Montana (18 page)

L
OLA JUMPED
back from the dog and the dead man and crashed into Charlie Laurendeau. They fell together, his weight a sudden surprise atop her. The dog dropped his prize long enough for a wrathful bark, then sank his teeth more deeply into the leg with a rolling, elemental growl. Charlie pushed himself off Lola, eyes on the dog. He pulled his pistol from its holster.

“Are you going to shoot it?” Lola got up, brushing her hands along her torso from shoulder to hips, all the places his body had touched hers.

“Not unless I have to. I just want to get close enough to see who this poor soul is.” He pulled the whippy red willow branches aside. “Oh, dear lord.”

Lola peered around him. The man lay next to an empty nylon backpack, arms flung out, chest caved in, a couple of ribs splintering white through all the red. Blood slimed his hair. His jaw skewed to one side, pink gums gone grey. Lola thought of the outstretched hand, the toothless, ingratiating smile that had greeted her that first evening in Magpie. His hand, now clenched in a useless fist, forming a gun at the funeral. The slurred voice. “Poor Mar’ Alice.” She took a step.

Charlie flung up a hand. “Don’t move,” he said. “I won’t have you messing up another crime scene.”

Lola’s legs wobbled beneath her. She sat down before they gave out altogether.

“What’s wrong with you?” Charlie asked.

She pointed to Frank, to the ring of clean skin around his neck, presumably protected from dirt by his ever-present bandana. Which was not present upon his corpse. “You take that bandana you just bagged to the Crime Lab, Sheriff. You and I both know that Frank’s DNA will be on it. Now we’ll never know whether he killed Mary Alice.”

“Goddammit!” The sheriff’s vehemence chased away the shakes. “Leave it alone. How often do I have to tell you that Frank had nothing to do with that?”

Lola lobbed a quick, defusing softball. “What happened? Hit and run?”

Charlie twisted in place without moving his feet and surveyed the road. A tumbleweed cartwheeled across it, riding a skiff of grit shoved along by the wind. The road crested the prairie swells, rising and falling, disappearing over each ridge and reappearing at the top of the next.

“What are you looking at?”

“Not at. For. Skid marks. But I don’t see any. Not that I expected to.” He squatted and trained his eyes on the ground at their feet. Lola followed his gaze as it swept quadrants from Frank’s body to the road. “Look, there. In the mud by the ditch.” He pointed to a muddle of wide footprints with the pointed toes common to the boots everyone seemed to wear. “Look at all those different sizes. I’m seeing three, four people, minimum. Kids, likely.”

“How do you figure kids did this?”

“I forget you’re not from here. Come on. I’ve got to call this in. Try to step in your own footprints back to the car. I’ll wait here for the ambulance—and until Old Man Frazier comes and gets his damn dog. Maybe he can get you back to Mary Alice’s.”

“Ambulance? Sheriff, I think he’s past help.”

“Standard procedure.”

She followed him back toward the car, concentrating on placing her feet in the flattened places in the grass. She stopped in front of the ditch, not sure she could jump it without adrenaline. “What does my not being from here have to do with anything?”

Charlie tucked his gun back in its holster and cleared the ditch without visible effort, his ungainly body suddenly graceful. He turned and held out his hand. Lola bent her knees and jumped, grabbing for his hand in midair. “This road,” he said, “it goes to the rez. The boundary’s just over that hill.” He opened his fingers and her hand fell from his.

Lola flexed her fingers. “So?”

A magpie swooped into the willows, its gaudy black-and-white plumage an affront to the dusty leaves. Another landed nearby. The birds turned their heads this way and that, assessing Frank’s body. They chattered across the distance, their bold enthusiasm rebuking Charlie’s bitter monotone.

“They probably saw him walking.” There was something wrong with the sheriff’s voice. Lola thought back to her conversation with Wilson, how Wilson had said Johnny and Frank were cousins. And then Charlie, when he’d interviewed her after Mary Alice’s death, called Johnny “some long-lost cousin.” So somehow Frank and Charlie were related.

Charlie opened the car door and reached for the radio.

“Wait,” said Lola. “I still don’t get it.”

He slid into the car and she walked around and got in beside him. The car was hot from the sun and he turned on the ignition and lowered the windows. “People see an Indian headed into town, no matter how he’s getting there, they’ll figure he’s going there to drink—and that he’s got some money on him. Kids roll them for money, or sometimes just for fun. It happens. Frank’s had more than his share of it. That’s how he lost his teeth. Bum-stomping, they call it. Brave-stomping, when it’s an Indian guy. Some fun, huh? But these kids went overboard. They must have been pretty hopped up.”

“Jesus.” Lola tried to ignore the tiny, shameful wriggle of relief at the knowledge that Frank’s death at least had a reason, however unpalatable. Not like Mary Alice’s. “At least you have an idea who did it.”

“Oh, I’ll figure out quick enough who beat him up. But I already know who got him killed.”

“Who?”

He curled his fingers and drove his hand into the dashboard.

“Me.”

S
HE HAD
to ask three times before she pulled an explanation from him.

“Everybody thinks that homemade bomb his Humvee hit left Frank retarded. He was brain-damaged all right, but it didn’t mess with his intelligence. Just his speech, and some coordination. He understands things just fine. But everybody looked past him. That made him perfect.”

“For what?” Even as she spoke, Lola thought of her own reaction to Frank, the way she looked quickly away. Charlie was right. People didn’t want to see him.

“Somebody’s running quite the smuggling operation on the rez.”

“I know. Wilson told me.”

“He thinks it’s just booze, maybe a little meth. Same-old, same-old. But things are changing, getting bigger fast. Not sure the FBI’s let Wilson in on just how fast. God forbid they should tell people on the rez about the shit rolling downhill toward them. You saw Judith in that cell the other day. Multiply that scenario exponentially. Usually people die of other things before overdoses get them. Car crashes, mostly. Sometimes they fall asleep smoking, or cooking the stuff, and the house burns down around them. But they die. More and more of them, misery upon misery. And it’s not just on the rez anymore. It’s leaking down into the county. That level of traffic needs foot soldiers. I asked Frank to let it be known that he was looking for money. That’s all it took. He figured out fast who the middlemen were. We could have taken them out months ago. But I asked him to keep after it, find out who the big guns were. And now he’s dead.”

“Do you think Mary Alice was onto the same thing?”

The tight curved muscles at the corners of his mouth bulged. “I think it’s possible. A couple of days ago I let Frank go ahead and make one more run. He told me it was something big. I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, excuse the expression—figure out who’s running this stuff, and get whoever shot Mary Alice, too. Instead, I got Frank killed.”

“And I got Mary Alice killed by hanging around the airport instead of heading straight for Magpie when she didn’t show up,” Lola said.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No more than what you just said about Frank. We’re a pair, aren’t we?”

The hard set of his mouth softened. “That we are.”

“Thank you, Sheriff,” she said. “Charlie.”

“What for?”

“For telling me about Frank. I think it’s the first straightforward thing anyone has told me about what’s going on since I’ve gotten here.”

His lips curved. “You took me down with bear spray and a wine bottle. Figure I’m better off with you on my side.”

They sat for a moment that was almost companionable. Charlie sighed and lifted the radio mouthpiece and pushed a button. The radio buzzed static. “No matter whose fault this all is, we’ve got to deal with it.” He tried the radio again, with the same result. “Huh,” he said. He pulled out his cell phone and hit a couple of keys and spoke after a brief pause. “Hey, Tiffany. What’s wrong with the radio? Well, put it down and talk to me. We need the ambulance out on the reservation road by Old Man Frazier’s place and . . . what?
What?
Where?”

Strangled sounds from the phone.

“Tiffany, calm down. And call somebody, Highway Patrol maybe, or the next county. I don’t care where you get them from, just find somebody. Oh, and get another somebody up here to guard my damn crime scene before Old Man Frazier’s dog pisses all over it. Make sure they know not to let Frazier go wandering around in here on his own, either. I’m on my way.” He dropped the phone and whacked at something on the dash and the siren screamed as the car surged forward, wheels grabbing the pavement in a yawning U-turn back toward town. The hills blurred past, the speedometer needle quivered past ninety, a hundred, Lola’s hands braced against the dash, wind rushing through the window, catching her breath and tearing it from her. She fought an urge to shout with the relief of it all, the exhilaration of activity, the familiarity of rushing toward something happening, even if she had absolutely no idea what it was.

C
HARLIE TAPPED
the brakes as they came into town, rocketing around the lone pickup moving along the street, the quick dodge throwing Lola hard against the door before her seat belt caught. The car turned off the main street and shot past small faded houses that leaned away from decades of wind. It hit the railroad tracks with no evidence that shock absorbers were part of its assembly. Lola came up off the seat and her head knocked against the ceiling. Shrieking brakes competed with the siren as the car careened into a trailer park and stopped in a head-high backwash of dust. Kids spilled like feral cats out of one of the trailers, stumbling away from the cruiser. Charlie held a mic to his mouth.

“Get back here!” he shouted, his magnified voice booming through the park. “You are material witnesses and you could face charges . . .”

They were gone. He dropped the mic. “Hell and goddamnation,” he said. “You stay here,” he said to Lola.

She got out of the car.

The trailer had once been white. Tires sat on its roof. A lunk-headed dog leapt and slobbered at the end of a dragging rusted chain. The wind caught the open trailer door and slammed it shut and yanked it open again. Charlie sidled toward it, gun held high. “Stay here,” he said again to Lola, and disappeared inside. She ran up the steps behind him as he kicked his way through an ankle-deep layer of beer cans on the floor. The yeasty smell of hops and dope and old sweat thickened the darkness. Charlie headed down a hall, Lola crowding close behind. They moved into the bedroom. Stopped.

A boy and girl lay on a bare mattress. The boy fat, shirtless, skin the color of irises in full bloom, a slug trail of saliva across his cheek. Eyes open and unmoving.

“Oh shit, oh dear.” Charlie whispered it like a prayer.

The girl, skinny, hair dark and brittle as Spanish moss across her face. Jeans riding low on bony hips, T-shirt of thin, cheap stuff over braless buds of breasts. A flutter between them. Lola fell to her knees and shoved the girl onto her side, forcing her finger through stiff lips, prizing apart clenched teeth.

“What the hell are you doing? Stop touching things.”

“Help me, you idiot,” Lola hissed. “Can’t you see she’s alive?”

Charlie crouched beside her. “Tiffany said the ambulance is over in the next town. Guy had a heart attack. It won’t get here in time.”

“Shut up,” said Lola. “Listen.”

Gurgling.

“If that noise stops,” Lola whispered, “we’ll have to give her mouth-to-mouth. Let’s just keep her on her side, keep her airway clear, until the ambulance shows up.” She slid a hand beneath the girl’s shirt and ran it up her spine, spreading her fingers wide to better feel the breaths. Ribs like twigs beneath her fingers. Skin chilled and clammy as supermarket meat. Lola eased her other hand from the girl’s mouth and pulled her hair away from her face.