by Gwen Florio
Lola hoped Dawg wouldn’t be in the office. She saw him again on his barstool at the Sweet Crude, head thrust over the bar, trying to nuzzle Poke-a-hotness’s tangerine breasts as she kept a professional but still profitable millimeter beyond reach. Lola wondered if she should tell Thor about seeing Dawg there. And she wondered how he’d react if she did.
“I JUST don’t see how this is going to do any good.” Lola ran her thumb across the top of the photos filling the shoebox on Dawg’s desk. Even Charlie, a one-man sheriff’s office, had put all of the department’s mug shots online. But Homestead County apparently had yet to enter the digital age. “I mean, he wore one of those cold-weather masks.”
“Look anyway,” Thor said. “Maybe something will trigger a memory. The kind of coat, the detail on a collar, something like that.”
Lola looked, spreading a handful of photos out before her. Hard-eyed men glared back. White men, black men, Asians, Hispanics, Indians, the most extensive array of color she’d seen since arriving in the West. She said as much to Thor.
“The patch brings them in from all over the country. We’ve even got foreigners, people from countries I’ve never heard of. All of those Stans. Before this fracking business started, it took years to fill up a shoebox of mugs. Now, seems like we start a new one every few months. Only person who likes it is Charlotte. ‘Buy another pair of shoes,’ I tell her. ‘We’re running out of space.’ ”
Lola stacked the first batch of photos and turned them facedown and selected more. Oil and grime darkened some faces. Others sported black eyes, split lips, open cuts along their cheekbones. “What’d they do?”
“Those you’ve got there? Assault, mostly. A few rapists, maybe a negligent homicide or two. We don’t much get child molesters. Used to be kids could ride their bikes all over town without worrying about anything, but parents are pretty protective these days. Not much opportunity for perverts—at least, the ones of that variety—here. I didn’t give you the drunks. You’d be here forever. You keep looking at that bunch. I’m going to go in my office, make some phone calls about that girl, shake the bushes a little, see if anything falls out.” He closed the door behind him.
Lola flipped through more photos. Bub, who once again had accompanied her into the sheriff’s office, lay down across her feet. Thor’s voice came muffled from the other side of the door. She leaned toward it, straining to hear. Cold air slapped her face.
“Y’all good and comfortable at my desk?”
Dawg loomed over her. Bub jumped up. Lola forced herself not to slide back in the chair. “The sheriff wanted me to look at some mug shots. This seemed like the best place.”
“Heard you got yourself beat up.” The tooth glinted amid his smile.
“I didn’t get myself beat up. Somebody made a choice to attack me.” Lola pulled her attention away from his tattoos, assessing his general build, studying—as Thor had suggested with the mug shots—the detail of his collar. All she remembered about the man who’d hurt her was that he was big. Dawg was pretty big. So were a lot of men. Still. She smoothed Bub’s hackles, trying to settle herself as well as the dog.
“I saw you at the Sweet Crude,” she said.
“Saw you, too. Odd place for a woman. Not so much for me. So maybe I’m the one ought to be asking you the questions.” A flash of intelligence beneath the corn pone. Lola had taken for granted Dawg might be dangerous. Smart, too—that was something she hadn’t considered.
“I didn’t ask you any questions,” she parried.
“But you got ’em. That’s a fact. So fire away.” The door opened behind Lola. She wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or sorry for the interruption.
“Dawg. You’re here. Good. I need to take some air, wake myself up after that night I had. Lola, why don’t you come with me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Lola feared that Thor’s reference to taking some air meant going for a walk. Even back in Magpie, she’d felt like she’d had enough cold to last a lifetime. Burnt Creek had, just as Jorkki had promised, made her look fondly upon Magpie’s ten-below, no-wind days. Sure enough, as she and Thor left the shelter of the office, a gust whipped around the corner of the building and grabbed at her, nearly pulling her off balance. By the time she’d regained her footing, Thor was holding open the door to his cruiser. “Thank God,” she said as she clambered in. “Where are we going?”
“I take a little drive around town every day, just to make sure everything’s in order. Well, at least as much as anything is in order around here these days. Seems like every day or so there’s something new. I feel a powerful need to keep tabs on all of it. Someday, we’re going to level out, and wherever we are then, that’s going to be normal. I want to get an inkling of what that’ll feel like.”
The cruiser crept along the main drag as he spoke, enveloped in clouds of exhaust from tanker trucks, trucks hauling flatbeds, dump trucks, and trucks whose purpose Lola couldn’t begin to fathom. Bub sat in the cruiser’s backseat, quivering nose glued to a window rolled down a quarter inch. The smell of diesel permeated the car. “It stinks,” said Lola.
“It’s like this at all hours. Come down here at four in the morning and it’ll look—and smell—the same.”
Lola remembered the night she’d spent in the truck just two nights before, the unbroken rumble of traffic, and believed him. But her mind was still back in his office. “I know you told me why Dawg works for you,” she said. “But I don’t think you told me how you found him. Did you go looking for somebody who’d scare half the people in town to death?”
Thor threw back his head and laughed. “You know, I’ve spent so much time around him I’ve almost forgotten the effect he has on people. He found me, more like. I was trying to bust up a fight one night at The Train. Whole bunch of guys, greenhorns versus roughnecks, all beating and banging on each other. I’d bust up two of ’em and three more would jump in. And it’s not like I can just call for backup. The closest is the next county over. Anyhow, I was about to call it quits, just get myself out of the door in one piece and hope the lot of ’em didn’t kill one other when Dawg wades in from someplace in the back of the room, throwing one guy after another out of the way, hollering to everybody to settle down and mind the sheriff. Miracle of miracles, they did. I hired him on the spot. Long as nobody ever asks for the background check, we’re fine.”
“What’s in the background check?”
“Little of this, little of that. He’s been a busy boy. Nothing too recent, though, and nothing that gave me pause. In fact, in a way it comes in handy. Let’s just say he has some specialized knowledge.” He changed the subject. “I want you to pay close attention these next few blocks.”
“To what?”
“You’ll see.”
Lola hoped she would. People liked to say things like that to reporters, set little traps for them, show them they weren’t as smart as they thought they were. Lola usually lost those games. She braced herself to lose again. The stream of trucks, the cruiser bobbing in its midst like a black-and-white cork, picked up some speed. They began to pass houses, large frame ones with deep eaves and generous porches. The trees in the yards, bare now, were substantial, and Lola thought that in the summertime when they leafed out and flowers grew in what were surely beds beneath the snowdrifts, this part of Burnt Creek must be welcoming, gracious. Except maybe for the trucks. “Is that it?” she asked Thor. “All the traffic noise and stink ruins it for the people who live here?”
He made a dry noise in the back of his throat. “Close. We keep our windows closed here, even in the summer, because of it.”
Lola felt inordinately pleased. She hadn’t flunked the test, even if she’d only gotten a B.
“In a way, the noise and traffic—or at least, what comes with it—is what ruined it for the people who used to live along here,” he said.
“Who lives here now?”
Thor didn’t answer, letting her figure it out for herself. She stared at the houses
. Some had gone shabby, paint faded, the walks caked with packed-down snow or shiny with ice. She’d lived in northern climes just long enough to know that only the worst of neighbors left a walk unshoveled and slick, ready to send the unwary sprawling with a sprained ankle or worse. She opened her mouth to say as much, then looked again. “I see it!” She pointed to the multiple mailboxes beside each door. Even from the street, she could see the layers of stickers on each, indicating a regular turnover of renters. “Where’d the owners go?”
Thor’s smile was no more pleasant than his chuckle. “Wherever their money took them. Imagine how many people you can pack into houses this size, how much you can charge in rent. Folks who lived here figured out quick how to cut a fat hog. They sold for five times what they paid, or rented out at New York prices. Some of them went across the state to Fargo, others all the way to Minneapolis. The women especially couldn’t wait to get out. These are nice houses, sure, but we’re a long way from anywhere here. It’s hard on people, especially women. Of course, it’s a lot harder now. Look what happened to you.”
“And DeeDee.”
“And DeeDee. Of course, she put herself in harm’s way. Doesn’t excuse it,” he said, as though sensing Lola’s ready objection.
“Charlotte seems happy here.” Lola told herself maybe she’d imagined the chill between the two. Thor dispelled that notion.
“Charlotte’s happy anyplace she can get a meal.”
Lola hadn’t been sure what to make of Thor Brevik. Now she knew. “That’s cruel.”
“It’s fact. You of all people should respect that. Besides, it’s a fact I’ve learned to live with.”
No, you haven’t, Lola accused silently. If you had, you wouldn’t be so hurtful. But then she thought of the way Charlotte fussed over her husband, despite his public put-downs. Lola wondered if that’s why Charlotte surrounded herself with the knickknacks and dolls, cheerful silent figures who beamed nothing but approval as she bustled about the house, taking care of a man who seemed to have stopped caring for her long ago. Lola thought that, in Charlotte’s place, she might have bounced a Hummel off Thor’s head when he made one of his cracks. For sure, she mused, she herself didn’t understand marriage. Yet another reason to keep things with Charlie at arm’s length.
The turn signal clicked, interrupting her thoughts. Thor swung the car left. The houses grew smaller, bungalows in treeless yards. A mobile home park, three or four cars pulled up in front of each trailer. One of those campgrounds, campers packed in bumper to hitch. “No vacancy.” Then, without warning, prairie. The road began to climb, working its way up a bluff.
“Where are we going now?”
“To the old buffalo jump.”
“What’s that?”
“Indians used to spook whole herds of buffalo, stampede them over the bluff. They could live for weeks off the ones they killed, staying put until they’d smoked all the meat, cured the hides. Hardly left anything. Then we came along and it’s almost like the Indians were never here. I wonder how these oil companies are going to treat us when the boom’s over. If they’ll put things back the way they were or just move on and leave all their junk behind. If their stuff will cover ours so completely that nobody will ever realize we were here. It’ll be like things went straight from the Indians to oil and skipped us over entirely. Makes a man doubt his own existence.” He pulled the car into a parking area at the edge of the bluff and set the parking brake.
“Why, Thor.” Just when she’d slotted him neatly into the Neanderthal category. “You’re a philosopher.”
He turned to her with a grin whose warmth stirred an embarrassing heat within her. Not for the first time, Lola cursed a mischievous libido entirely too often enthralled by the least appropriate of men. She forced herself to focus on the town below. Beyond it, rigs stretched to the horizon. Another town—or at least, something like one—lay between the rigs and Burnt Creek proper. It looked like a giant self-storage business, row upon row of prefab units gleaming even whiter than the tired midwinter snow. “What’s that?”
“Man camp.”
Lola started to count the rows, but gave up after she got to fifty. “How many people live there?”
“Hundreds for sure. Could top a thousand. Maybe even more people than in all of Burnt Creek. They’ve got mess halls, gyms, everything in there. Even a fast-food place. No alcohol allowed, so they come into town for that. It’s close enough that even in this weather, those guys can walk to the bars in about ten minutes. Think about it. That many men, packed together. Working like dogs day and night, drinking even harder on their time off. No women to civilize ’em. No wonder they get rammy, beat up people, worse. Makes you wonder if maybe they didn’t have the right idea in those old mining camps with their red-light districts. That probably helped keep a lid on things.”
“And now you’re philosophizing again,” Lola teased, then changed the subject before he could flash another one of those grins at her. The last thing she needed was that sort of distraction. “Do you think the man who jumped me is down there?”
The question chased any remnants of a smile from Thor’s face. “Could be. Probably. And the one who beat that girl to a pulp in the snow, he’s probably there, too. Tell you what.”
“What?”
“Pretty much any trouble we’ve got in Burnt Creek, I’ll guarantee you that man camp is its source.”
There it was, she thought. Her opening to ask about the trailer. But true to form, Thor was still talking.
“Now, Miss Lola.” A smile to let her know the formality was affectionate. “From talking to your Sheriff Laurendeau, and from watching you work—The Train! Good heavens above—I know that you like to look around in unsavory places. So if you’ve got a notion to go wandering into that man camp, I’d strongly advise against it. Or at least, not without me right there with you.”
First he’d told her the man camp was too well guarded for prostitution. Now he’d warned her against going into it. Lola held up her bruised hand, reminding him of the injuries she’d so recently suffered. “The last thing I want,” she said, “is any more trouble.”
She was the kind of liar who looked a person straight in the eye, unblinking. She just hoped Thor was as bad a judge of prevarication as she was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Thor threw the car in reverse, the view of the subject at hand vanishing as quickly as it had arisen. Lola cast a final, dismissive glance at the monochrome vista. “What a wasteland.”
Thor hit the brakes. “Wasteland? Take another look.”
Lola looked. Town, rigs, prairie. White snow, grey sky. Wasteland, she thought, but decided against saying it aloud again. “It’s very . . . flat.”
“Not really.” Thor’s hand undulated across the windshield, tracing faraway bluffs and cutbanks, the washes and coulees. “We don’t make it easy for people here. Don’t slap them across the face with landscape the way those mountains do over in your part of the world. If you live here, you’ve got to develop a taste for subtlety.”
Implying, Lola thought, that she didn’t have it. She took a reluctant second look. “Maybe summertime improves things.”
That gaze again, burning through her. Lola fiddled with the heater knob, turning it down.
“Summertime! It’s fine, but you need to be here in spring. This place goes green as Ireland.”
Lola had been to Ireland. She’d also spent the previous summer in Montana, which she couldn’t imagine was much different than North Dakota, and had learned that the word green held considerably less intensity there than Ireland, more olive than emerald. She made a noise of vague assent, hoping to get them moving. But Thor was on a roll.
“And then the lupine comes. We go from Ireland to, oh, I don’t know. Whatever’s blue. The sea, maybe. Nothing but waves of blue flowers, as far as you can see. I grew up here, spent my whole life here, and still I never get used to it.”
“A philosopher and a poet,” Lola said, despite herself.
But. Lola wondered how she’d feel if Charlie took a crime victim for a ride in his car for a little tour of the town that ended in a kiss. If maybe that’s how he’d met the woman who apparently had borne his child. Lupine, my ass, she thought. When Thor had first mentioned it, she hadn’t thought of the flower at all, but of the word’s alternate meaning. Wolflike.
“Then the lupine comes,” he’d said, and for just a moment, she’d pictured a wolf, eyes fixed upon her and mouth open, the gleaming teeth, the lolling tongue, loping toward her across the prairie.
LOLA SCRAMBLED out of the cruiser before Thor could bestow another not-quite-kiss. “I’ve got to go the library for some research before my meeting tonight,” she said, refusing his offer for a ride back to the house. It would be less embarrassing, she’d reasoned to herself during the ride back to the sheriff’s office, to look up Charlie on one of the library’s computers than it would to use her laptop at the house, where Charlotte, ever attentive, hovered. Besides, Dawg’s remarks that morning had piqued her curiosity. As a county employee, his hiring would be a matter of public record. She could get his full name, Google the “little of this, little of that” that the sheriff had hinted a basic background check would reveal. She waited until the door to the sheriff’s office had closed behind him, and went to the main county office, where she waited for a clerk to tear her eyes away from her computer.