Badlands (34 page)

That was the last thought he ever had.

 

PART FOUR

THREE WEEKS LATER

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CASSIE WAS
washing the dishes from dinner when her alternative cell phone rang on the kitchen counter. She'd set a different ringtone than her primary phone.

She quickly dried her hands on a towel and snatched up the phone. It was from an unknown caller.

“Excuse me,” she said to her mother, “I need to take this outside in the hall.”

Isabel looked up suspiciously. She was reading
The New Republic
in her overstuffed chair while Ben, Kyle, and Raheem were engrossed in a project that had taken over the entire front room of her apartment. The project involved card tables, blankets, and ropes.

“Outside?” Isabel asked, arching her eyebrows.

Cassie nodded, then stepped around the boys' project and went into the hallway, closing the door behind her.

She punched the button. “Yes?”

The call was like all the others thus far in that she could hear distant motors idling, background chatter, and sometimes wind.

“Hey, I'm callin' about the LTL you've got up on the board. I'm in Billings and headed your way with a reefer. How many pallets we talkin' about?”

The voice was thin, reedy, and Southern. It was not familiar.

She said, “I'm sorry, but we just made a deal with another carrier.”

“But it's still up on the board?” he said. He sounded put out.

“They haven't had a chance to take it off yet,” she lied. “This just happened.”

“Well,” he said, drawing out the word until it had two syllables, “I guess I'm a day late and a dollar short.”

“Sorry,” she said, and disconnected the call. She dropped the phone into the left pocket of her sweater and went back inside.

*   *   *

WILLIE DIETRICH
had survived the shooting. He credited his “thick chest.” In exchange for dropping some of he charges against him—conspiracy, kidnapping, and being an accessory to the murder of Simon Bierstadt, aka Winkie—Dietrich started talking. He held court for a week from his bed in Bakken County Memorial Hospital.

Yes, he said, Cam Tollefsen was dirty and he'd provided protection and inside-the-department intel to Willie for the past few years.

Yes, the two Salvadorans were MS-13 and had been sent to Grimstad from Los Angeles to take out the competing biker operation.

Yes, Fidel “La Matanza” Escobar and Diego “Silencio” Argueta had murdered and dismembered Rufus Whitely, Phillip Klein, and Simon “Winkie” Bierstadt. Willie gave the sheriff's department directions to the warehouse and told them which barrels to open.

Yes, Lance Foster, aka Surfer Dude, was the inside man for MS-13. In addition to Dietrich's testimony, Foster's and Escobar's cell phone records proved that they'd been in contact for weeks and in constant communication during the seminal week in December.

Yes, Dietrich said, Rachel Westergaard had died of her own hand from a heroin overdose. Right in front of him. Dietrich's account was disputed by Lottie Westergaard, who was still in the hospital recovering from a broken hip and shoulder from being thrown around. She said she saw Dietrich administer the fatal overdose himself.

And yes, even though the MS-13 drug pipeline had been temporarily disrupted and the Sons of Freedom were regrouping in Colorado, Dietrich said with confidence there would be new product on the streets of Grimstad within a week.

“You can throw me in prison in Bismarck and let all the gangbangers freeze to death in the Missouri River,” Willie said, “but you can't do nothin' about demand. When there's demand, there'll be supply.”

He was right.

*   *   *

CASSIE
SKIRTED
around the boys' project and went back to the kitchen, where she observed the three boys. They'd been so wrapped up in whatever it was they were doing they hadn't so much as looked up at her when she passed by.

Ben liked Kyle the moment he met him, and Kyle seemed to take Ben under his wing. Ben had no trouble understanding Kyle when he spoke, which was something Cassie found intriguing. Even when Kyle got excited about something—fishing, for instance—Ben hung on to every word and translated later.

Having a couple of older friends—especially one with a newfound reputation for danger—suited Ben perfectly, and Kyle treated Ben like the younger brother he'd never had. Kyle took Ben to school on the front handlebars of his bike—something Cassie didn't approve of and Isabel refused to watch. Kyle was easy to have around, and Cassie already knew she would miss him deeply when Lottie had recovered and Kyle could move back in with her.

The therapist seeing Kyle said the boy showed few signs of trauma, despite what had happened with T-Lock, his mother, and at his grandmother's house.

In fact, the therapist told Cassie, Kyle came across as remarkably composed.

“His life has been one trauma after the other,” he said. “Maybe he's used to chaos and he welcomes the respite from it. One thing for sure: the kid is resilient. He doesn't let his special needs or his circumstances get him down. What I do know is that he likes you and considers you a kind of mother figure, maybe because his was so unstable.”

Cassie was speechless. Inside, she was thrilled.

*   *   *

FOR KYLE
, it was now a matter of months before the ice broke up on the river and he and Raheem could begin their great adventure. His River Box was under the bed at Grandma Lottie's, and he'd crossed out several more must-have items.

Although sometimes he wanted to shout about the boat trip he would take across America, he knew not to say anything about it except to Raheem. Otherwise, he knew, they'd try to stop him.

Of course, one thing he'd learned about himself was that he couldn't be stopped if he was determined to do something. It was a remarkable thing to find out about himself.

He thought of his mother often. He tried not to think of her face through the pickup window, or how she'd looked on that couch when he knew she was already gone. She looked peaceful, and that made him happy. The things that had happened in those last few days made him miss her almost as if she were a little girl, not his mother. He didn't tell the therapist that.

Kyle never thought about her life with T-Lock or the times she was so depressed he had to feed himself because she couldn't get out of bed. What he remembered were the small kindnesses—how she'd cup his face in her hands and bend over to kiss him, how she'd sing him to sleep sometimes, how she'd call him “her little man.” How she'd taken his side when T-Lock called him a retard.

Because he wasn't.

Even the kids in school who used to tease him or ignore him looked at him differently now. The girls looked at him with sympathy: he had lost his mother.

The boys looked at him with awe and even respect. He had shot two gangbangers and stuck an arrow in the neck of a third man.

Teachers and counselors looked at him carefully, weighed his every word and gesture to note changes in his behavior. They tried to understand how a boy could go through what he had and not be changed by it.

What they didn't understand was that Kyle wasn't damaged.

He was
improved
.

*   *   *

ISABEL PUT
down her magazine and got up clumsily from the chair. She was wearing a large flowing dress covered with tropical flowers she'd had for years. She said she liked the apartment very much but she didn't know how long she could take Grimstad, even though a man had actually winked at her in the grocery store a couple of days ago.

She padded over to Cassie in her old moccasins and nodded toward the second cell phone Cassie had placed on the counter.

“How many phones do you have?” Isabel asked. Isabel was offended, Cassie knew, because she believed that cell phones caused brain cancer. She'd read it somewhere.

“Two.”

“Why do you need more than one?”

“I just do.”

“Why does that one play that awful song?”

“So I can tell them apart.”

“Is it
him?
” Isabel asked.

Cassie was confused and shook her head.

“You know,” Isabel said, pointing to the flowers Ian Davis had sent Cassie on her birthday the week before. “
Him.
”

“No, he didn't call. And if he did he'd call my regular cell phone.”

Davis was divorced, no kids. They had gone out twice. For Cassie, it was supremely uncomfortable and she drank too much each time. She liked Davis but couldn't wrap her mind around the concept of dating again after all these years. They'd gone to a movie—she was one of two women in the theater—and to dinner. Same ratio.

Although Davis was pleasant and polite to her, she couldn't stop thinking of the fact that at her apartment both Ben and Isabel were waiting for her to come home. She felt selfish. Sex was out of the question, and a deeper relationship would need to involve Ben.

At work they acknowledged each other but kept the fledgling relationship a secret.

Cassie knew it probably wouldn't end well. Still, though, she appreciated the flowers and Davis's attention.

*   *   *

CASSIE'S PRIMARY
phone vibrated and she saw it was from Leslie Behaunek in North Carolina.

This time, Cassie went into her bedroom and shut the door. As she connected the call, she tossed two pillows from her bed toward the door and kicked them into place at the base of it. She didn't want Isabel to overhear.

“Leslie, hello.”

“Hi, Cassie, sorry to call so late.”

“It's late for you, not me. So what's up?”

Behaunek asked if Cassie had been getting any calls on what they both referred to as her “trucker phone.”

“One or two a day,” Cassie said. “No hits yet.”

“Damn it.”

They'd hatched the plan together after the Lizard King was released from jail. In the preliminary hearing, the judge had thrown out all the charges because of the illegal search. He'd also dismissed the assault charge on Cassie due to “insufficient evidence of the requisite degree of injury.” In effect, the judge said that he thought the police, including Cassie, had been engaged in misconduct throughout the case.

Under a fake name, Leslie had joined several Internet-based trucking industry load board enterprises. Each day, she posted a new listing requiring a refrigerated truck for an LTL—“less than a load”—pickup in Grimstad, North Dakota. The destination for the LTL varied from day to day as well, so it wouldn't stand out as similar to the listing the day before. The phone number for an enterprising trucker to call was for Cassie's alternate cell phone.

“He'll call you eventually,” Behaunek said. “That's his specialty—always keeping his trailer filled so he can get maximum income. He'll eventually work his way up there.”

“Where is he now?” Cassie asked. Behaunek had told her the sheriff had illegally installed a GPS tracking device under Dale Spradley-Ronald Pergram's truck.

“He's off the grid.” Behaunek sighed. “He must have found the device. All we know is his last known location was Savannah, but that was over a week ago. He could be all the way across the country by now.”

Cassie said, “I told the sheriff.”

There was a long pause. Cassie could hear Behaunek take a sip and set down a wineglass. “You must trust him,” she said.

“I do. He knows all about the Lizard King and he'd love to help shut him down.”

“Do you have a plan yet for when he actually shows up?”

Cassie said, “I'm working on it.”

“So how are things going? Are they calmer now?”

“A little,” Cassie said. “But like I was told, this is the new Wild West.”

“I'd like to see it someday.”

“Come in the summer.” Cassie laughed.

*   *   *

ISABEL WAS
giving her the eye when she came out of the bedroom and Cassie ignored her.

She paused and looked over the project in her living room with her hands on her hips. The boys had upended three card tables—they had to borrow two of them from other cops down the hall—and had placed them end to end on the carpet. A rope had been strung from leg to leg and blankets had been draped over the ropes. Ben was in back, Raheem in the middle, and Kyle up front. Kyle was speaking so quickly Cassie couldn't understand what he was saying.

“What is this?” she asked Ben.

Ben didn't even look up. He was too enraptured in the project.

“We're building a boat,” he said.

Cassie thought it charming.

*   *   *

AFTER HE'D
gone back to school, Kyle had asked Cassie to take him back to the Badlands on the weekend. Kyle wanted to see the photo of Theodore Roosevelt arresting the boat thieves again.

She'd agreed and they made a family outing of it, bringing along her mother, Ben, and Raheem. While they were in the museum, Kyle wandered away from the others and noticed a display about Roosevelt called “Early Tragedy.” He stood at the display for a long time, struggling with reading the placards. But he found himself glued in place when he learned that Roosevelt had lost his mother, too. Not only that, but his wife and mother died hours apart in the same house.

Kyle was stunned. Theodore Roosevelt lost his mother and his wife before he went west to the Badlands. Before he pursued the boat thieves on the icy river, became a colonel and charged up San Juan Hill. Before he became president of the United States and got his face on Mount Rushmore.

He thought about that all the way back to Grimstad in Cassie's car. He and Theodore Roosevelt had something in common. Kyle found himself smiling at that.