by Saul Herzog
“You walked right up to her and told her to come with you,” the big man said. “Right in front of my face.”
“Calm down,” Lance said, but he wasn’t calming anybody.
“Calm down?” the big guy said.
“All I did was ask how she was doing.”
The big guy couldn’t believe it. No one stood up to him, not even the cops. He controlled the drug traffic at Roosville, Chief Mountain, and a few other small border crossings. People knew not to mess with him.
“And what gave you the idea to go and do that?” he said.
Lance wasn’t sure what to say. He looked at the girl, then back at the big guy.
He turned to the bartender for support but he wasn’t offering any.
“Look at her,” Lance said.
He said it to the room, to the bartender and the guys in flannel shirts and Timberlands by the pool table. He said it to the girl. The words didn’t sound right but he didn’t know how else to put it.
It was the girl who replied. She took the gum from her mouth and said, “The fuck did you say?”
Her voice was harsh. Just listening to it put the taste of an ashtray in Lance’s mouth.
He looked her over, head to toe, then at the rest of the guys in the bar. “This can’t be right,” he said.
“What,” the girl said pointedly, “can’t be right?”
Lance shrugged. “Any of it.”
“Any of what?”
Lance shook his head, but the girl insisted.
“No,” she said. “You got something to say to me, have the guts to say it to my face.”
“All right,” Lance said. He made a motion with his hand like a hammer going up and down. “You look like you suck dick for meth.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed. She was pretty, beautiful even, but her lifestyle was catching up on her. There were bruises around her eyes, faded but they’d been bad a week earlier. The big guy was roughing her up.
Lance remembered the first photo of her he’d seen. She couldn’t have been more than four or five, happy as could be, sitting on her daddy’s knee.
“You don’t need to be with these guys,” he said.
The girl rolled her eyes. “Who are you to say what I need?”
The men she was with were older than her. Lance pegged them at about forty. They wore matching jackets with the emblem of their two-bit gang on it. Lance knew they moved drugs south from Canada. Chinese fentanyl. They sometimes moved Chinese women too, set them up in brothels and massage parlors across northern Montana.
That was what they’d do with the girl. Handjobs for lumberjacks and ranchers. Maybe some extras if it was payday.
She sure was dressed the part, with the dominatrix boots and ‘fuck me’ leather skirt.
But the looks wouldn’t last. The life in her eyes wouldn’t last. These men would hurt her in ways that would never heal.
Not her body.
Not her soul.
Six more months and the spark would be gone from her eyes. Six years, and even they wouldn’t have a use for her.
“You’re coming with me, Sam,” he said to the girl.
Her eyes flashed. She was surprised to hear her name. She wanted to know how he knew it.
“Sam?” the big guy said.
They had their own name for her. Lance knew what that was too. Candy.
“Come on,” Lance said. “It’s time to leave.”
“With you?” she said. “Mister, I don’t know who you are.”
He kept her gaze. He didn’t want to lose her.
“You know who I am, Sam,” he said.
She looked at him. He knew she knew. There was no one else he could be. No one else was coming for her. Ever. This was it. This was the cavalry.
She looked from Lance to the big guy, then to the big guy’s friend lying on the floor with his hand on his nose, a river of blood flowing from it.
“Knock his teeth out,” she said.
The big man charged like a bull. Lance ducked, letting him drive his fist straight into the brick wall. He yelped in pain. Lance grabbed his wrist and bent it back until he felt the snap.
He wanted to kill the man. The thought of it flashed through his mind. It would be so simple. A yank of the neck.
“That’s enough, Lance,” the bartender said.
Lance let the man drop to the floor. He fell hard and clutched his wrist in agony. His buddy lay next to him, so much blood coming from his face he was going pallid.
The girl just stood there, watching it all, speechless.
Lance looked at the bartender apologetically.
“I don’t want to hear it,” the bartender said.
Lance turned to the girl.
“You’re coming with me,” he said.
“Uh, uh,” she said, shaking her head.
The big guy tried to get up and Lance raised his foot and brought it down on his face. The man collapsed, unconscious.
The other guy made to move and Lance said, “You want to join him?”
The man shook his head and Lance turned away, then, thinking better of it, swung back and kicked him in the face too.
The bartender spoke again. “Lance, get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”
Lance reached into his pocket and put some cash on the bar, about enough to cover the damage, which he figured was fair. He picked up his sunglasses and clipped them back on the neck of his shirt.
He looked at the bartender, who was wearing an ACLU t-shirt from a campaign a few years back protesting the death penalty.
“I thought you liberals all had bleeding hearts,” he said.
“Fuck you,” the bartender said.
“Fuck me?”
“You’re a dead man, Lance. I don’t care where you served. These guys are going to gun you down in the street.”
Lance looked down at the two unconscious bodies. They didn’t look like they’d be causing him trouble any time soon.
“I guess I’ll have to take my chances” he said.
He turned to the girl.
“I don’t care if I have to carry you. You’re coming with me.”
3
Sam got into Lance’s pickup without a word.
He climbed in next to her and cracked the window.
He had a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard and lit one. He offered them to Sam but she ignored him.
He fired up the engine. It was a cold night and he turned the heat on full. Ice covered the windshield and he grabbed the scraper and got back out.
When he returned, Sam was smoking one of his cigarettes.
They pulled out of the parking lot and headed north. There was a McDonald’s and he asked if she was hungry but she didn’t answer.
This was her town. Beulah, Montana.
Lance had been coming for a few weeks, keeping tabs on her, getting to know her life. She’d been easy to find. She spent her time in bars, pool halls, sleeping in until four in the afternoon in a cheap apartment with her scumbag boyfriend.
Lance had seen her getting high in the parking lot behind the drugstore. He’d seen her running out of the apartment at four in the morning with blood on her face. He’d seen her twist an ankle on a dance floor wearing seven-inch stilettos.
He kept his distance, but saw everything.
They passed the motel Lance sometimes stayed at and crossed the bridge over the Kootenay River.
The road from her town to his was windy. It wove through a steep mountain pass next to the river. Dense forest covered the slopes on both sides. An hour tops and they’d be at his place unless the snow caused a road closure. It looked like the first big storm of the season.
“Can I ask where you’re taking me?” Sam said about ten minutes out of town.
Lance hadn’t thought too far ahead. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do. All he knew, what he’d decided, without speaking to anyone or asking Sam her view on the matter, was that she was headed down a bad path.
Drugs.
Crime.
He was probably right.
“I told…”, Lance said, before stopping.
“You told what?” she said.
Lance took a long drag from his cigarette and threw the butt out the window.
Sam did the same and leaned back in her seat.
“You’re kidnapping me,” she said.
Lance shook his head. “I’m not kidnapping you.”
“Then let me out of this truck.”
“Here? In this weather?”
“So I’m not free to leave?”
“Not here.”
“That’s kidnapping.”
He shook his head again.
They drove another few minutes and she said, “So that’s it? No explanation? No discussion. You’re just going to clam up?”
Lance cleared his throat. “I guess you already know who I am,” he said.
“Know who you are? I never met you in my life.”
“You saw me outside your apartment.”
She didn’t say anything.
“And in the bars where you and your idiot boyfriend hung out.”
“I saw some creepy dude dressed like what’s his name from Top Gun.”
“Tom Cruise.”
“No, not Tom Cruise. The other guy.”
“Iceman?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What?”
“Iceman?” Lance said.
“You don’t like Iceman?”
He drove on, taking the curves faster, letting the truck swerve.
“Calm down,” she said.
“I am calm.”
“You sure hate Val Kilmer.”
Lance sighed. “You never said anything to your boyfriend about me.”
“I didn’t want to give him another reason to mess me up.”
The snow got heavier. The road might have been closed behind them.
“Lucky we got out of town when we did,” he said.
At the top of the pass, about halfway between the two towns, was a gas station and motel.
“Maybe we should stop,” Sam said.
Lance had been thinking the same thing but her saying it made him reconsider.
“We’ll press on,” he said.
She looked out the window at the brightly lit restaurant. It was late, maybe ten. He thought she was getting hungry.
“Press on where?”
He didn’t answer.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’ve got a soundproof room in your basement. You’re going to keep me there.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Like that movie. Come in and rape me whenever you’re in the mood?”
“I’m not going to rape you.”
“You better not.”
“I’m not,” Lance said.
“Yeah, well,” she said, pulling her skirt as far over her thighs as it would go.
The heat was on but she was cold. Lance undid his seat belt and took off his jacket.
“Take this,” he said.
She put it over her legs.
When they saw the glow of the town in the valley below he felt her relax.
“I knew your daddy,” he said.
Sam didn’t say anything.
They drove into town and pulled up to a diner on the main drag. Sam followed him inside and they took a booth. They were by the window and could see the road. The snowplows were out in force.
Sam sat there, looking so ferocious Lance made note of where her fork and knife were.
“I suppose you’re thinking I had no right to do what I did,” he said.
She shook her head. She was upset. Him talking wasn’t helping.
“I met you once,” he said.
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“At the funeral.”
Sam gritted her teeth. “Stop talking.”
A waitress came over. Lance knew her. Marlene.
“We’ll have the special and coffee, sweetie,” he said. When she looked at Sam he said, “The both of us.”
Marlene sensed the mood and left them alone. She came back a minute later with two cups of coffee and some sugar and creamers.
Lance took a sip. He wasn’t good at this sort of thing. He didn’t spend enough time with women. He was rusty.
“I told him I’d look out for you,” he said.
Sam pursed her lips. She inhaled deeply.
“I’m sorry,” Lance said.
She said nothing. She was more emotional than he’d expected. He should have known.
The mug of coffee was in her hands. She’d put a decent amount of cream in it but it could still scald.
“The funeral was seven years ago,” she said.
“I know.”
“Seven years.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying you know. You don’t know shit. If you wanted to step in, that was the time. Now you’re too late.”
Sam’s father left her to serve in the army. He’d come back in a pine box with a flag draped over it. That was all the closure she ever got.
Lance knew that was the time he should have come. It would have been messy. There would have been tears. But he could have done something for her then. For her mother.
The mother was dead now too. A car accident. She’d been drunk. She took a father of two out with her.
No wonder the kid was messed up.
“Why now?” she said.
Lance didn’t have an answer for that. He’d been adrift. He’d been drinking too much and fucking around too much. He couldn’t sleep at night.
“I wanted to keep my promise,” he said.
It was the wrong thing to say.
“You,” Sam said, “wanted to keep your promise?”
“I checked in and saw you needed help.”
“I needed help? Oh, come on. You’re the one with the survivor’s guilt. You feel bad because you’re alive and men like my father are dead. You feel guilty and you want to feel better about yourself.”
Lance was surprised. He felt like she could see right through him.
“You want to be able to sleep at night,” she said, “so you come interfering in my life, where you have no business.”
“Those guys you were with,” he said, “they were bad news.”
“Oh, thanks for the tip, Sherlock. You got a team of army detectives working round the clock on that? What gave it away?”
“I want to help you.”
“And what a fine job you’ve done. How am I supposed to go back now? You know what they’ll do to me when they find me?”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“Well everything’s fine then, isn’t it? I’ll quit worrying because you’ll take care of everything.”
Lance didn’t know what to say.
“Those guys will kill you,” she said. “And they’ll mess me up real good too.”
He took a sip of his coffee.
“Yeah,” she said when she saw he had no answer. “Thought so.”
The waitress returned with their food but Sam had lost her appetite.
Instead, she sat and watched Lance eat. He’d lost his appetite too but didn’t know what else to do.
“I thought I could help,” he said.
“You kidnapped me, you psycho.”
“I didn’t kidnap you.”
“You want to help? You know what? Go back to Iraq. Go back to Syria. Do what we spent all that tax money training you to do. Serve your country, asshole.”
He looked down at his plate, shoveling chili methodically, not tasting it.
“Go back,” she said again, louder. “Go back and fight, coward.”
He put his fork down.
“Go back and die there. Like my dad did. Like a real soldier.”
Then she did it. He’d known it was coming. She picked up her mug and threw the coffee in his face. He could have stopped her but didn’t. He owed her that much.
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br /> 4
Deweyville, Montana was a town of about a thousand people. It hadn’t changed much since its founding by miners and frontiersmen in the eighteen hundreds. Visitors could be forgiven for thinking it was a resort, custom-built to look like an old mining town. It still had a hunting and trapping store, a tobacco store, and a massive wooden statue of a lumberjack in front of the courthouse. The town’s largest building was the old headquarters of the Farmers and Merchants Bank, and was such a fine example of the western commercial architecture style that it was on the national register of historic places.
It was all pretty as a postcard, the kind of place people liked to think small towns were still like, nestled in a mountain valley nine miles south of the Canadian border.
Lance pulled his truck up outside a bar called The Eureka and got out. He was followed by Sam. She hadn’t made a run for it yet, which he took as a positive sign.
The bar was fitted out like an old saloon and when the bartender saw Lance she smirked. Then she saw Sam and looked away.
It was a cold night and there was a log fire burning. Lance warmed his hands by it before going to the bar. He pulled up a stool for Sam and sat next to her.
“Still snowing?” the bartender said.
She was blonde, early twenties, looked like she could have been Sam’s sister. She was squarely in the bracket of too young for Lance. At thirty-eight he should have been past hitting on girls like that.
“What time you get off?” he said.
The bartender looked at Sam.
“Don’t worry about her,” Lance said. “She’s my niece.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “I’m not his niece.”
“What are you then?” Lance said.
“I ain’t your nothing.”
“Well she’s not my date,” Lance said to the bartender. “Don’t go thinking that.”
That was something Sam could agree with. “He’s all yours,” she said, holding her hands up like she’d rather put them on literally anything than Lance.
“Well, thanks guys, really,” the bartender said, “but I’ve got plans.”
Lance shook his head. He’d been with her half a dozen times. She didn’t have plans.
Apart from an old guy at the far end of the bar who might have been asleep, Lance and Sam were the only customers.