by Gwen Florio
“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
Magpie 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.
NIGHT FELL fast and hard. Floodlights appeared beside the road, glaring above a series of roadside campgrounds with travel trailers and RVs and pickup campers sardined into spaces meant for a third their number. The man who’d spoken so crudely of Judith in the café had called her “one of the girls from the trailer.” Lola had thought she might end up knocking at the doors of a trailer park in Burnt Creek. Most towns had one. It hadn’t occu
rred to her there’d be too many to count. A painted plywood sign heralded the town itself. “Burnt Creek. Population 700. Home of the Dinosaurs. 1972 Class-C basketball champs.” Somebody had crossed out Dinosaurs and written in Drillers, sketching a hard hat with an oil company logo atop the cartoon T-Rex that balanced a basketball at the end of one of its tiny, useless arms. Lola thought it impossible that a town of seven hundred people would bring the profusion of neon that lit up the road into Burnt Creek like a Las Vegas boulevard. Lola crawled along with the traffic that backed up three blocks beyond what appeared to be the town’s only stoplight. Lola shielded her eyes against the oncoming headlights. Most of the neon signs turned out to be for motels and, just as Jorkki had warned her, every last one said, “No Vacancy.” There was a camper shell on the back of her pickup. Her tattered old sleeping bag that she’d used far too often in her travels around Afghanistan was back there, along with the newly purchased luxuries of a foam pad and a pillow and down comforter, as well as a plastic tub packed with a lantern and some canned goods—also, the can opener she’d belatedly added after a teasing reminder from Charlie—and a camp stove and toilet paper, standard equipment between September and May for every vehicle in Montana. She didn’t want to have to use any of those things, least of all the toilet paper. She imagined herself crouched by the side of the truck, buffeted by wind and snow, and decided that if nothing else, she’d park next to a twenty-four-hour fast-food place with bathrooms she could bogart. Even though, in her experience, towns of seven hundred people didn’t have twenty-four-hour anything. “But there’s more than seven hundred people here now,” she said to Bub. “A lot more.”
She was already taking mental notes, years of habit kicking in, the frisson of a new place and a new story chasing the fatigue from her bones. People spilled from the door of a bar that looked a lot like a railroad car. Lola squinted. It was a railroad car. She belatedly took note of the name. “The Train,” it said. And, in smaller letters, “Pull One.” She worked it out in her mind and flinched. Pull a train. “Otherwise known as gang rape,” she told Bub. He whined at her tone. The Train had to be a strip bar. She wondered if Judith had ended up in a place like that. Tried to imagine the clientele. She reached below the seat, where she’d stashed the little revolver. “You’ll feel better having it,” Charlie had said. Suddenly she did.
The lights grew brighter still, the street more crowded. She and Bub were in Burnt Creek proper now. Bars, bars and more bars. Lola had yet to see a church. There had to be one, if not several. The longer she lived in Montana, the more she marveled at the way even the most far-flung hamlets harbored a variety of congregations, sometimes all in a row, the Seventh-Day Adventists next to the Presbyterians next to the inevitable Catholic church that had begun as a mission guaranteed to try the faith of even the most sacrifice-addicted cleric. It was almost as if some long-ago law had mandated bars and churches in equal numbers, providing the balance of a Sunday morning recovery from Saturday night’s revelries. Maybe North Dakota was different, she thought.
An American flag, standing stiff in the wind above a frame building, caught her attention, along with the most welcoming sight of the very long day. Homestead County, a sign said. And, below it, a smaller sign: “Sheriff’s Department.” Lola flicked the turn signal and pulled into a parking lot and found her notebook and Judith’s photo from the newspaper. She flipped through the notebook until she came to the notes she’d made about Burnt Creek. The sheriff’s name was Thor Brevik. She’d met just enough sheriffs in her brief time in Montana to know that Charlie’s youth made him a rarity. Brevik was almost certainly one of those leathery-skinned specimens whose tarnished belt buckle from his rodeo days would likely outdo his badge when it came to grabbing attention. She imagined him tall, the beginnings of a stoop, another pale Scandinavian like Jorkki, the hair already so light as to render the transition from blond to white unremarkable. She looked at her watch. It was just before five. No matter what Thor Brevik looked like, if his workload were anything like Charlie’s, he’d be at his desk another hour yet.
CHAPTER TEN
The man in the sheriff’s office wasn’t particularly old. And it was impossible to tell if he was leathery, despite the discomfiting amount of flesh on display. Tattoos from wrist to shoulder wrapped bare arms that bulged like boulders from a denim shirt with the sleeves ripped out and buttons long gone. The visible strip of chest and stomach appeared to be similarly adorned, albeit covered with such an impressive mat of hair—she’d been right about the blond, at least—that it was nearly impossible to make out the designs that twisted like so many snakes through the shrubbery. An inked strand of barbed wire provided the only demarcation between neck and jaw. In some trepidation, Lola shifted her gaze upward. Thor Brevik’s blond curls framed a cherubic face that in no way went with the body below it. His pretty pursed lips parted in a smile of surpassing sweetness. A gold tooth shone. Lola blinked.
“Aren’t you cold?” she blurted, looking at the exposed arms and flesh.
“Wouldn’t be if you’d shut the door behind you.” Something soft and Southern in his voice, a little syrup to flow pleasingly over all those crags.
Lola slammed the door shut. “Sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
He waved her apology away with a hand weighted with silver rings that reached to the knuckle of every finger, including his thumb. Lola saw a skull, a cobra, a Stars and Bars, and one featuring two carved silver women, hands grabbing one another’s ankles, mouths bent to . . . she looked away. Each of the rings stuck up at least half an inch, rendering Brevik’s fist a fearsome weapon.
The tooth flashed again. “Help you?” He’p.
Lola slid her hand into her pocket, ran her finger along the ragged edges of the clipping with Judith’s picture. It seemed obscene to show the photo to this hulking aficionado of girl-on-girl action. If the people of Homestead County had elected this man as their sheriff, the county was rougher than she’d thought, reluctantly conceding to herself that Jan may have had a point.
“Y’all probably want the sheriff, right?”
“You mean—” Lola’s sentences kept stopping before she was finished with them. The final cup of coffee, just before she drove into Burnt Creek, probably hadn’t helped.
The man’s laugh exploded in the small room, ricocheting off the walls, blasting Lola back against the door. She felt for the knob. “You thought I”—Ah—“was the sheriff? That’s a good one. I’m Dawg. This here”—the rings beat a drum solo on an inner door—“would be Thor.”
THOR BREVIK, like Charlie, was still at his desk. All resemblance ended there. Charlie’s style with anyone, whether criminal suspect, stranger in town, or lifelong acquaintance, was to let the other person start the conversation, and also do most of the heavy lifting once it was under way. But Thor came out from behind his desk in a half-crouch, hand extended, talking, talking. “You must be Lola. Thought you’d never get here. Of course, it’s a rotten drive. But we were starting to worry anyway.” He urged her into a chair. Lola twisted. Dawg loomed behind her.
“Told you she’d get here fine. Y’all get acquainted now.”
Thor flapped a hand as the door to the outer office was closing behind Dawg. “Don’t forget, we roll at seven tomorrow, Dawg.” He turned back to Lola. “I’ve been listening to the weather station all day, figuring you might run into snow. A front’s supposed to blow through any time now. But it sounded like clear sailing all the way for you. How about some coffee? You’re not one of those people who can’t drink it after noon, are you? I can’t imagine you are, not in your line of work. You reporters are the only people I know who drink as much coffee as cops. Take our local gal, Susie Bartles. I swear she goes through a gallon a day. Says she drinks a cup at bedtime to help her sleep. Sugar? Cream? Powdered is all I’ve got.”
“Black is fine.” When he brought the coffee to her, his back remained bent as though in a bow. But whatever was wrong with his back, the rest of T
hor Brevik was just fine. More than fine. Lola thought of old movie posters, the square-jawed guy in the white hat, one arm curled around the waist of a little lady who stared adoringly into his handsome face. Lola yanked her own stare away, fearful that some adoration of her own might have crept into it. “How’d you know who I am?”
“Why, your sheriff, of course.”
Lola choked on a mouthful of java so strong it put her own muscular brew to shame. “Charlie?”
Thor swung his arms behind him and hoisted himself up onto his desk. He wore the belt buckle she’d expected, showing a bull flinging its hind feet high in the air, a cowboy balanced improbably on its back. “He called to let me know you were coming. Told me to keep an eye on you. Burnt Creek can be hard on new folks.”
She could have sworn he winked. She raised the mug to her lips. With anyone else, the long sip would have been a delaying tactic, a way to keep the person talking. But Thor Brevik didn’t need tactics to keep talking. “It didn’t used to be this way. Time was when we were mostly just a bunch of dirt farmers barely hanging on. Now you’ve got folks who’ve been here their whole lives taking vacations in places like Paris. Coming back all prissy and perfumed. And the likes of the people showing up looking for work—well, they’re from whatever the opposite of Paris is, I suppose. Your Sheriff Laurendeau is right to worry.”
My sheriff? Lola stopped herself from saying it aloud. What in the world had Charlie said? She took another sip and looked at the clock. A half hour had flown by. She wondered how long it would take her to find a place to settle for the night.