone as to make the prospect palatable. They were too young. Somebody had to be directing them there. Or luring them. Or—her stomach clenched at the thought—kidnapping them and forcing them. “Tina. How’d you end up here?”

“I don’t know,” Tina wailed. Lola put her finger to her lips.

Tina gulped for air. Lola thought of film and TV scenes of people hyperventilating, of women in childbirth. “Blow out,” she said. “Like this.” Puff. Puff. Puff.

Tina dutifully puffed, fast at first, then more slowly. Finally, she drew a single long breath. “Better.”

Lola cast an eye toward the door. The scent of fried chicken wafted into the room. In the kitchen, grease sizzled in a pan. Voices rose above the sound—Dawg and Charlotte. The latter sounded distinctly unhappy. “Make her clean it up herself,” Charlotte said.

“Tina,” Lola urged.

“I was on an assignment for the paper. They sent me out to interview somebody at a ranch. But when I got there, nobody was home. I knocked and knocked on the door and all of a sudden somebody pulled it open and put something over my mouth. I passed out.”

“Chloroform,” said Lola. “Or some facsimile. I’m pretty sure you just can’t walk into a drugstore to buy it, but I think it’s one of those things that’s easy enough to mix up. How long were you out?”

“Not long, I think. The next thing I knew, I was all tied up in the back of a car. Then they put me in what felt like a semi cab. When he used the horn, it sounded like—”

“I know what a semi horn sounds like,” Lola said. Tina needed to move it along.

“Anyhow, I ended up here.”

“What ranch?” With beef prices so low, ranching was such a losing proposition that Lola thought it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that a hard-luck rancher might try and get himself in on the girl trade.

“Old Man Sullivan’s.”

Lola thought aloud. “That doesn’t make sense. His kids have been fighting over it ever since he died last year. Nobody’s worked it since.”

Something clanked outside the door. Dawg pushed his way in, preceded by the smell of bleach. He handed Lola a ratty towel and sat a galvanized bucket on the floor. Frothy water slopped over its top. “Mama says to clean up your own mess before it soaks too far into that good carpet.”

“I heard her. You’ll have to move. I can’t clean this up with you standing there.”

“I’m supposed to watch you.”

Lola tilted the bucket and let the water flow onto the rug. Dawg took a hasty step away. “Just stand outside until we get this done. Where the hell are we going to go? Out there?” She flapped the rag at the room’s single oblong window, high on the wall. Dawg recoiled as droplets hit his uniform. “Look at that thing,” Lola said. “It’s too small for even Tina to squeeze out of it.”

He remained stubbornly in place. “Mama says hurry up. The mens are coming soon and she doesn’t want the place smelling all barfy.”

“Lunchtime break,” Tina mouthed.

Lola waved the rag again. “Go on. Get.”

To her surprise, Dawg got. “I still don’t get it,” Lola said, returning to their earlier conversation. “Why in the world would Jorkki send you to an abandoned ranch?”

“Something about somebody looking at it for a conservation easement. It was a
news
story. Not another stupid fluff feature.” Pride briefly trumped fear. Tina’s shoulders straightened, her chin lifted. “Besides, Jorkki didn’t send me. Finch did. He thought it would be a good way to show Jorkki I could handle more responsibility.”

“Finch?” The rag stilled in Lola’s hands. In all the months she’d worked at the
Daily Express
, she’d never seen Finch go beyond his regular assignments of the obituaries, the wedding and engagement announcements, the police blotter. “The blotter,” she said.

“What about it?”

The blotter, with its endless list of local crimes and the names of those charged. The girls’ names wouldn’t have been on it, of course—they were juveniles—but it wouldn’t have been hard for Finch to figure out which families routinely strayed from the law, who struggled with nascent addictions, whose parents were less than vigilant. Who could go missing with only a resigned, “It was only a matter of time.”

Finch. His mysterious disappearances took on new meaning. Lola imagined him sailing across the Hi-Line in his Caddy, sweaty hands slipping on the steering wheel as he ferried a girl to some halfway point between Magpie and Burnt Creek where he could hand her off to Dawg.

“That bastard,” Lola nearly shrieked. “I’ll punch his fat face in!”

The outburst brought both Dawg and Charlotte into a brief scuffle at the door, each trying to shove past the other into the room. Dawg had height and hard muscle but Charlotte, as Lola had only belatedly begun to realize, had sheer meanness on her side. She burst first into the room, brandishing a syringe.

“Do I have to calm you down? Do I have to?”

Lola tried to flatten herself against the wall behind the bed. She couldn’t. Tina had gotten there first. She felt the girl’s shuddering breaths against her back.

“Now, listen.” Twin infernos burned in Charlotte’s eyes. “Lunch-time’s coming. It’s about to get busy in here. I can’t have any trouble from you two.” She jabbed the needle toward Lola, who slammed backward, ignoring an “oof” from Tina. “Something tells me it would be smarter to give you this. But we’re looking at a busy night and we’re still short a girl and Princess here is on reserve for a special order. We might need you, and the customers don’t like girls who just lie there. You catch my drift?”

Tina began her whispered mantra again. “MommyMommy Mommy.”

Charlotte folded her arms across her chest. The needle’s tip glinted. “Do we understand one another?”

Lola couldn’t believe she was capable of speech. But the word floated into the room. “Completely.”

The door closed, almost, behind them. Lola eased away from the wall. Tina fell to the mattress, incapable of forming even the single word. “M-m-m,” she stammered. Lola took her by the shoulders, eased her upright. Put her hands to either side of Tina’s face, her thumbs beneath Tina’s slack jaw, and pushed until Tina’s lips were mashed together. Held it until Tina’s teeth stopped chattering.

“I talked to Jan earlier today,” she whispered. She watched the notion swim past Tina’s dull gaze, noted the slight jerk as the idea took hold. “Jan,” she said again, trying to force Tina’s thoughts away from her unthinkable present back to that other world. She gave Tina another second or two to recollect Jan, the newspaper, her whole previous life. She checked an impulse to slap the girl. The shock might bring her back. But if things didn’t work out, there’d be more than enough slaps and worse in Tina’s future. And—she pushed the thought away—her own. She lowered her face to Tina’s and forced the girl to look into her eyes.

“You need to focus. We don’t have much time.”

“Much time for what?” Tina asked. Good question, thought Lola. If only she had an answer. The one she came up with surprised her almost as much as Tina’s accepting nod.

“Until we figure out how to get the hell out of here. Because that’s what we’re going to do.”

CHAPTER FORTY

“L
unchtime, shift changes, any time the men are off—those are the worst.” Lola had asked Tina to tell her the trailer’s routine, mostly as a way to help Tina refocus, and to give herself time to think. In her brief time in the trailer before Lola’s own unplanned arrival, Tina had managed a quick conversation with one of the other girls from the rez, Josephine’s niece. “Nancy. She played basketball with me for a while. She wasn’t as far gone into drugs as the others. I guess that makes it worse for her.”

“Why?”

“Mama keeps them drugged up, just high enough not to really care.” Lola remembered Dave’s description of a girl who lay passive, unmoving. She already had assumed the girl was unwilling. Drugs added an ominous extra layer of the inability to protest.

“So how come we aren’t?”

“Maybe she thinks she got you good enough to keep you in line.” Tina pointed with her lips to the goose eggs from Charlotte’s pistol-whipping. “And me”—her eyes went dark and flat—“the special customer wants me wide awake.”

“We’re going to be long gone by the time that damn special customer gets here.” And if they weren’t, Lola vowed, she’d find some way, no matter how unlikely the chance, to put a hurt on the special customer. She’d heard tales overseas about men paying a premium to have sex with a virgin. It made her sick then. Thinking about that being applied to Tina took her beyond sick to murderous. But it was also distracting. Lola gave herself the same advice she’d given Tina:
Focus.
“What about the other girls?”

“Nancy, she was trying to get clean when they snatched her. She tells Mama she doesn’t need the stuff, pretends she doesn’t mind the men. That’s what Judith did. She’d worked so hard to get clean, and then they drugged her. She was so scared of getting hooked again. She told them she, um, worked better without it.” Lola recalled the inflamed scratch across Swanny’s face, his lewd appraisal of Judith’s performance. “And it worked. She stayed clearheaded and got away. Nancy was hoping to do the same thing. But now there’s somebody by the door all the time. And they leave the bedroom doors cracked even when the men come. Nancy says if they hear talking instead of”—the next word came out in a whisper—“fucking, Dawg or Mama will bust in, make sure nobody’s plotting anything.”

“Nobody’s plotting anything now, that’s for sure.”

Around them, the trailer heaved and creaked like a ship at sea, buffeted by the wind without and the primal surges within. The men, at least, were quick. This bunch, Tina had explained, comprised day workers around town on their lunch breaks. Every few minutes a groan would sound, followed by relative silence. Then, the rustle of clothing being donned, the creak of a door, and heavy footsteps passing one another in the hall as the next man hurried toward his own brief assignation. From the direction of what Lola assumed was the living room or kitchen, Lola heard voices.

“C’mon, Mama. When you getting more girls? You promised.”

“If she does get ’em, I get first crack. Right, Mama?”

Charlotte’s voice was full, flirty. “Only because you paid. And not first crack. Somebody paid a lot more than you for that particular privilege.” Lola wondered how many personalities the woman had. Prim housewife, fiendish madam, and now this new sultry version. All combined, she supposed, to make Charlotte a particularly astute businesswoman in her unsavory line of work.

“Har,” another man chimed in. “Sloppy seconds for you, Larry.”

Plates rattled. “Here,” said Charlotte. “Eat your chicken while you’re waiting. You don’t want it cold. Although it’s good that way, too.”

“Indeed it is. Some days out on the rig, I don’t know what I look forward to more. Your dark meat or theirs.” General hilarity.

Lola turned to Tina. “So the fried chicken stand is a real thing?”

“They make money on the food and the girls, both. Nancy said that sometimes the guys don’t even bother to wipe off their hands after they eat. The girls end up covered in chicken grease.”

“Huh.” Lola roamed the room as they spoke. She picked up the lamp, put it down. It was plastic, with no more heft than a toy. She checked the bulb. Charlotte must have squirreled away the old incandescent variety, or maybe the new curly ones simply hadn’t made their way to Burnt Creek yet. Even if Lola shattered the bulb, the jagged edge of the eggshell glass would break at the first stab, allowing her to hurt someone only just enough to piss him off. She cast a glance over her shoulder through the just-open door, then pulled the folding chair beneath the window and stood on it. No matter how long, or from what angle, she studied the window, it was far too narrow to allow her, or even Tina, to squeeze through. The window gave a view of row upon row of trailers, with the endless prairie beyond. Despair gouged Lola’s heart. “A wasteland,” she’d called the prairie. Now its promise of space and freedom seemed wondrous. What if she never saw prairie again? Something flitted across the corner of her field of vision. She blinked hard. Sure enough, there was the motion again, a flash of black and white.

A dog. Nosing among the trailers. Listing on three legs.

Lola cranked at the window mechanism until it opened a crack, wet her lips, pursed them, and managed a quick whistle. Bub’s head whipped around, ears at attention. Lola whistled again and he streaked toward the trailer. “Bub! Oh, Bub!” she gasped.

“What’s going on?” Tina got up from the bed.