Read Montana Online

Authors: Gwen Florio

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

Montana (34 page)

BOOK: Montana
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Lola started to shake her head. Even that slight motion spurred new waves of pain. “He was the one with the gun. I just . . .”

He put his lips to the broken skin. “Just what?”

“Threw something at his horse. It shied. They went over.” She saw again Verle’s eyes, staring terribly into hers in the endless second before he plunged from view. Her teeth chattered.

A dull boom sounded. Then another. Charlie stood up. “I don’t know what that noise was, but it wasn’t anything good. Lola, you didn’t kill anybody. Let’s get this leg splinted. You look shocky. If I can get you onto that horse, think you can hang on?”

Lola looked at Spot. Blood crusted along a deep furrow in his flank. “He’s hurt.”

“But he can walk. You can’t. I’m going to let go of you now.” He unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of it and wrapped it around her. He peeled off his undershirt and tore it into long strips. He took a Leatherman tool from the endless assortment of gadgets on his duty belt and selected a blade and slashed two thin branches from a nearby tree. “I won’t lie. This is going to hurt like hell. Ready?”

“No. I am not. But, Charlie?”

“Yes?”

“If I holler, don’t stop. Keep going. Just get me out of this place.”

L
OLA QUESTIONED
Charlie through gritted teeth, wielding words against agony as the horse jolted down the trail. “Why do you think he threw that rock through the window instead of just shooting me?”

“I don’t think he did. I think Frank threw it. Maybe he came across Mary Alice’s body after she got shot and wanted to warn you, to keep the same thing from happening to you. Who knows?” Charlie’s shoulders lifted and lowered. They were shiny with sweat. Thirty yards away, a pine exploded into flames. Spot limped faster. Lola hadn’t thought her leg could hurt any worse. She’d been wrong. She hung onto Charlie’s words, grateful for any distraction.

“Or maybe you’re right—Verle could have been trying to scare you away. He didn’t need another shot-to-death woman on his hands. Besides, maybe he didn’t want to kill you unless he absolutely had to. Given that you two . . .”

“Slept together?”

Charlie made a choking sound.

“That thing,” she said. “It was just . . . nothing. A mistake. One in a long history of mistakes, I’m afraid.”

His back was broad, muscles sliding easily beneath his skin as he walked, no sign at all of the pudginess Lola had assumed when she’d first met him. He was not a fat man, just a big one. He looked over his shoulder, his expression utterly devoid of condemnation. “Maybe your luck will turn.”

Smoke rolled across the trail like ghostly tumbleweeds. Lola used it as an excuse to cough away still more tears.

“We’re almost there,” Charlie said. “We’ll take my car down. You’re doing great.”

“Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a big one.”

“Shoot.”

“Can you go back and find Bub and bury him?” It was the most she could push past the sob lurking in her throat.

“Consider it done.” Charlie’s own voice was none too steady.

Lola closed her eyes and concentrated fiercely on maintaining her balance for the final few yards. Spot stopped. “Are we there?” she said without opening her eyes. She was very tired. As badly as she wanted to be flat on her back in a bed in the clinic, pumped full of every single painkiller Margie had on hand, she dreaded the maneuvering necessary to get her off the horse and into Charlie’s cruiser. “Let’s get my stuff out of the cabin and get this over with.”

“That’s going to be tough.”

Lola opened her eyes. Shut them against the sting of smoke.

Maybe, she thought, if she didn’t look again. Maybe it wouldn’t be true. But even behind her closed eyelids, the image remained, the lick and leap of flame, the hungry snapping sound, the burnt skeletons of the rental car and Charlie’s cruiser, the crashing collapse of roof, Mary Alice’s cabin whirling away into the hideous sky in a great pillar of ember and ash.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

L
ola sat at a computer in the Baltimore newsroom and clicked on the
Express
website.

The homepage was nearly all headline. “Friends Eulogize Area Rancher Killed in Fall.” Jan’s story from Verle’s funeral summarized the information she’d included in her piece a few days earlier about his death. “It appears Mr. Duncan’s horse lost its footing on the trail above Two Medicine River,” said Sheriff Charles Laurendeau. “It’s pretty unforgiving up there. No second chances.”

Lola chuckled over the eulogies themselves, the verbal contortions that avoided mention of the near-daily revelations that had run in the
Express
since Verle’s death: Mary Alice’s cell phone, fished out of the irrigation ditch along the road where Lola had first seen Verle. Along with a semiautomatic rifle, a spent shell casing, and a bullet. Ballistics tests would take another week. But Charlie confidently predicted they were the weapon and ammunition that had killed Mary Alice. “Hah,” Lola said to the screen.

The story that she and Jan had written together about Johnny Running Wolf, hastily amended to include his ties to TMResources and thus to Verle, would run—with both their bylines—in the Sunday papers in Baltimore and Magpie. The cafe, she’d heard, had tripled its order of Sunday
Expresses
for the breakfast crew. As for the Baltimore paper, Lola had assumed her insistence on including Jan’s name at the top of the story would result in an extra year’s exile to suburbia. Instead, someone in one of the layers of management that never seemed to be thinned by layoffs had pulled rank on her behalf. The suburban assignment was rescinded altogether in favor of a coveted posting to City Hall, with its reliable stream of corruption stories.

An editor—the same one who had yanked her from Kabul—stopped beside her desk, stepping around the crutches that leaned against it. “Looks like you’ve gotten signed into our new system.” Resentment narrowed his eyes, dragged at his mouth. “Now try to find that same story on your phone.” He handed her a flat black oblong.

Lola tossed it from hand to hand. “How do I turn this thing on?”

He gave her a manual with a number inked on the cover. “Here’s your security code. I have to say, I never thought I’d see you again. I was sure you’d head back to Afghanistan. We had a pool. I lost some money.” He pointed toward a placard mimicking a movie poster hung in the newsroom. “Run, Lola, Run!” was printed in red across the top, above an old photo of Lola kicking at her Jeep in frustration during a particularly prolonged delay at a Khyber Pass checkpoint. She wore a headscarf that had come loose, its ends lofting in the winds that skated down from the Hindu Kush, revealing a face contorted in anger. The poster featured a roughly sketched map of the world titled, “Where’s Lola now?” Stickpins affixed with flags littered its surface.

“They sold for a buck a pin. There’s a name on each one of those. People put them where they thought you’d end up.” A clot of pins nearly obliterated Afghanistan. There were a few in the general region of Montana—“Some of the women thought you might find yourself a cowboy and stay, but I think that was more about their fantasies than yours”—some in Europe, quite a few in Africa and more than one in Antarctica. Not one, Lola saw, was anywhere near Baltimore.

“There’s one in the middle of the Atlantic,” he pointed out. Sure enough, a flagged pin adorned a crude drawing of a raft. “That might be closer to here than Montana. I think that one belongs to Bob. Looks like he wins fifty bucks. Just think, back in the old days, with everybody playing, it would’ve been something like two hundred.”

Lola’s new desk was near his office. She looked through the glass wall. He’d acquired another paperweight. This one rested on a high shelf, out of easy reach. “I was going to,” she said. “Go back to Afghanistan, I mean. I had it all planned.”

“What happened? A sudden decision to abandon your lonely, noble quest for the real story?”

So she’d wounded him after all, all those weeks ago.

“What changed your mind? You get a good look at somebody who’d been shot and finally figure out a newspaper story wasn’t worth it? Because that’s what was going to happen if you went back to Afghanistan. Sooner or later, everybody’s luck runs out.”

Lola thought of her savings swirling away in the ashes of the fire. Her luck ran out before she’d even gotten a chance to get back on the ground in Afghanistan. She considered the Baltimore streetscape through the window, the sluggish river of people and automobiles moving between the grey canyons of tall buildings, and conjured instead mountains and endless sky.

“Stay,” Charlie had urged. “This is your home now.”

Lola balked. “It was Mary Alice’s home. Not mine. Besides, all my money’s gone. The paper’s paying me four times—well, three times, or at least twice—what I’d make at the
Express.”

“We none of us make any money here to speak of,” he’d said, his body so warm and comforting against hers that she’d reversed her opinion of the lumpy beds at the Sleep Inn on the spot. “Somehow we survive. You might be broke, but you’d never be bored. As you well know.” He waited until she was back in Baltimore to start the emails. No message in the box, just the subject line. “Come home.” Same thing, same time, day after day. Four
P.M
.

Jan, too, sent notes, but hers came at all hours. “Idiot,” she typed into the subject line. “Fool.” Lola looked at the clock. It was 3:55. Activity picked up in the newsroom. Deadline neared, editors glaring meaningfully over the tops of their computer screens at reporters who’d spent most of the day screwing around drinking coffee and Googling their own bylines before getting down to the business of writing their stories.

Her computer pinged. Lola looked at her email list. There it was, right on time. “Come home.”

She smiled. Then looked again.

This time, there was an attachment, a photo file. She opened the email. He’d written a message, too. “Look who’s waiting for you.”

Lola rolled her eyes. He was upping the ante, sending a picture of himself. She wondered if he’d be in his sheriff’s uniform.

“Get off that computer and get on your phone.” The editor again. “You’ve got to learn to use that thing.”

Lola clicked rebelliously on the paper clip signifying the attachment. Then shoved so forcefully away from her desk that her chair sailed into the aisle. She grabbed at the crutches as she rolled past, nearly dropping them. She stopped the chair, struggled to her feet and fitted the crutches under her arms.

The editor narrowed his eyes. “What’s going on?”

Lola balanced on one crutch and reached for something on her desk. “Catch!” She launched the phone at his head. He ducked. She laughed.

From her computer screen, a photo of a black-and-white dog, one leg bandaged, another gone entirely, fixed an approving stare upon her with one brown eye, one blue.

“Wicks! Goddammit. These phones are expensive. Where are you going?”

Lola planted the crutches and swung her body. Another hop and swing, catching the rhythm, moving with sudden certainty toward the door.

“Home,” she called. “I’m going home.”

BOOK: Montana
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ads

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