by Gwen Florio
“How’d the girls get in?”
He looked at her as though she were not particularly bright. “They pay off the guards. Same way everything else works around here. Take those two guys who got killed today. You think the company’ll own up to making a mistake? They’ll just hand their families a wheelbarrow full of money and that’ll be the end of it.”
Lola wanted to hear about that, too, but she needed to hear more about the trailer first. “I can pay.”
He shook his head. “Won’t work. Those other girls, it was obvious why they wanted in. But you—a woman on your own and too old, besides. Only one reason you’d be heading into the camp, and that’s to cause trouble.”
Lola moved closer, let her leg fall against his. “I could pretend to be your girlfriend. You could be sneaking me in, just like that other guy.”
He leaned against her. “Really? What’s in it for me?”
She put a hand on his knee. Walked her fingers a couple of steps up his thigh. “Things that would make you holler.”
He grabbed her hand, tried to pull it higher. “Show me.”
The waitress caught Lola’s eye, her look a clear signal: Take it someplace else. Lola gave her a little wave, fingers spread wide. Five more minutes. She steeled herself. Lay her lips against her companion’s ear. He tasted of sweat and petroleum. “I promise you won’t have any complaints. But here’s the thing. Tonight I’ve got to find my sister. I’ll be back, though. I know where to find you. Found you tonight, didn’t I?”
His sigh was mournful. His grip on her hand slackened.
Good, thought Lola. Too soon. Dave hadn’t given up. “Show me anyway. In my truck. I’ll get you into the camp for free afterward. C’mon, girl. It’s been weeks. I’m dying here.”
Lola tapped her foot against his. She wondered if he could even feel it through his heavy work boots. “Tomorrow.”
He pulled back. “You’re really not gonna do me tonight?”
Lola fell back on an old lie. “Can’t. Wrong time of the month.”
“Like that’d matter for a blowjob.” His eyes were slits in that square face. “You’re playing me.”
Lola threw it back at him. “Could be.”
“Maybe you’re a cop.”
Lola braced herself for a final humiliation, reasoning that lips to earlobe had been at least as intimate as what she was about to do. She begged forgiveness from the journalism gods for turning her back on all ethical principles, and leaned into him. Extended her hand. Lowered it to his crotch. Sure enough, beneath the layers of coveralls and long johns, he was hard. She forced herself to count to three before snatching her hand away.
“Cops don’t touch,” she said. “So you can rule that out right now.”
The skin around his eyes relaxed. The muscles in his face shifted. Some sort of calculation being made. “I still can’t figure you. But you’re good. I’ll give you that. So you want to go there? To the trailer that serves up all the goodies?”
“I do. I really do.”
“Then we’d best get moving.”
In her haste to gather her cap, her coat, her gloves, Lola knocked over her beer. The waitress smirked knowingly. Lola turned her head and spat the taste of him into her napkin and gave thanks that he hadn’t called her bluff in exchange for taking her to the man camp.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Lola crouched beneath the tarp in the truck’s half-size back seat as Dave tossed things atop it. An insulated coffee mug. Something soft and floppy: a sweatshirt, she guessed. A quick succession of harder objects, book-sized, but lighter. DVDs, maybe. Porn, probably. A lunchbox landed with a thud.
“Watch it!”
Dave grunted. She heard some sort of scuffle and a yelp before the truck’s door opened and slammed shut. “The dog stays here,” Dave said.
Lola flung the tarp aside and sat up. “No! He’ll be quiet. If we leave him, he’ll freeze.”
“He’s a dog. He’ll figure it out.” The truck began to roll.
“No!”
Bub ran beside the truck, leaping at it, toenails scraping the side. Lola leaned over Dave and reached for the door handle. He grabbed her wrist, bent it back and stomped on the accelerator. Bub raced behind the truck, body low to the snowy street. Lola watched him get smaller as the truck’s speed increased. “Stop! Please. He doesn’t know where he is.”
Dave turned and straight-armed her. “Get down. Pull all that shit over you again. And shut up. We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.” Something different in his voice. He was the one in charge now. Within moments, the truck slowed. Lola heard the window’s electric hum.
“Late night, Dave? Where’d you wind it up tonight? Sweet Crude? Or maybe”—a guffaw—“The Train?”
“You know me. Back at the Grub Steak, same as always.”
The guard’s footsteps crunched across the snow toward the truck, receded as he skirted the hood, grew louder as he circled toward the back. They stopped at the rear window. Lola’s breath came so ragged she was afraid the guard would hear it above the country music blaring from Dave’s radio. Her whole body shook. What if her fear dislodged the pile of junk atop her, sent it cascading to the floor? Did they arrest people for trying to sneak into the man camp? Would she have to face the sheriff? And if she did, what would she say? That she’d decided to celebrate her last night in Burnt Creek with a man she barely knew? By the time she realized the truck was moving again, it had already made a turn or two.
“Damn.” She’d meant to keep track of its route in case she needed to find her way back.
“Problem?” Dave asked. “I thought it went pretty well myself.”
Lola kicked at the tarp and sat up. “Oh, it did,” she reassured him, pushing past her fear for herself, for Bub. The dog was smart, she reminded herself. With luck, he’d retrace his tracks to the sheriff’s house and she’d find him sleeping on the back step when she returned. If she returned. Doubt flared as Dave turned, his face contorted. “Get the hell back down. We’re not even close.”
Lola pulled the tarp back over her. “Maylinn, Annie, Carole, Nancy,” she chanted beneath her breath. Was it worth it to lose Bub over girls she’d never even met? But Bub, although he might be lost, was still alive. Judith—and of course DeeDee, and Ralph and Swanny, too—were dead. “Maylinn, Annie, Carole, Nancy.” The tarp smelled of grease and dirt, normal, reassuring. Charlie had one just like it in the barn. He pulled it out every few weeks for the oil changes he insisted upon doing himself. She’d had a brief notion to call him earlier in the day, but had cast it aside. She wasn’t sure how she’d ask him anything without blurting out the question at the forefront of her mind. Did he really have a child? And if so, who was the mother? And what sort of relationship did he have with either of them? Lola had made mental lists of the young women she’d met on the reservation, trying to remember how they’d looked at her when she walked into council meetings, powwows, school events. No one had been less than polite and quite a few had been more. At some point, she’d have to ask him. The truck stopped.
“Here you go,” Dave said. “Get out. Now.”
Lola kicked the tarp away a final time and crawled into the front seat and put her hand to the door, careful to keep her head low. Rows of long white prefab buildings stretched away on either side of her.
“Which one?”
“Back two rows. Take a left. It’s midway down. You’ll know it when you see it.” He reached past her and opened the door, put a hand to her shoulder and shoved her into the snow.
LOLA ROLLED fast to the side as the truck roared away. Floodlights laid shining carpets between the rows of modular units. She pressed herself against the side of one of the trailers and scanned the landscape to make sure no one was out and about. The wall behind her vibrated with the pounding bass of hip-hop. Lola put her hands to it and shoved herself off, sprinting to the shelter of the next row, then the next. Around her, the units throbbed with life. Washing machines thumped nearly as loud as bas
s lines. As she sidled along a building, snores were audible from one unit; from another, an argument about the merits of the Green Bay Packers. Televisions blared laugh tracks, game shows and yes, the feigned moans of porn. She counted windows. Ten. Presumably with counterparts on the other side. So, twenty men to a trailer, unless they doubled up in the rooms. Then, as many as forty. She rounded a corner and stepped into darkness. All the previous units had been floodlit, but the lights for the next unit were out. “The trailer,” she breathed. It had to be. Lola wondered how much money it took to keep the lights off. She crept closer. The door swung open. Lola flattened herself against the closest modular unit. A man stood briefly on its step. He hitched his pants and fastened his coat and pushed a stockman hat low and tight on his head. Lola followed the hat’s movement as he turned his head to one side, then the other. He hopped down from the unit’s metal steps and set off around the corner. Lola heard an engine start. She waited until long after the sound had faded, until her toes were numb and her fingertips going quickly to agony, before daring a dash to the unit. She stood on tiptoe beneath a picture window, hoping for an opening in the curtains. But they were drawn tight. She stomped an unwise foot in the snow, then recoiled from the crunch. The door opened again. Lola pasted herself to the wall again and closed her eyes, falling back on a child’s reasoning that if she couldn’t see someone, the person couldn’t see her. She eased her hand over her face, afraid that the clouds of her own condensed breath would give her away. A familiar scent, deeply out of place, slipped between her fingers. She started at the sound of heavy footsteps, then relaxed when she realized they were heading away from her. She opened her eyes. The departing man held a white paper bag in his gloved hand. Lola dropped her hand from her face and breathed in.
Fried chicken?
This particular customer was on foot. Lola waited until she heard a door slam farther down the row, then backed slowly away until she had a good view of the unit. She peered through the darkness and saw what she’d missed the first time. Suddenly, the burnt-out floodlight seemed less sinister. A lot less. Far from being furtive, the unit advertised itself with a homespun sign with the same sort of saucy come-ons about breasts and legs and thighs she’d seen at the same sorts of places around the country. All available at Mama’s Fried Chicken.
“They’ve got everything in there,” she remembered Thor saying about the man camp. “Even a fast-food place.”
“You want the trailer that serves all the goodies?” Dave had asked. And that’s exactly where he’d brought her, no doubt as a way to repay her in full for leading him on. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered. She spent a bitterly pleasurable moment imagining tipping the waitress at the Grub Steak to spit in his beer, or serve up an Ex-Lax brownie for his dessert, before she turned her back on her final failure in Burnt Creek and began the long trudge back toward town.
BY THE time Lola made her way back to the sheriff’s house, she was pretty sure she was frostbitten someplace on her body. Maybe all over. She’d had to wait inside the camp until the guard had ambled away on a break—headed for the fried chicken stand, for all she knew—before daring a dash through the spotlight-flanked gates. Halfway back to the sheriff’s house, she’d ducked into the first warm place she could find that was open in the middle of the night—a convenience store, where she lifted the lid on the crock pot of obscenely pale and bloated hot dogs and let the steam wafting from the greasy liquid thaw her face. She drank three cups of tepid coffee before the clerk’s pointed glare finally drove her back into the cold, tottering along on feet she could barely feel. She passed The Train just as its door swung open, disgorging heat and drunken men. She thought, for just a moment, about going in. Then one of the men slipped his hand beneath her parka and she fled, cloaked in laughter and humiliation.
When she turned onto the Breviks’ street, the darkness was incomplete. True dawn would not come for another three hours, but the blackness was lighter somehow, gathering itself for its too-brief withdrawal. Lola saw lights in a couple of the houses, early-rising rig workers lucky enough to have been born in Burnt Creek and thus have real homes, returning nights to their own beds warmed by their own grateful wives instead of making do with the sterile comfort of the man camps. She approached the house with deep apprehension, but it was dark and hushed and still. Too still. She’d hoped to see Bub rising stiffly from the back step to greet her, his tail making feathery sweeps in the deeper snow of the yard as he trotted toward her. She whistled, low and soft, hoping maybe he’d emerge from around a corner. Nothing. She stood on the back step, and pulled her boots from numb feet and let them fall behind her into the snow, and eased into the mudroom. She waited, listening to the silence. The narrow little bed upstairs, so strange two nights ago, exerted a newly powerful pull. She longed to sink into it, pull every one of the blankets over her, grab a few blessed hours of unconsciousness before deciding what to do about the dog and every other disaster that had occurred while she’d been in Burnt Creek.
She weaved through the living room, leaning this way and that as the Hummels grinned threats of crashing betrayal. By the time she got to the stairs, her feet had begun to thaw. Fire shot through them. She bit her lip against a gasp each time she ascended another step. She almost fell into the bedroom door, grasping at the knob for support.
Something rustled on the stairs.
“Bub!” She whirled.
Charlotte loomed behind her, all pink robe and fuzzy bunny slippers and butcher knife raised high in her manicured hand.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Footsteps pounded up the stairs. Thor rounded the landing, stark naked, his business flapping and bouncing as he took the steps two at a time. Lola’s attention shifted to the service weapon he wielded. A scream died in her throat.
“What’s going on here?” He swung in a semicircle, eyes darting to all corners of the narrow hallway outside the room. The gun moved with him. Lola flattened herself against the wall as the gun brushed past her. “Did somebody break in?”
Charlotte found her voice first. “Just Lola, apparently.”
Thor lowered the gun. It dangled from his fingers, hanging at thigh level, drawing Lola’s eyes in an unfortunate direction. Thor appeared to have awoken abruptly. She glanced away, only to realize Charlotte had caught her looking. “I didn’t exactly break in,” she began. “Look, we can talk about this downstairs? After you’ve had time to—”
“Time to what?” Charlotte’s voice could have cut glass.
“Dress.”
Charlotte squeezed past Lola, climbed to the stop of the steps, and kicked open the bathroom door. She grabbed a towel and tossed it to Thor. “Here. You appear to have embarrassed our guest. Or excited her. I’m not sure which.”
Thor flipped the towel around his waist and held it loosely at his hip. It drooped, barely covering him. A trail of blond hairs curled toward it. “What do you mean, Lola broke in?”
Charlotte folded her arms across her chest, the knife blade winking with the motion. “I heard something. You were dead to the world and I knew—at least I thought I did—that it was way too early for Lola to be up. So I went to check. Grabbed the knife on my way through the kitchen.”
Thor’s face was all hard suspicion. “Why didn’t you just wake me up?”
Charlotte’s expression mirrored his own. “Because you’ve had such a terrible few days. You need all the sleep you can get. Besides, I was sure I was imagining things. Until I got up here and saw her in her hat and coat. Were you on your way in or out? And where were you heading, anyway? Or, where had you been?”
Lola had been thinking about the answer to that very question ever since Charlotte had appeared behind her—or at least, ever since Charlotte had lowered her knife and Thor his gun. “The dog,” she said. Like his wife, Thor folded his arms. The towel fell to the floor. He kicked at it. Lola, her embarrassment relegated to secondary status, blurted out the only excuse she’d been able to come up with. “I couldn’t sleep. So I
went downstairs for a snack. I was going to share it with him. He’s pretty spoiled.”
“Yes,” Charlotte agreed. “He is.”
Lola tried to detect a softening in her words and settled on the fact that Charlotte had responded at all. “But when I let him out, he took off after something. I was scared. It’s so cold. So I bundled up and went looking for him. But I can’t find him.” At least the hitch in her voice was real.
“Poor thing.” Charlotte handed the knife to her husband and put her arm around Lola, who slumped into the welcome solace of her embrace. “Thor, either put some clothes on or go back to bed. I’m going to get Lola warmed up and fed, and then we’re going to help her find her dog.”
BUT WHEN Thor came down to another of Charlotte’s gargantuan breakfasts, dressed—to Lola’s great relief—in his uniform, albeit one free of scorch marks, he advised against any such thing. “We’ll find your dog. But best you stick to your plan to go straight home. We’ve hit a rough patch here, what with that girl getting killed, and I don’t see things getting better anytime soon.”
“And those guys,” Lola reminded him.
“What guys?”
“The ones killed on the rig.”
Thor waved a bacon strip. “The way these things usually turn out, it’ll be an accident. Thank the good Lord. I don’t have time for another investigation right now. As to your dog—”
Lola leaned across the table. The sweetness of the syrup-drenched pancakes clashed with the salty tears at the back of her throat. “You have to understand. I just can’t leave here without him. He was my best friend’s dog.” And now he’s my best friend, she added silently.
Charlotte poured more coffee. “We’ll find him, sweetheart. And we’ll take good care of him until we can get him back to you. Do you two have enough food?”
