Dakota (10 page)

“You want to know what matters?” Ellen reached into the rear pocket of her jeans. The motion threw her shoulders back. Even beneath the disguising apron, Lola could see a lush figure. She hadn’t noticed, but the men at the end of the bar had, and from a distance, too.

Ellen withdrew her hand from her pocket. She thrust it beneath Lola’s nose. Let her fingers unfold. The bill that one of the men had tucked beneath the apron lay there, creased lengthwise. “Go ahead,” Ellen urged. “Look at it.”

Lola expected to see a phone number on it, maybe some crude message. She shook it open. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” said Ellen.

Lola had thought they’d given her a five or even a twenty, but she held a hundred-dollar bill in her hand.

Ellen snatched it back. “You were right. My looks don’t matter at all. And they were right, too. I could make way more there than I can here. And I turn eighteen this summer.” She turned her back on Lola and headed back down to the other end of the counter, hips swaying, chest outthrust.

If a girl could score a Benjamin with her clothes on, Lola thought, how much would a dancer who took them off make? And what about someone who not only took off her clothes but lay down with a man? That whiskery, redheaded guy back at Nell’s had as much as said Judith was a whore. The lure of easy money had led stronger people than a drug-addled teenager down the wrong path—especially when that teenager felt painfully indebted to her brother. The wine went sour in Lola’s mouth. She pushed the glass away and slid the remains of her steak into a baggie that she kept on hand for scraps for Bub. The girl came back.

“More?”

“I think I’ve had about all I can handle for one night,” she said, happy to let Ellen think she was only talking about the wine.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A
t three in the morning, Lola kicked off the quilt she’d draped atop her sleeping bag. The thermometer on the bank clock across the street had read fifteen below when she’d crawled into the back of the truck with Bub. It had to be colder now, but to Lola’s grateful surprise their combined body warmth had heated the truck to something nearing comfort. Headlights swept across the window with rhythmic regularity; workers heading out on the day shift. People in The Mint the previous night had told her that some of the roughnecks drove as far as fifty miles to their rigs. The lucky ones from the man camp rode old school buses that had been painted white and pressed into service as shuttles. Bub whined. Lola struggled out of the sleeping bag and into her parka. She thrust her feet into boots and opened the back of the truck and slid out. Bub shot to a corner of the municipal building. Lola followed him and kicked fresh snow over the yellow circle he created. A pickup on steroids pulled off the main street and stopped beside her. The window lowered.

“You working?”

The man who spoke had a square pleasant face. He may have been headed for a twelve-hour shift in the weather, but he’d shaved and combed his hair. Another unemployed insurance agent, Lola thought, come to the patch to support a family back in a sprawling suburban house with an underwater mortgage. “Excuse me?”

“I wondered if you were working. I got an early start this morning, so I’ve got a little extra time. My truck’s already warmed up. I could pull over right there, out of the light. I’m pulling a double shift today. Be good to start it with a smile.”

Lola wanted to crawl back into the truck and fall into sleep again before the wind woke her all the way up. Maybe he didn’t mean what she thought he did. He dispelled that notion fast.

“You know.” He poked a forefinger into his fist, the crude gesture at odds with his outward decency. “You work for yourself? Or are you one of those girls from the camp? Heard somebody new was coming in. You take care of me now, you can keep all the money for yourself. I know the place takes its cut.” He checked his phone. “I’m still okay on time. I’m not looking for anything fancy.”

He could have been discussing getting a cup of coffee. Which Lola wished, very badly, that she had. She needed her brain to kick into gear. What had the redheaded guy said back at Nell’s? “She’s one of them in the man camp. You know the ones I mean. From the trailer.”

“The camp,” she said. “I’m looking for somebody there. I didn’t want to try to find it in the dark.” She unzipped her parka, hoping the cold would shock her synapses into firing. “Maybe you can tell me how to get there.”

“Who would that be?”

He looked like a family man. Lola thought of Joshua and played the sibling card. “My sister. She fell in with a bad crew. I’m trying to get her to come back home.” She scuffed her feet in the snow.

He looked at his phone again. “That’s about as bad as a crew gets. You don’t want to deal with them. I’d go to the police if I were you. About time somebody did.”

Lola tamped down a flare of interest, hoping it hadn’t shown on her face. “Then you know what I’m dealing with. I can’t concentrate on anything else right now. Although I appreciate the offer. I really do.”

He rolled his eyes. “Right. But maybe I’ll see you around again. Name’s Dave. You ever feel like making a little extra on the side, I take my dinners at the Grub Steak. You can find me there after ten.”

“That’s late.”

“So’s my shift.”

Lola raised a hand. She’d left her gloves in the truck, and she cut the wave short, curling her fingers against the cold. “I’ll be sure and keep an eye out for you, Dave.” By the time she and Bub had settled themselves back in the truck, all the heat fled the camper. She held the dog tight, shivering within the layers of sleeping bag and quilt, until the late-breaking dawn.

T
HE CELLPHONE
ding-donged in her ear, seemingly minutes after she’d finally fallen back asleep. Lola held the phone close to her face in the grey light. It was eight-thirty. The phone sounded again, annoyingly cheerful. She reminded herself to find a new ringtone. She cleared her throat. “This is Lola.”

“Lola, what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Charlie?”

“You know damn well who this is. What are you up to over there?”

Bub inched his way from his spot across her feet until he lay upon her chest. Lola forced her words past the fifty-pound weight compressing her lungs. “What are you talking about? You know I’m working on a story. A series.”

“But what story? Thor Brevik said you started right off asking about Judith.”

Lola made a mental note to kill Thor Brevik. Or, at least not say more than “Hello,” “Goodbye,” “Please” and “Thank you very much for ratting me out.”

“For God’s sake, Charlie. It’s a logical question. If I get any information, I’ll pass it along to Jan. How are you today, anyway? What’s it like to have spent the night in a nice, warm bed? And what’s the deal with Brevik? He’s got this freak working for him. Do you know anything about that?” Trying to change the subject, and maybe get some sympathy, too. Neither worked.

“Let’s just say it’s a relief not to have spent the night with someone I apparently can’t trust at all. When you get back, you might want to think about getting your own place. It’s not like it’ll take you any time at all to pack. You never really moved into mine. I should have known.”

“Charlie—” The phone was dead at her ear. Lola kicked open the back of the truck and let Bub do his business by himself. “Damn.” She lay back in the twisted sleeping bag and tried to remember the last time she’d had anything resembling a relationship, let alone what seemed to be a relatively healthy one. She’d spent years in Afghanistan limiting herself to practical, prescriptive sex, preferably with colleagues getting ready to rotate to another assignment or aid workers winding up their tours of duty. Which, she’d told herself when things started with Charlie, was how things were likely to go with him, too. But she’d been secretly pleased as the weeks accumulated with neither insecurities nor drama, and passion limited to bed, which was where it belonged. She’d thought they were comfortable together. Apparently, she’d been wrong. Bub touched an icy nose to her neck just as the phone rang again.

“Jesus!” she shouted. Then, “Charlie, I’m sorry. That wasn’t meant for you.”

“This isn’t Charlie. But you owe that man an apology. And me, too.”

“Jan.” Lola held the phone away and glared at it, then put it back to her ear. “What do you want?”

“What do you think I want? I want you to stay the hell away from my story. Charlie just called me and said you were all over it. Jorkki is going to fire your ass.”

The dog was back on Lola’s chest. Which, she thought was a good thing. The effort required to speak made her words seem slow, measured. “Jan. I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Charlie. And if Jorkki tries to fire me, I’m going to tell him, too. It’s crazy for me to be over here and not ask about Judith. Besides, I think this is about more than Judith.”

Lola could practically feel Jan’s struggle to control her curiosity.

“How’s that?” Jan spoke past a yawn whose fakery came through loud and clear.

“I think it’s about all those girls. Too many of them, you know? All from the same place. All in trouble with the law. Now one of them’s dead. You know what we say—”

“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Jan broke in with the oft-repeated lesson.

“Exactly,” Lola said. “So why don’t you do some poking around back there, and I’ll do some here. Get their photos. Check the school library. The yearbooks should have them.” Lola knew that the minute Jan put faces to the names, found out the barest facts about the girls, they’d be real to her and she’d be hooked. “I’ll feed you whatever I find out here. Think what it would mean to people for you to get to the bottom of whatever happened to those girls.” She gave Jan a moment to salivate over the irresistible possibilities that lay on the silver platter she’d just extended. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a story—my own story—to work on.” This time, she made sure that she was the one who hung up first.

She spit on her hands and ran her fingers through her hair. It was growing out in ways that reminded her why she’d cropped it so short for so many years. Now she had a good three inches of unruly curls, one more layer of insulation between her and the cold. Silly to even worry about her hair, really, given that it would spend most of the day hidden in a hat. Which she located and pulled onto her head with a jerk, making sure it covered her ears. Weeks earlier, she’d returned from a careless outing with one lobe white and frozen. The thawing-out process was something she never wanted to repeat.

“Come on, Bub. Looks like we’d better go track down Judith’s uncles.” Could she help it if any of them might have run into Judith in Burnt Creek, or at least heard through the Indian Country grapevine about what Judith was up to in the patch? More to the point, the places she needed to go to ask about Judith—the strip bars like The Train and its ilk—probably wouldn’t be open until later in the day.

Bub shoved his face against hers, something he did whenever she became agitated. She ruffled his fur. “Everything’s going to work out just fine.” But just to be sure, she held her finger over the phone’s on/off button until its screen went black.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

R
oy deRoche and assorted relatives and friends—Lola had long ago given up trying to track relationships—had somehow managed to snag one of Burnt Creek’s rare apartments, where the sixteen men split the twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month rent on two shoebox bedrooms, a closet of a bathroom, and a microwave and minifridge. They lined up four cots in each of the bedrooms and duct-taped blankets over the windows so that the eight men coming off the night shift could tumble onto still-warm, just-abandoned cots and sleep through the day’s weak light. The blankets served as extra insulation against the icy winds that sliced through the gaps between window frame and walls, but also served to hold in the mingled odors of sweat and farts and feet that had spent twelve hours and more in heavy work boots.

The smell greeted Lola as the door swung inward. She clutched an armful of plastic containers closer to her chest. She’d stopped by Josephine’s house the day before she’d left for Burnt Creek, collecting frozen offerings of stew and casseroles so that the men would have a taste of home, a gesture calculated to win the good will of both the women and their men—altruism that she hoped would make them more likely to talk with her, and with Jan, too, about matters normally too sensitive to discuss with outsiders. “I sent Roy off with plenty of food,” Josephine had assured Lola, as though she might assume otherwise. “But those guys work so long and so hard, they’ve probably inhaled every last bit of it by now.”

Lola had hurried to be at the apartment early, thinking to catch the night shift crew before they hit the sack, but instead the apartment was impossibly crowded. Some men sat two to a cot, testing the limits of the threadbare canvas. Others rooted around beneath the cots, stuffing belongings into duffel bags. Lola squinted into the dimness, searching for Roy. He emerged from the second bedroom, carrying a bundle of what appeared to be clothing wrapped in a sheet.

“Lola,” he said. “I forgot you were coming.”