Montana (33 page)

L
OLA’S LUNGS
burned. She couldn’t see the fire anymore, but she heard it, the stiff swish of taffeta rubbing against itself. Smoke drifted in shreds, obscuring and then revealing the trail. Lola clutched tighter at the horse’s mane and finally chanced a backward glance, caught a glimpse of the bay’s head, lather dripping from its mouth, its eyes rolling white with exertion. Spot lunged up another switchback. The blistering wind scorched their faces, briefly lifting the smoke. Again, Spot stopped. This time, Lola let him. She’d forgotten how the trail came out onto the canyon edge, the way it threaded along the cliff wall until it met the forest beyond. Far below, the cool waters of Two Medicine River taunted her, and then the rifle cracked. Spot spun away from the sound and Lola flew through empty air, soaring so inevitably toward the river that the smash of rock against shoulder and hip came as a shock. She reached out a tentative arm and felt nothing at all. She’d landed at the canyon’s rim.

She rolled toward safety, clawing at the hard earth. The horse’s spotted rump, the color of soot and smoke, newly punctuated with red, disappeared into the trees. Verle’s horse approached, saucer-sized hooves paddling through the loose shale. Verle sat him easily, reins loose in one hand, rifle at the ready in the other.

The big horse stopped a few feet away and Lola looked up, into the rifle’s bore. She rolled onto her stomach and put her hands on the rocks beneath her and pushed herself to her knees. But when she tried to stand her left leg bowed at midcalf and she twisted to escape the pain, fighting to fall away from the canyon edge. She lay still, ignoring Verle, ignoring the gun, ignoring everything but the scarlet intensity of the pain pulsing between the long bones in her calf and radiating through her body, so that the sudden throb in her head, the numbness in her hands, all seemed somehow connected. She flexed her fingers and then slid her hand down her leg, wondering at the way that simple motion drew the pain with it, a line of concentration so fierce she wondered that it remained invisible. She pressed her hand against her ankle.

“Oohhhh.” She pressed harder, getting used to it. She’d need to walk on it. Somehow.

“Got your wings clipped, didn’t you?”

Lola kept her hand on her ankle and rolled her head to look at Verle. Soot shadowed the lines and hollows of his face, throwing the expansive forehead, the beaked nose into high relief, giving it the pitiless appearance of a medieval woodcut. She raised herself onto her elbows and hitched toward a skinny tree that leaned over the trail’s edge, grasping at the rough bark. She hauled herself to her knees.

Verle sat and watched, patting the restive bay to still him.

Lola put one hand over the other and then repeated the motion, hoisting herself by degrees to her feet.

“This should be interesting,” said Verle.

Lola put a little weight onto her left foot and forced a rising moan back into her throat. She planted her right foot more firmly and let go of the tree and dragged a hand across her face, letting it come to rest against her throat. Her pulse jerked, fast and uneven. “I’m fine.” She took a wobbling step and grabbed at the tree. “I’m fine,” she said again.

Verle waved the gun. Lola flinched. “You have an unusual definition of fine.”

Lola watched the gun. She’d had a longstanding bargain with God, and God was letting her down. The more time she’d spent in Afghanistan, the more she figured she’d increased the odds of the inevitable. Fair enough. But she looked at how some journalists had died—beaten, tortured, raped, throats slit with rusty knives or beheaded altogether with several awkward chops—and made her deal: a bullet in the back. “I just don’t want to see it coming,” she’d say during the punchy late-night conversations at the Kabul house when the talk veered in that direction, as it always did. “Quick, clean. One minute I’m there worrying about making deadline, the next minute deadline’s not an issue anymore. I’d leave an editor hanging. Is there any worthier way to go?” A line that brought a raucous laugh and a new round of drinks.

She’d always wondered whether the unlucky ones ever really let themselves admit they were about to die. If they thought the steady gun, the twitchy trigger finger, was just one more bluff. If, in those final few seconds, they regretted the decisions that had led them there. If a job in a suburban bureau would really have been so bad after all. She looked at Verle and looked at the gun and figured she wasn’t ever going to get the chance to find out. She wasn’t even going to get shot in the back. She thought of Mary Alice, saw again the wound on her face, wondered if at the last second Mary Alice had closed her eyes.

Verle lifted the gun.

There was the motion and Bub barking and a shot. Lola fell, twisting her leg yet again. She screamed.

The pain came and came, waves of it, and Lola thought it was a lousy deal that things went on hurting after you were dead. Bub barked again and Verle shouted and Lola saw him juggling the gun that he’d almost dropped when Bub launched himself, sending the shot wild. Lola did a sort of leap and hobble across the trail, dragging herself to the cliff face and then along it, grabbing at the rocks, her back to the drop-off, moving away from Verle as fast as she could, her own searing breaths nearly drowning out the struggle behind her. Another shot cracked and Bub’s snarls changed to a prolonged wail and she looked, once, and saw the dog on the ground and then Bub was quiet; and it was just her own breathing and the sound of the pebbles dislodged beneath her feet, tumbling over the cliff edge and pinging off the rock below.

She stopped.

The gun came up again.

Lola let go of the cliff and stood in the middle of the trail, a foot from the drop-off. She stared hard at Verle, the sight line like a steadying rope.

“Go ahead and shoot,” she said. “And when you’re done with me, go find the horse and kill him, too.”

“I just might.” He brought the gun up again.

Lola ducked.

“Go ahead and shoot,” Verle parroted. “Big talk.”

Lola took a step back. He took one forward.

“It’s not going to work,” she said. “Johnny can do his disappearing act over the border, but you can’t. They’ll get you. You might as well give up now.”

Telling him to quit because she wasn’t ready to, not yet, bargaining as though she were back at a border crossing, habit kicking in, trying to give herself time to think. She put her hand to the knobbed cliff face as though for support, feeling for a loose stone. But the rock was solid. “Just tell me why,” she said. She had to get him talking. “Before . . .”

“Before you get what’s coming to you,” he said agreeably. “You’ve been to my ranch,” he added.

Lola nodded. Keep talking, she thought. Come on.

“Then you know why.”

Lola wondered if she’d figure it out before he shot her. He advanced another step. He was probably forty feet away, entirely too close for comfort.

“I don’t get it.”

“Teaming up with Johnny. Whatever his name was. I didn’t care. He knew how to move drugs. I knew how to hook him up out here. It’s what you might call a win-win. There was more than enough money for both of us. He got to fling his take around, making like he was a serious candidate for governor and I got to bail out the ranch, keep the tribe from getting their hooks into it. They were set to buy it until I outfoxed them. I fixed it up, gave it the care it deserves. Until that friend of yours started poking around. Her bad luck. Now yours, too.”

Lola tried again. “It’s all on Mary Alice’s files. I emailed them to Charlie. And to Jan at the
Express.”

He laughed. “No, you didn’t. Your email was up on your computer. I looked through the file. You didn’t send anything.”

Lola slumped against the rock, trying to look nonchalant. Like she was settling in for a nice long chat with the man who was going to put a bullet or three into her. She slipped her hands into her pockets, hoping she’d shoved the flash drives in there on her way out the door. Thinking that maybe, if he killed her, it wouldn’t occur to him to go through the pockets. That somebody else might; that they’d find the drives, open the files, think to look below the stupid stories Mary Alice had stacked atop the real information. She imagined sitting with Mary Alice on some sort of afterlife barstools. “Poor bastard. Joke’s on him, huh, Bub-ette?”

She slithered her fingers within her pockets in slow, small movements and talked fast. “It’s not going to work. One woman shot dead, maybe you could get away with that. But two? They’re going to look at anybody who had contact with us. That’s a pretty small circle. They’ll look at Johnny, sure, but you’ll be right at the top of the list with him.”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” Verle said, and the hope rose hard in her even as he spoke again.

“You’re going to jump.”

He pulled the trigger.

Lola fell awkwardly, hands still in her pockets. The bullet powdered the rocks in front of her feet. Shards ricocheted around her. Verle stooped and picked up the shell casing, then waited as she freed her hands and went through the manipulations required to bring her more or less vertical again.

“Looking for these?” he said. He held out his hand. The flash drives lay like flattened bullets in his palm. “They were next to your computer.” He flicked his wrist and sent them into the vast gulf below.

Lola let go of the wall and balanced on her good leg. She glanced over the edge.

“Just get it over with,” Verle said. “I can stand here and shoot around you all day, but you’d save us both some time and trouble if you’d just jump. Suicide, fall, it won’t matter. People will believe either one. Anything’s possible.”

“Anything’s possible,” Lola murmured.

She tested a little weight on her bad leg. It was bearable. Just. A sprain, maybe, or a hairline fracture. It would do.

“Go on,” Verle said. He gestured to the edge with the gun. “You go on now. I haven’t got all day.”

Lola lifted her arm. Pulled it back. Quick windup, theatrics not advisable at this point. A split second’s full weight on her leg. Heard a snap as she shot her hand forward, opened her fingers, and let fly.

The bear fetish rocketed straight and true, connecting with the pulsing dimple above the bay’s right eye. The horse shrieked and reared. Verle swayed forward with the motion, as comfortable as a grandmother in a rocking chair, not even grabbing the horn for balance. Of course, thought Lola. He was a horseman. Yet again the gun rose.

Lola collapsed onto the trail, shouting her frustration to the sky.

The horse, already unnerved, blood streaming into its eye, shied from the sound, a sideways leap across the trail. It planted its outside legs firmly upon air. Lola watched its one good eye roll back, its body lurching off balance, the recognition crossing Verle’s face, the desperate scramble from the saddle, too late, too late, the tilt over the edge and beyond, turning clumsy arabesques into the smoke-filled canyon.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“L
ola! Lola!”

Lola raised her head by degrees. “No,” she moaned. How had he survived? He must have landed on one of the rocky outcroppings on the way down. With movement came sensation. The leg, a good sharp stab. Her palms, raw patches burning. She put them gingerly on the ground and began a three-point crawl, pain sending her off balance with each lurch forward. Stop. Breathe. Move. Smoke scouring her throat with every gasp. All the while, staring at the drop-off, expecting to see Verle’s rifle-wielding arm rise above it. Or had he somehow found a way back onto the path? She crawled faster. Uneven hoof beats sounded an ominous drumbeat. Her lament turned to protest. “No!” The horse, too? Lola slumped onto her good knee and peered down the trail into the roiling cloud. Something moving in there.

Spot limped out of the smoke, Charlie beside him. “Lola!”

For the first time in her adult memory, Lola Wicks burst into tears.

“W
HAT ARE
you doing up here?” Lola sniffled into his chest.

“I got worried when I didn’t see you come back through town. I was afraid you’d miss your plane.”

She pressed her face harder against his shirt. “How did you know I hadn’t come back?”

“I was watching for you. I had something to tell you. And then Jolee said when I went over for coffee that something was up at Verle’s, that his people had been tearing up and down the road all morning. And I started thinking—you know, it’s always bugged me that Johnny was in Denver when Mary Alice got shot. Somebody had to do the shooting for him. I got a bad feeling and headed up to the cabin. Your car was there, but you weren’t, and there were two sets of hoof prints headed off into the woods. It didn’t take a genius.”

“Thank you,” she said. Then she said, “I took your cribbage peg.”

“I know.” His voice nearly as reassuring as his arms around her. “Wilson can make another one.” He stroked her hair.

She pulled back. “What did you want to tell me?”

“Never mind about that now.”

“He shot Bub.”

“Bastard.” He drew her to him again.

“I killed him.”

He lifted one of her hands and inspected her bleeding palm. “That’s a matter of debate. Did you shoot him?”