Dakota (7 page)

“Bad enough you slept with a source,” she’d said, speaking over Lola’s protestation that she hadn’t even been working for the
Express
when she’d started seeing Charlie. “But no white woman has a future with that guy. You’re just asking to get hurt.”

“Jesus, Jan. Nobody’s getting hurt, and for sure nobody’s having kids. It’s just a good time.”

Jan spoke with the authority of someone raised in a small town where secrets were nonexistent. “I know a whole lot of babies who started out as a good time. I hope you two are taking precautions.”

Lola’s face had grown warm, as much from pride as embarrassment. She’d held several friends’ hands through any number of pregnancy scares, had driven more than one to a clinic, trying to ignore their obvious resentment at her own clockwork biology that was, apparently, foolproof. Now, she checked a mental calendar, sighed, then nudged Charlie. He woke instantly, as fully alert upon waking as he was oblivious while asleep. Alert, and ready, too. “Condom,” she whispered, as he pulled her to him. The clock said five. Lola wound her arms around him, almost as grateful for the distraction of lovemaking as she was for the fact that she’d be on the road minutes after they’d finished.

T
HE
T
HERMOS
rolled from atop the pile of gear in Lola’s arms and clanged against the frozen ground. Lola retrieved it and shook it, relieved not to hear the rattle of a shattered liner.

“Lucky.” The whisper floated toward her through the darkness.

Lola spun around, almost dropping the Thermos again. “Joshua! What are you doing here?”

Joshua stepped from the truck’s shadow. “Waiting for you. About an hour now. Mind if I have some of that coffee? I’m near froze.”

Lola handed him the Thermos. He unscrewed the top and poured. The coffee gurgled and steamed. “God, that’s good. I didn’t think you’d ever come out.”

A whicker sounded from the direction of the barn. A spotted horse, curious about the hushed commotion, ambled through the open door and stretched his neck over the fence, seeking the packets of sugar Lola usually filched from the café for him. Lola waved him away. “Go back inside, Spot.” The Appaloosa, like Bub, had been Mary Alice’s. Lola had given him to Charlie after Mary Alice’s death, then had ended up with him, anyway. She’d come to learn that his curiosity was insatiable. She glanced toward the house, where Charlie was cleaning up after the breakfast he’d insisted upon making. The last thing she needed was for Spot to neigh and draw Charlie to a window, where he could see her talking with Joshua.

“How’d you get here? I didn’t hear anything,” she said to Joshua.

“OIT.”

“What?”

“Old Indian Trick. We’re always creeping up on you white people in our moccasins.”

“Hah.” Indian people were unrelenting jokesters, but Lola never knew when it was appropriate for a white person to laugh. She usually settled for the same forced smile she now turned upon Joshua, hoping he hadn’t noticed that she’d actually glanced toward his feet to ensure he was wearing boots. “Seriously, how? And why?”

“Heard you were leaving this morning for Dakota.”

Of course he had. Lola had mixed feelings about the gossip in Magpie, which was nearly as accurate as it was widespread. As a reporter, it was a great help. But she didn’t like being the subject.

“When did Dakota lose the North?”

Joshua ignored the question. “I parked down around the bend and walked up here. I wanted to talk to you before you headed out.” In the harsh black and white of moonlight, his injuries looked even worse, the swollen jaw leaping to prominence, the space gaping darkly where his tooth had been, eyes cavernous and haunted.

“About your sister,” Lola said, “Charlie already told me not to go asking about her. Or those other girls, either.”

Joshua’s mouth stretched into a grotesque semblance of a smile. “But you will, anyway.”

“Maybe.”

He reached for the Thermos, took another swig. “Look. I thought about what you said. About the other girls. I don’t care if it ends up in a story or not. I just want to know what happened to my sister. And if knowing what happened to her helps find out about them, too, maybe that’s a good thing, closure or no closure.”

Lola thought of the man in the café, his ugly words about Judith. It was entirely possible, she thought, that Judith had endured worse abuse than the simple beating the man had delivered to Joshua, something so cruel as to make fleeing into a blizzard in street clothes seem the only way out. There were the track marks, the brand. The autopsy report still hadn’t been released. She confessed her reluctant second thoughts to Joshua. “Are you sure you want to know the details?”

The front door opened. Lola turned to see Charlie silhouetted in the doorway. A whisper barely reached her ears.

“Disappearing now. Another OIT. And, yes. I’m sure.”

“
C
OULDN
’
T WAIT
to hit the coffee?” Charlie shook the half-empty Thermos. “I can’t believe I’m letting you take it. I’ve had that Thermos since I was a boy.” He handed Lola her duffel bag. She tossed it into the space behind the pickup’s seats. The moon was still high, its silver light so bright that Charlie hadn’t bothered to turn on the outside light. He looked toward the horse. “Nice of Spot to see you off.”

“He’s just waiting for a treat. I forgot to bring him one.”

“Tank full?”

“I stopped at Howard’s last night.”

He moved to the front of the truck and unplugged the long cord that kept the battery from freezing during the night. The cord’s twin ran to his cruiser. He wrapped the cord in figure eights from his elbow to wrist and tied it off and sat it atop the duffel. “Try to find a place with plug-ins at night. I don’t care if you have to pay somebody. Speaking of which—got enough cash?”

“You sound like my mother.” Lola stood on one foot, then the other. First Joshua and now this. She’d been ready to leave twenty minutes earlier. “I’m fine.” When she’d first met Charlie, she’d thought him homely, with his deep-set eyes, blade of a nose, and wide full mouth warring for dominance between a broad brow and uncompromising chin. In repose, he could look almost angry, something he knew and used to good effect when questioning suspects. Now those same features twisted in concern. Lola was relieved that his eyes were in shadow.

“You’d better take this,” he said.

She almost dropped it when she realized what it was. “The last thing I need is a gun.”

“I’m not saying you have to use it. It was my mom’s. It’s just a little thing. It probably wouldn’t even kill anybody unless you got right in his face, but it would stop him. It’s already loaded. You’ll feel better, knowing you’ve got it.”

“You mean you will.” She’d hoped for a laugh. None came. “You’re as bad as Bub, the way you make me feel guilty.”

“Speaking of which.” He handed her another bag. Was there no end to the delays he’d manufacture?

“Now what?”

“Bub’s food and his bowls.” He took a couple of steps back and opened the front door. Bub streaked past him and into the truck, turning three times before settling himself into the passenger seat, panting in delight.

“What the—?”

Charlie boosted her into the truck. He reached in and turned the key. The engine caught on the first try. Lola had a good idea, looking at his expression, how criminals felt when they realized the sheriff had gotten the better of them. “Best to share your space with another beating heart,” he said. He closed the door behind her and raised his fingers to his lips and put them to the glass.

She thought of his own heart, beating alone in the cold house. What about you? she wanted to say. She touched her fingers briefly to the window, pressing hard against his on the other side, and put her foot to the accelerator.

CHAPTER NINE

M
agpie lay at the intersection of mountain and plains, spaces abruptly changing from vertical to horizontal. Lola loved the juxtaposition, the headlong sweep of prairie to the east, the way it made her feel at once small and soaring, while behind her rose the bracing immensity of the Rocky Mountain Front, the sheer limestone reefs seemingly so close that she could put a hand to them to steady herself. Until Lola drove east out of Magpie, she hadn’t realized how much she’d come to take that defining backdrop for granted.

Sixty miles out, her sky-gouging landmark disappeared from the rear-view mirror and the world became entirely too vast. The sky slowly lightened into roughly the same clotted-milk shade as the snow, making it impossible to tell where land left off and clouds began. “Do you think if I stood on my head it would look much different?” she asked Bub. She was already grateful for the company. Not, she thought, that she’d ever give Charlie the satisfaction of knowing that. She dug a hand into Bub’s fur, and felt for the stump of his missing leg. It ended in a hard knot of scar tissue that Bub gnawed when he was bored. She reminded herself that the dog had almost died because of her, flinging himself at the man who had killed Mary Alice and then had tried to kill Lola, too. So what if Bub’s presence meant a few extra stops so that he could do his business? She scratched at his ears. He thumped his tail against the seat. The pickup’s interior was toasty, and she’d long ago shed her parka and hat and mittens and glove liners. Still, the dog—the warm, living mass of him—provided a different kind of comfort, warding off the psychic chill imposed by her frozen surroundings. She kept one hand on Bub’s ribcage, with its reassuring rise and fall, and scanned the landscape, picking out features—a dense shelterbelt heralding a faraway ranch, the inevitable grain elevators marking a town—as a way of breaking it into manageable proportions.

Handfuls of houses, the remnants of railroad towns, sprang from the prairie at regular intervals and receded behind her before she could take comfort in the knowledge that other human beings shared the boundless space around her. Angus cattle stood motionless in fields of wind-whipped snow, like black barges in icy bays. At least, she thought, the road itself was largely clear of snow, scrubbed as it was by the merciless wind. Fellow travelers were such a rarity that she took to counting passing vehicles as a way to combat boredom. When that proved insufficiently distracting, she ignored Bub’s reproachful stare and warbled off-key tunes, starting with radio sing-alongs and then, when the dial went to static, a cappella versions of every song she could remember, including patriotic anthems and Christmas carols. She’d have recited poems, but all she could remember were dirty limericks and “Under the spreading chestnut tree,” its line about the smith’s large and sinewy hands leading her back to the limericks. By the time she reached the North Dakota border, she’d refilled the Thermos twice and stopped four times at gas stations whose bathrooms made her long for a fine healthy tree, if only such a thing had existed on the bald land and the mercury hadn’t stopped its daytime ascent at zero. She wondered what Judith had thought on her own long journey east, the mountains and trees vanishing behind her, exchanging the sometimes-stifling warmth and caring of her own people for the disinterest of strangers. Even if Judith had gone willingly, it must have been daunting.

Everything changed at the North Dakota line, starting with the road. The pickup had jounced over tarred seams that stitched the pavement together for more than four hundred miles when the ride smoothed, the tires rolling over new macadam, the unbroken coal-black surface startling against the snow. The road widened to four lanes. The distractions she’d so wished for hours earlier made a belated appearance. She’d passed the occasional oil rig in Montana, but here they grew in profusion, stabbing at the sky, a veritable forest cloaked year-round in green—not the verdure of leaves, but the rustling come-hither of ready cash. First came the ubiquitous pump jacks common even around Magpie, grasshopper heads ducking rhythmically as metronomes toward the earth as their mechanisms turned slow-motion revolutions. Closer to the patch, flames heralded Lola’s approach, waving like flags atop flare stacks beside rigs, burning off the natural gas that was a byproduct of oil drilling. Traffic picked up. Lola goosed the truck up an incline and steered it into a turnout. A supersize truck hauling a proportionate flatbed was parked there. Lola looked up and up. The equipment it carried—something round and metallic; part of a tank, maybe, or a pipe seemingly large enough to funnel the ocean—towered three stories above. She pulled her gaze back to the road with its surge of tankers and pickups and big rigs like the one parked behind her. There were panel trucks and fifteen-passenger vans, standard tractor trailers dwarfed by the double-and even triple-trailer varieties, too, along with the rare lone sedan moving low and squashable behind its high-riding cousins. That, she thought, was her horizon—not the indefinable line between snow and sky, but the river of trucks converging from all directions, ferrying oil and all of the things that went with it, the pipes and the gear and above all the manpower, across the rolling sea of prairie.