Montana (28 page)

W
HICH WAS
all she did that first hour, trying to get the hang of steering—“No,” she reminded herself. “Reining”—laying the leather against his neck with varying degrees of firmness, astounded every time at the immediacy of his response, from a long looping turn when she touched the reins low on his neck, to a spin that unseated her when she put them high and hard just inches behind his ears. It was the first of a half-dozen falls that day, and the only thing she could say about those was that she greatly improved her skill at getting back onto him, so that he finally abandoned his antics and stood resignedly as Lola—with increasing stiffness—hauled herself back aboard in preparation for her next fall. The more comfortable she got with the horse, working her way up to a jolting trot, the more he tested her. But gently, gently, and with great equanimity, though always just a little beyond the limits of her ability, forcing her to push herself. Next thing, she thought, as she lifted the reins and touched her heel to his flank, he’d probably try to buck her off.

And so he did, giving an obliging crow-hop, arching his back and then kicking out both back hooves, adding some velocity as she left the saddle, a little outside herself so that she could almost see the perfect backflip described by her body, jackknifing in the memory of some childhood dive, her timing all wrong because she slammed shoulders-first onto the ground, its surface suddenly rock-hard. Then she was back inside herself, gasping, turning her head away as the horse’s nose swam close, outsize and distorted. She shut her eyes and tried to catch her breath, knowing that with oxygen would come pain.

She tried her voice—“Always get right back on”—but didn’t like the sound of that. Not one bit. She looked up at the stirrup. It seemed very far away, the horse’s back farther still. She wanted to lie back down in the dirt. She wanted to drag herself into the cabin and go to bed. She wanted to hobble to Mary Alice’s truck and start it up and drive to the airport. She wanted to take enough sleeping pills to get her through the subsequent flights to Kabul, and then she wanted to find a fixer who would take her back to the border highlands where the people she met would be straightforward in their hatred and open about their reasons for shooting people and leaving their corpses staring open-eyed on rocky hillsides. She wanted to understand things again. She didn’t understand anything in this new place and at that very moment, the main thing she didn’t understand was why she had to get back on that goddamned horse.

“Come here,” she said to him, and when he stepped closer, she grabbed a fistful of his mane and used it to pull herself to her feet, and then she hitched along his side until she came to the stirrup and raised her foot and jammed it in, the horse standing frozen as she worked her way crablike onto his back. She wished, achingly, for Mary Alice; wanted to see her lean against the corral fence, shake all of that blond hair out of her face and say, “Well, I’ll be damned, Bub-ette. You did it. Surprised yourself, didn’t you? Now what?”

Now what, indeed. Lola took the reins and latched onto the horn in preparation for a repeat performance, but the horse apparently had had enough because he moved serenely forward. They made a final circuit of the corral, Lola nudging him into a brief trot and even—breathlessly, both hands wrapped around the horn—a few steps of a slow, rocking canter. Spot slowed of his own accord. Lola sighed, wishing, almost, that she’d fall again, knock herself completely senseless, anything to get her past the fact that despite all the progress it felt as though she’d made, she wasn’t one bit closer to figuring out what had happened to Mary Alice.

S
HE LAY
that night in a tub full of water as hot as she could bear it, every so often lifting a blister-pink limb free of the cloud of steam that hung above the water, inspecting the bruises blooming yellow and purple along her skin. The color reminded her of the dead boy she’d seen in the trailer. She wondered briefly about Joshua’s sister and then sank into the water again and groaned, so exhausted and sore that when the phone rang it took her three rings to answer it.

She looked at the clock. It was eleven. She wrapped a towel tight around herself and put her ear to the phone and braced for some sort of threat. The voice on the other end was anything but furtive, spilling from the receiver and filling the room. Bub growled.

“Wicks! Bet you’d forgotten all about me. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Sanchez. It’s”—she calculated—“one in the morning there. What are you doing up?”

“I’m back on nights. This spoon you sent me. Pretty good prints, actually. Nice job.”

Lola put her hand to Bub’s muzzle and lowered herself onto the sofa. “Shut up.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Sanchez, please. Was there a match? What did he do? Kill somebody? Any record of him buying a rifle? An M-16, maybe? Or an AR-15? That’s the civilian version, right?”

“Hold up, hold up. Who are we talking about here?”

“Johnny Running Wolf. He was tight with Little Fanny Fantonelli—Vince Junior. I think maybe he took out Mary Alice. Arranged it so it would happen while he was in Denver.”

The night’s stillness closed in, a dark wave of silence flowing toward her, breaking against the yellow island of light cast by the lamp. Lola fell onto the sofa and reached out her hand as though to push it away, afraid that somehow the phone had gone dead, that Sanchez had vanished into it, along with the answers she so badly needed.

“That may well be,” he said. Her heart thudded. “But here’s another scenario.”

The towel fell away as Lola bounded to her feet, breathing hard, head spinning, reaching for something, anything in what Sanchez was saying that she could catch and hang onto, to help her make sense of the impossibility he had just described.

They spoke a few moments more. She hung up the phone and stared into space. Then she dialed again. “Charlie?” Once again, she held the phone away from her ear. “Yes, I know what time you start work in the morning. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t be calling if it weren’t really important. I need you to meet me at the cafe tomorrow. Bring your cuffs.”

Bub lifted his ears at the renewed blast from the phone. Lola waited until the sheriff finished. “I’ve figured some things out,” she said, and treated him to a sample. “There’s more. Please trust me on this one.” Her smile lingered even after Charlie hung up on her.

“That’s the problem,” he’d said before he’d clicked his phone off. “God help me, I do trust you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

L
ola’s fingertips tattooed the Formica tabletop.

The salt and pepper shakers rattled against the ketchup bottle. Except for the blur of fingers, she was motionless, eyes fixed on a space beyond the cafe window. Smoke over the mountains boiled up black. Helicopters buzzed the perimeter, giant canvas buckets swaying like dancers beneath them. Joshua and his coffeepot walked into her field of vision.

“How’s your sister?”

“In rehab,” he said in his characteristic whisper. “Finally. She doesn’t know about Frank yet. It’s going to kill her when she finds out what those so-called friends of hers did to him.”

Lola tried to look as though she were paying attention. She pressed her hand against her shirt cuff, her fingers tracing the reassuring outline of Jan’s digital tape recorder inside her sleeve. She’d stopped on her way to the cafe to borrow it, saying she wanted to dictate some notes for the story, and then practiced with it in the car, draping her arm casually over the wheel and reading aloud from the newspaper. Even when she’d lowered her voice, the recorder picked up the words, muffled but still intelligible. She wanted everything documented, for the story’s sake, and for Charlie’s, too, although she had a feeling he might not approve. She lifted her cup for a refill and looked at the clock.

11:53.

She’d asked Johnny to meet her at noon. Charlie would join them at 12:30. “He’ll spook if he sees us together when he walks in,” she’d insisted, and the sheriff had finally agreed. The room’s sounds came separately. The racket of cutlery on porcelain. Ice cubes crashing against one another in tall water glasses. Lola was back on the battlefield, as on edge in this cafe as in a highlands gully awaiting the opening rattle of rifle fire, focused, ready. As prepared as she ever could be for the moment when all hell broke loose and preparation counted for shit.

11:56.

The door opened. Lola’s hand jerked and a wave of coffee broke over the lip of her cup and shuddered into a puddle. Joshua’s rag flicked. A rancher walked past, earth flaking from his boots in a trail across the floor. “You bunch of do-nothings. What are you doing sitting on your behinds in the middle of the day while I’m out making an honest living?” Chairs scraped to accommodate the newcomer. Lola held out her mug again.

11:58.

When the door opened again, she didn’t look up, not until he slid into the chair across from her. She’d forgotten how big he was, the way he filled the space between her and the rest of the room. She launched the smile she’d practiced. “Johnny,” she said. The first time she’d called him by name.

His hair shone blue-black in the dust-filtered light. “At your service, ma’am. One of those big cinnamon buns,” he told Joshua. “Warm it a little if that’s not too much trouble. I suddenly find myself with a powerful appetite.”

Lola had spent a fair amount of time in front of the mirror working on her smile, and it held. “It’s good to see you.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked. “Or is this business?” His standard opening, but probing, too, just the way he’d done on the phone when she’d called early that morning to set up the meeting. “I’m in the middle of a campaign here,” he reminded her now. “I’m supposed to be over in East Bumfuck talking to the Elks. I had to cancel. Riley chewed my ass.”

Joshua arrived, bearing the cinnamon bun as though offering something precious. It glowed warm and golden, crystalled with frosting, nearly filling a plate.

“Do you actually intend to eat all of that?” Lola asked, her astonishment unrehearsed.

“Two forks,” Johnny said to Joshua.

Lola shook her head. “I’ll have the fruit cup.” She said nothing else until it arrived.

Usually she enjoyed this part, watching them fidget through the silence. On her best days, they broke it first, sometimes blurting what she wanted to hear before she even had a chance to ask. Not Johnny. He stayed where he was, rocking a little on the back-tilted legs of the chair, leveling a steady half-smile at her. She was, she reminded herself, dealing with a pro.

She wondered if Mary Alice had likewise confronted Johnny, confident that she’d gotten the goods, bracing herself for anger made more dangerous by fear of exposure. Mary Alice would have been smart enough to have had that confrontation in public, too, knowing that people—no matter how angry or afraid or embarrassed—generally don’t want those emotions on display for the world. It was an old safety measure and a good one, given that once they cooled down, the subjects of such interviews usually didn’t summon someone with a high-powered rifle and dead aim.

Lola chased her fruit around in its syrup, peach slices swimming like goldfish among the pale, peeled grapes, the scarlet surprise of the occasional maraschino cherry. She lifted the paper napkin to her lips and put it back down, brushing her thumb against her wrist to activate the recorder. She looked at the clock—12:10—and raised her eyes to his; noted for the first time the contacts sliding dark across the irises. “I just couldn’t get over Calgary.”

Johnny attacked the cinnamon bun. “What about it?” he said around a mouthful that filled his cheeks.

Lola speared one of the sickly grapes. “Your having gone to school there. With Vince Fantonelli.”

“Damn. I haven’t thought about Vince in years. Shame about what happened to him. But school—those were the days. We had ourselves some good times.” He threw his head back and laughed, showing that pale throat beneath the cured-hide tan of his face.

12:18.

The cinnamon bun was half-gone.

Johnny moved the plate toward her. “You’ve got to have some of this. Nell’s are the best. But you’ve been hanging around here long enough to know that. Isn’t it about time for you to go?”

Lola pushed the plate away. “And then, going to work with Vince. Getting all tangled up in the mob.”

“My job for Fantonelli Transport was hardly, as you put it, all tangled up in the mob. I was just another lawyer with a good-paying employer. Last I heard, everybody has a right to legal representation,” he said. He dragged his fork across the plate, icing piling up against it like drifts on a snowplow blade.

“Nice that your father put you on the payroll. How much did you get under the table?” She picked up her bowl and put it to her mouth, tipped it and drained the fruit syrup in a long swallow.

12:28.

“My father?”

A final piece of cinnamon bun sat lonely on the big plate.

“Last chance,” Johnny said.

“All yours.”

He ate it, taking his time, swallowing before speaking. “My father. I never knew him. Do you mean my stepdad? He was a pharmacist. I never worked for him, though.”