by Gwen Florio
“Lola? It’s about time. Where the hell are you?”
Lola held up her hand as though Jan could see her. “Wait—” She couldn’t risk Jan mentioning Tina.
Jan’s voice rocketed through the phone. “Just because Jorkki fired you when you didn’t show up doesn’t mean you get to quit right away. We need you more than ever now that—”
“Wait,” Lola said again. “Shut the fuck up, Mary Alice.” She spoke fast into the second of stunned silence. “I’m still out here in Burnt Creek. The truck broke down. Besides, the story got bigger. Mary Alice, I’m finding out all kinds of things about Judith. He won’t want to fire me when he hears what I’ve got. And Sheriff and Mama Brevik are being nice enough to let me stay at their place—”
Charlotte took a step toward her. Thor racked the Sig Sauer’s slide. Lola gasped and spoke faster still. “Anyhow, that’s the deal, Mary Alice. Sorry to screw up your plans. Gotta go.” Charlotte snatched the phone from her hand before she’d finished talking. She jammed her thumb against the off button and gave the phone to Thor. He sat it on the end table and smashed the butt of the gun against it until it shattered. They stood before her, faces contorted.
“Sheriff and Mama Brevik? Mama?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He keeps calling you Mother and I was nervous—I mean, my God. You’ve got that gun right on me. But there’s no way she could know about Mama’s. It was just a slip. A stupid, stupid slip.” Lola figured she was about to find out just exactly how stupid she’d been. Charlotte seemed happy to tell her.
“And you let her know you were staying here.”
“Half the town knows I’m staying here. If anyone comes looking for me, that’d be the first thing they’d find out. But they won’t. I’m fired. Didn’t you hear? Nobody’s going to come.” Lola’s voice caught, her incipient tears real.
Thor lowered the gun. “Well, if anyone does, they’re not going to find you here,” Charlotte said. “Get up. I was going to give you back your clothes, but that little stunt shows me you’re not ready for privileges. Here.” She reached for the corner of the quilt and in a single sharp move, yanked it from beneath Lola’s body. Lola tumbled to the floor. Charlotte stared at the bed. Lola scrambled to her feet and followed her gaze, trying to see what Charlotte saw. Thor voiced Lola’s thoughts.
“What’s wrong, Mother?”
“Something. Not sure what.” Charlotte bent and ran her hands over the sheet, then around the sides of the mattress. Her hand stopped at the inch of fabric protruding between the mattress and box spring. “Ah. Here’s what’s wrong.” She tugged on the fabric, drawing Lola’s makeshift rope inch by inch from its hiding place.
“Miss Lola here destroyed a perfectly good top sheet. Lord only knows what she planned to do with this.” She ran the rope through her hands. “But I know what I’m going to do with it. Thor, her hands.”
Before Lola could react, Thor had laid down his gun and grabbed both of her wrists. Charlotte ran the rope around and between them, tying it off in a knot that was cruelly tight.
“Give me the gun.” Thor handed it to her.
For a big woman, Charlotte moved fast. The Sig Sauer’s flat barrel caught Lola’s left cheek, then the right side of her jaw as she tried to twist away, no match whatsoever for Thor’s grip and Charlotte’s ferocious dexterity with her husband’s service weapon. Lola collapsed onto the floor, arms wrenching against Thor’s hold, noting a spatter of blood on the floor beside her, and tried to focus on the fact that at least the damn mess she was creating wasn’t lethal.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
In the end, Lola got her clothes back—minus, of course, the reassuring weight of the gun in the pocket of her parka. And she returned to the man camp the same way she went the first time, in the back of a truck, beneath a tarp.
Before, she’d been worried about losing Bub. Now she was worried about losing her life. In fact, until she realized they’d brought her back to the man camp, she feared they were driving her to the edge of town and beyond, some remote place where they’d position her at the edge of a ravine, put a bullet in her brain and watch her tumble over the edge, certain of the snows to come that would hide her body for so many months that its eventual discovery would barely cause a stir. It could so easily be blamed on roughnecks who’d passed through the patch months ago. So sure was she of this scenario that the glimpse of the fried chicken stand, as Charlotte and Thor rushed her from the truck and up the metal steps into the trailer, provided the first sliver of real hope she’d allowed herself. They won’t kill me here, she thought, even as they moved single file down a hallway, the tarp still over her head. They stopped. A door opened. A hand struck her back. She stumbled forward, her shins striking a bedframe. As she fell onto the mattress, someone rolled away from her.
“You should feel right at home here.” Charlotte closed the door behind her. Lola wanted to tear off the tarp, run to the door and test it; if it opened, to dash down the hall in a futile rush past Thor with his gun and Charlotte with her iron will. She forced herself to lie still instead, to slow her own breathing until she could hear the sobbing gasps of the other person on the bed. The mattress creaked. Soft hands patted at her back. Lola moaned and the hands fell away, tugging instead at the tarp. Lola blinked in the room’s harsh light. Her eyes widened. A hand fell across her mouth, suppressing sound. There before her, lines of adult worry gouged across a face that still bore a childish roundness, was Tina Kicking Woman.
TINA WRAPPED her in a grip so tight that Lola could barely breathe. Lola let Tina’s head rest on her shoulder for a moment or two, no more. Then she shoved Tina away with a hard shake. “We don’t have time for this,” she mouthed, the words barely audible. For all she knew, Charlotte was on the other side of the door. Tina’s mouth hung slack, trembling. Her broken nails dug into Lola’s hands. Her hair hung dull and tangled around a tear-streaked face. The skin around her mouth was red and raw. Lola wondered if she’d been gagged. Her words came in a stuttering plea.
“Helpmehelpmehelpme.”
Lola’s own fear took a step back in the face of the sixteen-year-old’s terror. “That’s why I’m here. To help.”
Tina’s gaze kept sliding away from Lola’s face. Her teeth rattled against one another. Lola lifted her hand to her own jaw, her cheekbone, gauging the heat and swelling there. She tried to infuse her voice with the confidence that her appearance would not have inspired.
“We’re going to get out of here. I’ve already sent a message for help.” Guilt stabbed Lola at the trust in Tina’s eyes. She prayed Tina never asked the details of that message, never realized that her call to Jan was the weakest, most bobbling Hail Mary ever lofted heavenward. “But I need all the information you’ve got. What are we dealing with here?”
Tina told Lola what she already knew. “This. It’s a whorehouse. This room is where I’m supposed to work. Charlotte called it the deluxe room. It’s because the bed is so big. You know for—” she stuttered anew “—for, for, well, for threesomes.”
“Not threesomes,” Lola snapped. “Threesomes are consensual. Rapes.” The bed nearly filled the room. The spread was satin, tiger-striped, the colors vaguely reminiscent of the star quilts at Charlie’s house that Lola had found so comforting. Gold shag carpet covered the floor. Lola wondered what warehouse had held onto that carpet for forty years, or if there were businesses that catered specifically to modern-day bordellos. A single folding chair squeezed between the bed and the fake pine-paneled wall. Maybe, Lola thought, so the clients could sit down and pull their boots on afterward. If they even took them off. Two narrow doors stood open in one wall, one revealing an empty closet, the other a claustrophobic bathroom. Lola leaned forward to get a better view. “Where’s the shower curtain?”
“I asked the same thing. That Dawg guy, the one with all the tattoos, told me they took them all away after a girl tried to hang herself with one.”
Tina forgot to lower her voice. The door flew open.
Dawg squeezed himself into the room, a rat shouldering through a mouse hole. “Somebody call me?” He shut the door behind him and crossed the room in a single step and lowered himself onto the inadequate folding chair. He crossed his arms and showed his metal-capped incisor in a grin.
“You wanted to know what we’re dealing with here?” Tina’s voice trembled so that she could barely force the words. “That. We’re dealing with that.”
DAWG WAS happy to explain, telling Lola far more than she’d demanded to know.
“Are you here to guard us?” she asked him. “Because that just seems stupid. It’s not like we can get away from here. Even if we could get out of the trailer, we’d never get out of the camp.” Trying to goad him into at least moving into the next room. She desperately wanted time alone with Tina—if she could calm her down enough, at least—to glean more information from the girl who now curled shrimplike, whimpering into a fist shoved against her teeth. “MommyMommyMommy.” Lola thought of Brenda Kicking Woman’s towering fury were she to see her daughter in such a state. Imagined a confrontation between Brenda and Dawg. Her money would be on Brenda.
“Y’all would think nobody could get out of here,” Dawg agreed, ever amiable. “But that one girl did. Ever since, Sheriff and Mama like me to stay around here whenever one of them can’t be here.”
“That one girl,” said Lola. “You must mean Judith.”
“The pretty one.” Dawg’s voice turned wistful.
Lola wanted to slap the sentiment out of him. “Not so pretty that you didn’t kill her.”
His little eyes widened. “No. I didn’t. She run off with some trucker. I was supposed to bring her back, but I never found her. But then Sheriff told me she died anyway.”
Every time Lola saw Judith in the snow, she seemed a little smaller, a little farther away, the eagle feather in her hand harder to see. She remembered Charlie’s weariness that day. He’d been up all night because of the truck accident, but it went deeper than that, a blow to his very spirit, yet another young tribal member lost to drugs. Her drifting thoughts snagged on a detail. The truck accident. “She ran off with a trucker?” she asked Dawg. “Did you go after him, too?”
Dawg’s teeth flashed. Lola wished he wouldn’t smile. “He died.” Dahd. He turned his renewed cheer upon Tina. “Don’t you cry. You’ll be fine. You’re pretty, too. I sure wish I could help you.”
“You can help her,” Lola snapped. “You could get her out of here. Keep me.” The words were out of her mouth before she could recall them. She wasn’t sure she’d meant them. In fact, she was pretty sure she hadn’t.
Dawg continued unperturbed, oblivious to her inner turmoil. “Naw. I mean help her.”
Lola kept one hand firmly on Tina’s back, smoothing circles onto her shirt, trying to calm her or at least reassure her with friendly contact. The other she raised, palm-upward, an unspoken question to Dawg.
“Whenever Sheriff and Mama get a new girl, they keep her up to the house a few days. You know, in that room you was in. Some of them girls are pretty rough. They need to dry ’em out, get ’em cleaned up. And then I go and help them, get them ready to start work over here.”
Cold washed over Lola. She had to ask. “Help them how?”
He actually blushed. Lola tried to hold onto that, to tell herself that the hulking caricature before her actually possessed some humanity. “You know. I do the things the mens do to them. To get them ready.”
The light in the room went patchy. Lola rubbed her eyes, trying to clear the cloud across her vision. Or maybe to draw it tighter, to blot out the image of Dawg assaulting girl after girl, letting each one know that no matter how onerous the task of servicing untold numbers of greasy, stinking roughnecks night after night, something far worse awaited if a girl balked. Somehow Lola managed to lean over, so that she puked on the floor instead of the bed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Don’t you move,” Dawg commanded. “I’ll get something to clean that up with.”
Lola couldn’t even look at Tina. The idea that the girl had been forced to submit to hideous carnalities with Dawg would become far too real if she did. Tina seemed to understand. “He hasn’t touched me.”
Lola dragged her sleeve across her mouth and met Tina’s eyes. “He hasn’t? Are you sure?” Lola brushed Tina’s hair away from her neck, looking for a telltale pinprick, thinking that Charlotte could just as easily have drugged Tina, too. In fact, Lola wondered if she drugged all the girls as a way of keeping them compliant.
Tina’s lips, dried and cracked, twisted in a sort of sarcasm that was a relief from her panic of minutes earlier. “They’re saving me for someone. Someone who’s paying big money.” Lola watched the fear return to her eyes as she imagined what lay in store.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. He’s driving over—they didn’t say from where. Just that he should be here t-t-tomorrow.” She pushed the words past fresh sobs.
“It takes a day to get here from just about anywhere. Even Magpie,” Lola said. Magpie. On the border of the reservation that had seen so many girls go missing over the last year. Lola couldn’t imagine that, no matter how much money was involved, and no matter how badly drug-addled the girls, they’d willingly jump at the chance to prostitute themselves—especially not so far from home. Turning the occasional trick with a Glacier-bound frat boy was one thing. But an army of roughnecks, day and night, was another matter entirely. Lola thought it unlikely that their addictions were so far gone as to make the prospect palatable. They were too young. Somebody had to be directing them there. Or luring them. Or—her stomach clenched at the thought—kidnapping them and forcing them. “Tina. How’d you end up here?”
“I don’t know,” Tina wailed. Lola put her finger to her lips.
Tina gulped for air. Lola thought of film and TV scenes of people hyperventilating, of women in childbirth. “Blow out,” she said. “Like this.” Puff. Puff. Puff.
Tina dutifully puffed, fast at first, then more slowly. Finally, she drew a single long breath. “Better.”
Lola cast an eye toward the door. The scent of fried chicken wafted into the room. In the kitchen, grease sizzled in a pan. Voices rose above the sound—Dawg and Charlotte. The latter sounded distinctly unhappy. “Make her clean it up herself,” Charlotte said.
“Tina,” Lola urged.
“I was on an assignment for the paper. They sent me out to interview somebody at a ranch. But when I got there, nobody was home. I knocked and knocked on the door and all of a sudden somebody pulled it open and put something over my mouth. I passed out.”
“Chloroform,” said Lola. “Or some facsimile. I’m pretty sure you just can’t walk into a drugstore to buy it, but I think it’s one of those things that’s easy enough to mix up. How long were you out?”
“Not long, I think. The next thing I knew, I was all tied up in the back of a car. Then they put me in what felt like a semi cab. When he used the horn, it sounded like—”
“I know what a semi horn sounds like,” Lola said. Tina needed to move it along.
“Anyhow, I ended up here.”
“What ranch?” With beef prices so low, ranching was such a losing proposition that Lola thought it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that a hard-luck rancher might try and get himself in on the girl trade.
“Old Man Sullivan’s.”
Lola thought aloud. “That doesn’t make sense. His kids have been fighting over it ever since he died last year. Nobody’s worked it since.”
Something clanked outside the door. Dawg pushed his way in, preceded by the smell of bleach. He handed Lola a ratty towel and sat a galvanized bucket on the floor. Frothy water slopped over its top. “Mama says to clean up your own mess before it soaks too far into that good carpet.”
“I heard her. You’ll have to move. I can’t clean this up with you standing there.”
“I’m supposed to watch you.”
Lola tilted the bucket and let the water f
low onto the rug. Dawg took a hasty step away. “Just stand outside until we get this done. Where the hell are we going to go? Out there?” She flapped the rag at the room’s single oblong window, high on the wall. Dawg recoiled as droplets hit his uniform. “Look at that thing,” Lola said. “It’s too small for even Tina to squeeze out of it.”
He remained stubbornly in place. “Mama says hurry up. The mens are coming soon and she doesn’t want the place smelling all barfy.”
“Lunchtime break,” Tina mouthed.
Lola waved the rag again. “Go on. Get.”
To her surprise, Dawg got. “I still don’t get it,” Lola said, returning to their earlier conversation. “Why in the world would Jorkki send you to an abandoned ranch?”
“Something about somebody looking at it for a conservation easement. It was a news story. Not another stupid fluff feature.” Pride briefly trumped fear. Tina’s shoulders straightened, her chin lifted. “Besides, Jorkki didn’t send me. Finch did. He thought it would be a good way to show Jorkki I could handle more responsibility.”
“Finch?” The rag stilled in Lola’s hands. In all the months she’d worked at the Daily Express, she’d never seen Finch go beyond his regular assignments of the obituaries, the wedding and engagement announcements, the police blotter. “The blotter,” she said.
“What about it?”
The blotter, with its endless list of local crimes and the names of those charged. The girls’ names wouldn’t have been on it, of course—they were juveniles—but it wouldn’t have been hard for Finch to figure out which families routinely strayed from the law, who struggled with nascent addictions, whose parents were less than vigilant. Who could go missing with only a resigned, “It was only a matter of time.”
Finch. His mysterious disappearances took on new meaning. Lola imagined him sailing across the Hi-Line in his Caddy, sweaty hands slipping on the steering wheel as he ferried a girl to some halfway point between Magpie and Burnt Creek where he could hand her off to Dawg.
