by Gwen Florio
Thor’s voice rang out. “You mean Princess? She’s right here.”
A BOOT thudded against Lola’s shin. She stumbled and would have fallen again but for the support of the branding iron. Thor moved past, down onto the trailer’s steps, Tina in a chokehold, his forearm like a vise across her neck. He raised the other hand as if to emphasize the gun it held, then pressed the barrel once again to Tina’s temple.
Charlie’s own gun twitched in his hand.
Thor dug the barrel of his gun into Tina’s flesh. She sagged back against him. Her lips parted, a single word escaping, the one she’d said so prayerfully during her ordeal and now, just at the moment it seemed she might have been saved, mouthed again as a sort of farewell.
“Mommy.”
TRAILER DOORS opened anew. Men, faces alight with curiosity, took in the scene, the weeping women, the inadequately clad girls, one sheriff immobilized with his gun drawn, the other facing him with a gun to a girl’s head.
The onlookers read it wrong. “About time somebody cleaned up that nest of sin.” Heads swiveled. The man who’d spoken was older than many of the others. He’d stepped coatless from his unit. Strands of fine grey hair blew about his face. He had the hooded eyes and elongated mournful countenance of a Castilian noble who’d awoken one morning to find himself in the wrong century and the wrong place. A gold cross dangled from a chain around his neck. It caught the weak sunshine and held it.
“Well, listen to the preacher.” Another man stepped forward. Lola took in the Oakleys, the angled toothpick, and recognized a man who’d approached her at The Mint that first night in Burnt Creek. He’d added a leather bomber jacket, jaunty but entirely impractical for the weather. Men slapped his back. Probably the trailer’s best customers, Lola thought. But others moved to stand with the first speaker, faces set. Lola recognized Dave, the man who’d smuggled her into the camp and dropped her at Mama’s, before she’d realized what it was. He hovered between the groups before joining the one clustered around the older man.
“Somebody call 9-1-1,” Charlie said. “Tell them to get some backup out here.” Several men tapped at their cellphones.
Thor ground the gun deeper against Tina’s head. Her face went ashy except for the reddening circle where the barrel scraped her skin. “Make all the phone calls you want. 9-1-1’s just going to go to my office. He doesn’t have jurisdiction here. Can’t none of you stop me.”
“They can,” said Charlie. He pursed his lips, pointing with them toward the women. “And them.” He lifted his chin toward the man wearing the cross, and the others around him. He started, looking beyond them. His face lightened. “And them.”
A knot of men jogged around the corner toward the trailer—the uncles and Joshua, too, sprinting ahead. “We got here as fast as we could, once we found out where the women were headed,” he called to Charlie.
Lola had a good idea how he’d figured that out. Jan must have phoned him from the road to let him know. She wondered if Jan had called Charlie, too.
Joshua took in the crowds of men, the girls and the aunties—and the raised guns. He held up his hand. The uncles stopped behind him. The man camp went silent. Even the wind held its breath. Thor’s voice emerged relaxed and confident.
“You all have got some wrong ideas in your head. This girl was trying to escape custody,” he announced to the crowd. “She’s under arrest. Just like these others. Move along now, unless you want to join them. Last I checked, prostitution is a crime in North Dakota. I think more than a few of you know these girls.” Up and down the rows of trailers, doors slammed behind men who subscribed to the eminent good sense of Thor’s argument.
“Go on, now,” Thor said to the rest of the onlookers. “Get on out of here. The missus and myself, and this girl, too, have a trip to take.”
“What about me?” Dawg’s voice rose in a high whine. Bub circled him, growling, easily dodging a ponderous kick.
“You’re driving.”
Dawg rubbed his hands along his bare arms and smiled.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Charlie said.
“Go ahead,” Thor challenged, lowering his voice so that only those closest could hear. “Try and stop me. First person who takes a single step my way and this girl is nothing more than a big damn mess of red on all that pretty white snow.”
“And the next step you take after that will be the one that gets you caught,” Charlie said. “Then you’ll be facing a homicide charge in addition to all the other ways you’re in trouble for whatever this little operation of yours is here. It’s not worth it.”
“It’s not? Goddammit, stand up straight. You’re killing my arm.” Thor jerked his elbow upward.
Tina’s feet scrabbled for purchase on the trailer’s slick metal doorstep. Her mother sank to her knees in the snow. “Please,” Brenda Kicking Woman moaned.
“Talk to your Sheriff Laurendeau,” Thor told her. “He’s the one can make this easy. Here’s how it’s going to go. Dawg brings the truck around. The missus and myself and this one here”—Tina made a choking noise—“get in. And we leave. It’s that simple.”
Charlie gestured with his gun. “There’s nothing simple about it. No, I take it back. There’s one simple thing. You’ll be caught in a New York minute.”
Thor’s laugh seemed entirely genuine. “But we’re not in New York. This is Dakota. I’m the nearest law in two hours. By the time any of ’em get here, we’re long gone.”
Charlie shook his head. “But I’m right here. What’s to stop me from tailing you? And even if I didn’t, they’d get you at the border.”
“I’ll tell you what to stop either of those things.” The voice was Charlotte’s. She moved from the kitchen past Lola to stand in the doorway behind her husband. Lola’s head still throbbed, but had cleared considerably.
“This girl here,” Charlotte said. “She’ll stop them. Thor. Make her quit sniveling.”
Thor lifted the gun and rapped Tina’s head before jamming it back against her temple.
“Please!” Tina’s mother screamed.
“Pay attention.” Charlotte again. She shoved her hands into her apron pockets and rounded her shoulders against the cold. “If you follow us,” she said to Charlie, “this one dies. We get stopped at the border, this one dies. We get stopped ten miles inside Canada, this one dies. We get stopped as we’re boarding an airplane, any airplane going any place—you get the picture.”
Charlie’s knuckles were white against the dull black of his service weapon. “You can’t keep her forever.”
“We can keep her long enough. You’ll get a phone call from her. That’s when you’ll know we’re gone and you can come pick her up.”
Tina’s mother fell, hands clawing at the snow as though somewhere beneath it lay the answer to an impossible situation. Charlie’s voice was very tired. “How do we know that you just won’t kill her anyway?”
Charlotte chortled. “You don’t.” She moved closer still to her husband, slid one hand from her apron pocket and rested it on Thor’s shoulder in wifely support. “But what’s the alternative? Come after us and she dies for sure.” She kneaded her fist into her husband’s shoulder. “Honey,” she said. “You’re so tense. Relax. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Lola held her breath throughout the exchange. Everyone seemed to have forgotten about her. Charlotte adjusted her chubby hand yet again, just below Thor’s shoulder, largely out of sight from the people standing frozen in place in front of the trailer. Something poked from Charlotte’s fist, something small and round and silver. Popguns, Charlie had derided them. Ladies like them, he’d told Lola, because they’re small. Cute. It’s the only gun his mother would carry. But you’ve got to be entirely too close to do any damage, he’d told her, and you’d better shoot straight because accuracy isn’t their strong suit.
Charlotte’s hand wormed around, getting the best aim on Charlie, who stood only ten paces away. Maybe fifteen. Close enough, Lola thought, even for the Saturday night specia
l that Charlotte had retrieved from Lola’s coat. Charlotte’s hand stopped moving. She’d found her sight line.
Lola lunged, swinging as she stood, pouring all her strength into a single fluid motion, the branding iron splitting the back of Charlotte’s head, the shot meant for Charlie soaring wild into the winter sky.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Lola hung in the trailer’s doorway, clutching at the jamb for support, looking out over a crime scene that consisted of a dead woman in the bloody snow, a suspect whose wrists were so large Charlie abandoned his metal cuffs in favor of a triple wrapping of the plastic ones, and a traditionally cuffed sheriff—who’d lost his grip on his own gun when his wife’s body slammed into him—cursing in the back of Charlie’s cruiser. Not to mention a halfdozen hysterical girls and the aunties and uncles, and onlookers forming a crowd that grew deeper and closer by the moment. Lola eased down the trailer steps and stood at their base, Bub plastered against her legs, and let Charlie sort it out.
He spoke first to Alice Kicking Woman, as was proper. “It’d be best if you and these young ladies and their mothers could please wait in the van.” He pointed to the coats the woman had shed into the snow when they began their dance. “The girls need those coats more than you do right now. Roy can turn up the heat in the van on high. I’d grab some blankets from the trailer, too, but it’s a crime scene now.”
Nancy deRoche fairly spat the words at him: “I wouldn’t go back into that trailer if I was frostbitten from my head to my ass.”
Charlie almost smiled. “I can appreciate that.” He stepped back and held out his arm to help Alice up the van’s steps. “The van, then.”
Even though Nancy and the other girls were the most lightly clad, they stood back and waited as Alice and then their mothers clambered into the van’s lifesaving warmth, centuries of tribal politesse trumping the modern insults of the moment. The uncles milled around outside, casting dark looks whose intent left nothing to the imagination toward Thor and Dawg. Each time Dawg made as though to move, Charlie swung his gun toward him.
“These women need hot food. I need you all to go find some—coffee, soup, whatever you can—and bring it back to them,” Charlie suggested. No one moved. “Now. Your wives and daughters need your attention more than these pieces of nothing.” Joshua stood rooted, but the others moved off muttering toward their assigned task. Charlie raised his voice so that the lookie lous, who had swarmed again from their units at the sound of the shot, could hear. “I’ll need you all to step back and give us some room. We may need to collect some evidence from this area. And I’ll need to take statements from anyone who watched this go down. All of you who took any photos or videos on your cellphones, don’t even think about deleting them. But if any of you have some coats or blankets you could share with these young ladies and their mothers—” He looked stone-eyed at men who no doubt had availed themselves of the girls’ forced services. Finally, a few ducked their heads and shuffled their feet in the snow and then returned to their own trailers, emerging with arms full of warm clothing. Charlie handed the heap into the van except for one thin blanket, which he used to conceal the mess that was Charlotte’s head. Next he turned his attention to Dawg, sitting in the snow, straining unsuccessfully against the plastic binding his wrists behind him. Lola watched his gaze move from Dawg to the cruiser and back again. Dawg’s lips and fingers had gone beyond blue to a blackish-purple. It would be dangerous, Lola knew, for him to spend much more time in the snow. But Charlie didn’t dare put him in the cruiser with Thor. Charlie’s gaze swept the crowd, alighting on Joshua. “I’m deputizing you. That okay?”
Joshua snapped to attention. Lola thought he might salute. Charlie unlocked the cruiser’s trunk, removed a rifle and handed it to Joshua. “Take him to the guard shack and keep him there,” he told Joshua. “If he tries to run—and I mean if he so much as eyeballs you funny—take him down.”
Joshua turned the gun over twice in his hands. Then he waved it in Dawg’s direction. “You heard him.” Dawg struggled to his feet and found his balance, quickly ahead of Joshua, his boots leaving triangle-studded tracks in the snow.
Lola knelt and buried her hands in Bub’s fur. Charlie turned.
“Lola.”
“Hey, Charlie.”
And then, to her horror, the world went aslant. If only she hadn’t dropped the branding iron, she thought. It could have kept her upright. But the branding iron was gone and she was falling, fast, too fast to even put her arms out to keep her face from bashing into the polished granite surface of the snow.
LOLA CAME to in the van, stretched out across the long seat in the back. She heard a commotion and tried to lift her head. Pain wiggled its knife between her eyes.
“Put your head back down.” Jan stood over her with a handful of snow. She packed it onto Lola’s forehead. The girls and aunties crowded close behind. “Don’t move.”
“Oh,” Lola moaned. “That feels good. Good being relative at this point.”
“Don’t talk, either.” Jan glared down at her through tears. “Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble?”
At the sight of the tears, something coiled within Lola loosened. She and Jan were going to be all right. “How’d you find this place?” she murmured.
Josephine pushed her way past the others to stand next to Jan. “A menu for Mama’s was in Judith’s pocket. Charlie showed it around last night, asked if it meant anything to anyone. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out, especially given that Jan had told us you were staying with ‘Mama’ Brevik. Only problem was, we didn’t put it all together until late. It took awhile to round up everyone. We left about four this morning.”
It took me long enough to put it together, Lola thought. But then, no one had hurled “dark meat” epithets her way for half her life. She pushed away the thought and tried to take satisfaction in the fact that Charlie had taken Judith and the missing girls seriously after all. He just hadn’t wanted her to know it. But why had the women preceded Charlie to Mama’s? She wondered as much aloud.
“He didn’t know we were coming,” Jan volunteered when no one else said anything. “The aunties decided on their own to see if the girls were there, and to bring them home. They thought it would be easier on everyone if the whole thing were on the down low. The idea was that the dance would shame whoever had them into letting them leave.”
It might have worked, Lola thought, if they’d been dealing with people who had even a shred of shame. Which Thor and Charlotte didn’t.
“And you just happened to be with them?”
Jan’s response was oblique. “I heard they were going.”
From Joshua no doubt, Lola thought. She ventured a guess. “So you just showed up and hitched a ride with them.” Taking advantage of the fact that the aunties would never have been rude enough to turn her away. That, and they probably wouldn’t consider that even though they’d all known Jan from childhood, her determination to be on that bus likely stemmed at least as much from her pursuit of a story than those lifelong friendships. Melting snow trickled down Lola’s temples. Her head felt better. She started to sit up again. This time, her stomach rebelled. She turned on her side, retching toward the floor. “Sorry,” she gasped when the spasms ended. “I think I picked up a bug while I was here.”
Josephine put her hands to Lola’s shoulders and gently pushed her back down. “You just rest. And don’t worry. It goes away after a couple of months.”
“A couple of months?” Lola tried once again to sit up. Josephine increased the pressure on her shoulders. Smiles flitted among the women.
“Oh, dear child,” Josephine said. “Don’t you know you’re pregnant?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Five miles passed. Ten. Twenty. Lola sat small beneath the weight of the silence within the cruiser, the only sounds the roar and fade of passing trucks, the whomp of snow against the side of the car followed by the thunk of wiper blades to clean the cruiser’s begrimed
windshield. The horizon fled before them, level as a chalked string snapped against the sky. Lola sneaked an occasional sidelong glance at Charlie. But his jaw remained set, hands clenched around the wheel, gaze drilling straight ahead. It had taken more than two hours for a contingent of highway patrolmen and federal agents and sheriffs from neighboring counties to make their way to Burnt Creek and take Thor and Dawg into custody. The women and their daughters were long gone by that point.
“You can’t leave,” Charlie had protested as they prepared to go. “Someone will need to take their statements. And the girls should be checked out at the clinic here.”
“We have our own clinic on the reservation. After what they’ve been through, another day isn’t going to make a bit of difference.” Josephine moved aside so Alice could come forward. Smart move, Lola thought. Charlie would never dare disagree with an elder.
Alice’s lips worked soundlessly while she gathered enough breath to force the words. “We’re taking our girls home. They can give their statements there—if they feel like it.”
“I’ll ride home with them,” Jan said into the hush. Lola wondered how long it would take Jan to pull out her notebook.
“Me, too,” Lola said.
“No, you won’t,” Charlie said. “You’re coming with me.”
Jan raised her eyebrows and whistled soundlessly. “Good luck,” she mouthed to Lola. She grabbed the handle on the side of the van and swung herself inside just before the door closed. Charlie hadn’t spoken to Lola since.
Bub lay across Lola’s lap, sleeping so deeply that even his legs, which usually paddled ceaselessly during his dreams, were still. At some point, a man from one of the trailers had emerged with a paper plate of roast beef. “That dog’s been hanging around for a couple of days,” he said, in the elongated syllables of the bayou. “Might be it’s a bit peaked.” He returned with a second plate, heaped higher still, when he saw how quickly Bub inhaled the first. Lola drummed her fingers lightly against Bub’s distended belly. “Who told you?” she said, as though she and Charlie had been chatting all along.
