God, let them see!
“Toothaches never respect weekends, I’m afraid,” the dentist said.
Vicky felt as if her legs had turned to air. She had to hold onto the bannister knob to stop herself from crumbling to the floor. They didn’t see!
“Shut up and keep going,” Frankie hissed into her ear and gripped her arm hard. The gun pushed so hard into her ribs that she gasped with the force of it.
“What brought you in today?” The dentist was walking toward them now, the other man moving like a shadow behind him, something new flooding through their expressions—a mixture of interest, curiosity, and wariness.
“Move,” Frankie hissed again, pushing her forward.
Vicky felt herself propelled toward the wood-paneled door that rose before her like a barrier. The gun was still pushing into her ribs. Frankie’s free hand reached around and slammed against the door, sending it swinging on its hinges out into the gray morning. In an instant they were through the door and scrambling along the sidewalk, Vicky’s boots skipping and sliding on the wet pavement. Frankie’s fingers dug into her arm, pushing and pulling her forward. A pickup drove past on Main, tires whining, the distinct sound of hip-hop bursting through the unopened windows.
They swung around the corner of the building. Frankie pulled her off the curb and down the dirty, uneven tracks of snow and mud carved out by the vehicles parked around the lot. He steered her to the driver’s side of a battered tan pickup, looking back over his shoulder toward the front of the building as he did so. Vicky glanced back. Before he yanked her around, she’d caught the slightest movement, like a disturbance in the air, of someone pulling back from the corner. A wave of weakness and disorientation came over her, as if she were in a nightmare where everything should be familiar. Wasn’t that Main Street? The brick buildings across the street looming into the gray morning? The windows of the shops facing the sidewalk? And yet, nothing was familiar. Nothing was as it should be.
“Get in,” Frankie said, yanking open the door. “You’re gonna drive.”
It was then Vicky realized that the humming noise she’d only half registered was the motor running. Warm air funneled from the cab.
She felt Frankie’s fist clamp hard around her arm. Pain shot through her jaw as her face smashed against the steering wheel. She sprawled onto the front seat, the lump of her handbag digging into her stomach, and fought to right herself, finally managing to pull in her legs an instant before the door slammed shut.
She had a sense of being underwater. She was drowning at the bottom of a murky lake, unable to see anything, except for the dark smudge moving in the rearview mirror that had to be Frankie running around the pickup. She put the gear shift in forward and jammed down on the accelerator. The vehicle jumped ahead and slammed into something hard, pitching her forward. She threw up her hand to stop herself from hitting the windshield. The steering wheel dug into her chest. From far away, like noise traveling underwater, came the sound of crunching metal and breaking glass.
The passenger door flew open. Frankie jumped onto the seat. “I oughtta break your neck,” he said, slamming the door behind him. Then he stuffed the gun under his belt. “Get out of here,” he shouted. “Take the alley.”
Vicky shifted into reverse and pushed on the gas pedal. Whatever she’d hit gripped the front bumper a moment before the pickup rocked free. She swung left, steered around her Jeep and headed down the alley toward the side street, where there would be even less traffic than the handful of vehicles on Main.
“I’m not gonna forget your little trick back there,” Frankie said when she reached the end of the alley. She was aware of him settling back into the seat, removing the gun from his belt, holding it in his lap, pointed at her.
“Where are we going?” Vicky asked. A sharp pain pulsed through her jaw. She strained forward, staring through the windshield.
“Just drive,” the man beside her said.
FATHER JOHN STOOD at the door to Eagle Hall, shaking hands, patting shoulders, trying for an encouraging word, as Joanne Thornton, Don Menlo, Judy Pretty Horse, and the five other members of the education committee filed outside into the cool, moist air that seemed to have settled in. He waited until the last pickup had sputtered to life, backed across the gravel, and pulled out into the driveway that led to Circle Drive before he walked back to the front of the meeting hall and began gathering up the copies of the agenda.
Agenda. He shook his head at the idea that the committee might have actually gotten around to discussing the education programs for the summer. Religious education, high school tutoring, Head Start—everything would have to wait. The committee had huddled together in a circle of folding chairs under puddles of white fluorescent light that flooded down from the ceiling and talked about the murder of another Shoshone at Bates, and Liam Harrison’s front-page article in this morning’s paper about the tribal war on the reservation. Worry, shock, fear—all of it was there in the brown faces turning toward him, black eyes pleading for some explanation, some words of assurance. Four Shoshones had already been murdered and more violence would end . . . where?
After sliding the papers inside a file folder and pulling on his jacket, Father John was locking the door outside when a green pickup squealed into the driveway and skidded to a stop a few feet away. Even before Leonard Bizzel, the mission caretaker, jumped out, Father John had started toward him, all of his instincts switched to alert.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“You heard what happened?” Leonard gestured with his head toward the opened door of the pickup and the sound of a radio voice trailing from inside.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I was just heading home and turned on the radio. Hadn’t even gotten out of the mission when this announcer comes on with a news bulletin.” Leonard leaned closer. “Frankie Montana’s on the run from the police. They tried to arrest him this morning for shooting them Shoshones, and he took off.”
“Took off?” He could hear Ethan Red Bull’s voice in his head. It wasn’t an Arapaho. But if the police went to Montana’s with an arrest warrant, there must be some new evidence to tie him to the murders. The rifle. Dear Lord, the rifle must be Montana’s.
“Jumped out of the window,” Leonard said. “Made it to his pickup and drove off. Cops followed him to Lander before they lost him. Got an alert out, roadblocks everywhere.” The Indian hunched his shoulders and swept his eyes over the ground a moment before he said, “There’s something else.”
Father John waited. He could feel the knot tightening in his stomach. Whatever it was, Leonard didn’t want to tell him.
Finally, the man locked eyes with him again. “The cops say a couple of witnesses spotted Montana at Vicky’s office. They say he’s got her with him.”
“No!” Father John heard someone shout. But it was his voice, he realized. He was the one shouting. Then he was running, boots pounding down the alley, past the church, and across the grounds to the pickup parked in front of the residence. He got inside and jammed the key into the ignition. Stomping on the gas pedal, he shot around Circle Drive, barely aware of the rear tires spinning in the slush and the mission buildings flashing past the pickup’s windows.
27
“ROADBLOCKS!” FRANKIE MONTANA shifted around on the ripped passenger seat of the Ford pickup he’d stolen and tossed his head back. A loud guffaw erupted from his throat that sent a cloud of foul-smelling air across the dashboard.
Vicky kept her fingers wrapped around the rim of the steering wheel and tried not to breathe in the foulness. The stink of evil, she thought, what you read about in science fiction books, some imaginary stink that didn’t actually exist.
“Them cops are putting up roadblocks on every highway in the county, and we ain’t on the highways. What d’ya say? Ain’t that a laugh?” He was gloating now, congratulating himself that he’d directed her through alleys and down the streets of sleepy bungalows with blinds still drawn over the windows. The en
gine clanked and squealed, as if the metal parts were rubbing together.
“What d’ya say?” he demanded.
“You’re brilliant, Frankie.”
“Ha!” He let out another smelly guffaw. The sarcasm had rolled right by him. “Damn right I’m brilliant. And they’re so fucking stupid, all of ’em. Wasting time trying to put them murders on me, just so they can brag how smart they are, and the killer’s out there laughing at ’em, and all of ’em, the killer, too, thinking how I’m the one gonna be sitting in prison. Well, they’re not dumping me in no prison.”
Vicky threw a sideways glance at the man. “If you didn’t kill the Shoshones . . .”
“Bitch!” Frankie slammed a fist into the dashboard. The suddenness and unexpectedness of it, the hard thud of bone and flesh on the inert object made her give an involuntary jump. “I been telling you I didn’t do it. You’re not listening. My own lawyer, and you think I’m guilty like the rest of ’em. If you’d just listened to me, the cops wouldn’t’ve busted my door this morning. Good thing I got my gun right by the bed. You wanna know why you’re here? ’Cause you screwed up, and now you’re gonna help me escape, whether you like it or not.”
“Help you escape? That’s no way to help you, Frankie.” Vicky was trying again for the calm courtroom voice, but she couldn’t pull it off. Instead, the voice she heard was shaky and scared. “You’re acting like you’re guilty. Instead of looking for whoever killed the Shoshones, Burton’s going to spend every moment trying to find you. We should turn around, go back, and . . .”
“Shut up!” He was leaning forward in the seat now, turned toward her, the gun bobbing up and down between them. “You had any good ideas, I never heard ’em. All I heard from you was, ‘Get another lawyer,’ and ‘I don’t care if you rot in prison.’ ”
All true, Vicky was thinking. A part of her had decided that Frankie Montana was guilty. She should have found him another lawyer. Not Samantha Lowe with the eager sheen in her eyes. An experienced lawyer who would have believed in Frankie and argued with Burton over every piece of circumstantial evidence that he came up with, thrown up enough stumbling blocks and enough alternate scenarios about what might have happened out at Bates to make it impossible to charge Frankie, instead of sitting back and waiting for it to happen, as she had done, content to defend the man after he was arrested. For his mother’s sake, for Godsakes.
Neither one of them spoke. Frankie seemed spent. He leaned his head back on the seat, and for an instant, she feared that he would see the gas needle jumping around empty. She’d noticed that the gas was low when they were still in town. She’d been silently praying that the pickup would grind to a halt. Nothing to do but get out and walk through a neighborhood where someone might see them, wonder who they were—Indians. A man in shirt and jeans—in this cold weather—pulling a woman along, someone might have called the cops. Even if no one had, she could have watched for a chance to get away.
But the pickup had kept clanking and lurching forward, and now they were climbing a narrow, winding road that switched back on itself, the pickup balking at the trackless snow that spilled into the ditches. She couldn’t tell where the road ended and the ditch on her side began. The pines dipped under the wet snow, branches bending into the road and scratching at the sides of the pickup. Every once in a while, she caught sight of Lander below, the gray smudges of smoke rising above the roofs. It was like catching a glimpse of another world. She felt as if she’d been sucked into an alternate universe running parallel to the reality of an ordinary Saturday morning.
In the combination of cold and silence and utter solitude that pressed around the pickup as it took another turn upward, Vicky felt a wave of hysteria coming over her, the scream rising inside her throat. For a moment, she feared she couldn’t hold it back. She forced herself to swallow hard. Breathe, breathe, she told herself. Stay in control. If she became hysterical, the crazy man beside her would also become hysterical. Hysteria was contagious. And if Frankie Montana became hysterical, the gun could go off.
She was barely aware that the pickup had started bucking, little jumps at first, the pines rising and falling outside her window. She gripped the wheel hard, her fingers glued to the plastic, and watched the fuel needle bobbing below empty. The pickup shuddered and seemed to buck into the snowy road.
Frankie sat up straight and turned to her. “What the hell did you do?”
“We’re out of gas,” she managed, automatically bracing herself for the blow, the thud of flesh and bone into her face as she turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed and sputtered, gasping at the last drops of gasoline, then stopped. They were left in a silence so profound that it was like the silence at the end of the world.
“What the hell!” Frankie shouted. “Fucking out of gas! I don’t believe the fucking luck.”
The blow didn’t come. Vicky felt a mild sense of surprise. Her muscles were still tense as she watched the man thrashing around beside her, knocking his fist against the dashboard, flailing at unseen enemies.
After a couple of minutes, Frankie tucked the gun inside his belt. “Get out,” he said. “We’re gonna hike.”
Vicky waited until he’d opened his door and stumbled onto the road before she grabbed her handbag from behind the seat and got out. There was no one around, no sound except for the soft hiss of snow falling off the branches. She could see the blue puffs of breath in front of her, and the breath of the man stomping around the pickup, swinging his arms to keep up the circulation.
Vicky slung the bag over her shoulder. Inside was her cell, which probably wouldn’t work in the mountains, but you never knew. She prayed that Frankie wouldn’t notice the bag and become curious about what was inside. Pushing it back behind her arm, she weighed her options. She could start running down the tracks that the pickup had plowed through the snow and take the chance that he wouldn’t shoot her in the back.
He would shoot her. It wasn’t an option.
She had to stay with him and wait for a chance to try the cell.
“Come on,” he shouted, waving her forward. “It’s around here somewhere.”
It? “What are you talking about? What’s around here?
“A real nice house.” He was smirking at her, arms doing a windmill. “Let’s go.”
Vicky started after him. She understood now. He knew exactly where they were going. He’d had it all planned from the minute he’d forced her into the pickup. They were going to one of the mountain houses that he’d broken into last fall, a charge that she’d gotten dropped on a technicality. She was the one who’d kept him out of jail! And now he was taking her to one of the houses.
It was funny when you thought about it. She felt the hysteria bubbling up again and clamped her teeth together against the laughter that threatened to burst forth, laughter that she knew would leave her weeping helplessly. She focused on planting her boots, one after the other, in the footprints that he was making through the snow.
They must have gone a mile, she thought. Frankie was still ahead, but he’d slowed his pace, walking stiff-legged now, arms hanging like logs at his side. His shoulders were hunched up so far that his head and body looked welded together. He hadn’t said anything for twenty minutes, for which she was grateful. Just breathing, keeping one foot in front of the other—that was enough. It took all her energy. She didn’t need the conversation of a crazy man. The sense of weariness tugged at her legs, making them seem like stone pillars moving beneath her. She was breathing hard, her heart doing double time in her ears. Beneath the layers of her sweater and coat, her skin felt hot and clammy, and yet—this was the surprise!—she felt as if she might be freezing to death.
As they came around another switchback, the road took a steeper pitch upward. Vicky stopped and tried to catch her breath, but each inhalation felt like an icicle stabbing her chest. Frankie was barely moving, nearly bent double into the rising road and swaying side to side, one foot shuffling in front of the other.
He must have spotted the house at the same instant that she saw it, because he veered off the road and started wading through the snow piled around the trees, arms paddling like oars at his sides. And howling out some gibberish that she couldn’t make out, like the howling of a wolf.
Still trying to stay in his footprints, Vicky started after the man. The drifts were deeper among the trees, bunched up in mounds of white powder that looked as light as air but felt like wet cement pulling at her boots as she struggled through. There was more snow here than in town, the air felt colder, and the sun was lost in the leaden sky. Ahead, nestled in a stand of pines, was a two-story house washed in shadows, roof heavy with snow. There was a deadness about the place, an absolute absence of life or activity, as if it had been standing empty for eons, and yet, from what she could see, the house looked well maintained, flower boxes piled with snow at the windows, a fresh coat of gray paint on the siding.
She realized that Frankie had made his way around to the side of the house and was leaning against a door, rubbing and hugging his arms and blowing out huge clouds of breath. She forced herself to keep walking, across the front of the house and around the side. She set her shoulder against the siding a few feet behind Frankie.
“Take off your coat,” he shouted.
Vicky stared at the man.
“You heard me. Get it off.”
She wasn’t sure she had the energy to comply. Her fingers were clumsy sticks trying to push the buttons through the buttonholes.
“Hurry up!” he shouted again.
Finally the top button fell through the hole, then the next and the next. She was still slipping the coat off her shoulders when he reached around and grabbed it, tangling it with the strap of her bag. She staggered back along the side of the house, gasping at the blast of cold air that swept over her as he ripped the coat away. She stooped over and reached for the bag that had fallen into the snow. Her fingers kept sliding off the leather until, finally, she had hold of the strap and managed to drag the bag upward. She was shivering. She struggled to focus on what Frankie was doing. He’d wrapped his right arm and hand inside the front of her coat, letting the sleeves and collar trail down into the snow. Lifting his arm—a thick black club—he smashed it into the corner of the window set in the door. There was a muffled tinkling, like wind chimes, as the pane shattered and collapsed inward, falling out of the frame.
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