White Out: A Thriller (Badlands Thriller)

by Danielle Girard

  Still Mike wouldn’t meet his gaze. What the hell had happened?

  Mind racing, Iver struggled to put the night back together. Panic mounted in his chest, the kind he’d felt when he’d woken in the hospital and remembered the accident. Or rather, remembered that he couldn’t remember the accident. They had told him what had happened, that the others had died. Brolyard and Wykstra and Sanchez and Garabrant—his closest friends over there—were all dead. Everyone but him.

  This wasn’t the same. No one had died. There had been no accident. Last night, he’d done what he always did—he’d arrived at the bar around three to help the guys restock. Mike had been there early, and they’d already finished it, so Iver had hung around at the bar and shot the shit with the first patrons, who usually arrived before four. And he’d started drinking. A beer or two first, usually. Not like he was doing shots or anything. Well, not usually.

  When things got busy, he typically settled in his office and blasted Springsteen or Zeppelin or, when he was really amped up, Nirvana or old AC/DC and dealt with the paperwork—orders and payroll and taxes, the mindless shit of running his father’s bar.

  He remembered the bottle of Jack on the floor in his living room. He must have brought it home from the bar. God, he hoped that bottle hadn’t been full last night. But it couldn’t have been. That much alcohol would have killed him. He’d probably grabbed a half-empty one from behind the bar on his way out. For the drive home . . . he had driven home. That was an asshole move. He’d been doing that a fair amount lately.

  Not that lately, he thought. He’d been doing it since Debbie had left him. A year.

  “Iver?” Davis asked.

  Iver rubbed his face in an attempt to force his brain to focus. “Sorry. What were you asking?”

  Davis glanced at the detective, then back at Iver. The message between them was clear. Iver was a shit show. But so what? He hadn’t done anything wrong. Well, there was the driving. Shit, had he hit something? He opened his mouth to ask but snapped it shut.

  “Sheriff Davis was asking what time you left the bar,” the woman said, that gaze of hers like a laser into his brain.

  “Like I said, I think it was about ten thirty, but I didn’t think to check my watch.” Iver swallowed what little spit he had. “What is this all about?”

  “We need to get a sense for what happened in this bar last night,” the woman said.

  “A sense,” Iver repeated.

  The detective added nothing, and her piercing stare intensified Iver’s returning nausea. What had he done? Nothing. He hadn’t done anything. No one spoke for a minute. Iver looked back at Mike. “Kevin and Wyatt were with you last night, right? And Nate?”

  Mike nodded. “And Donnie helping on the door. We were busy, so if any of the guys had gone missing for more than the time it took to piss—” Mike looked over at the lady and cringed. “Excuse me, ma’am. Any longer than a bathroom break, I’d have noticed.”

  Iver ran a hand through his hair, the strands bent and fanned out from sleep under his fingers.

  “We’ve talked to them already,” Davis said and turned to Iver. “You got any cameras in here? Any monitoring of any kind?”

  Iver shook his head. “No. Whoever’s at the door keeps an eye on the lot, and we’ve always got a couple guys inside. We haven’t had any issues.” As he said the words, he wondered why, then, Sheriff Davis was here at this hour of the morning. He glanced at the detective, who studied him with a furrow between her brows. She reminded him of those head doctors, the psychiatrists. “You going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked Davis.

  The sheriff’s jaw worked a moment before he spoke. “A woman was murdered last night.”

  The rush of memory made Iver flinch. His neck taut, his voice hoarse from screaming. The cut on his hand. He’d been angry. Shouting. He glanced over at Mike, but his best friend was doing a damn good job of not meeting his eye.

  “Murdered?” he said. “Where?”

  “We have yet to find the crime scene,” the detective said. “But her body was found in your dumpster.”

  Your dumpster.

  Your anger. Your violence. Off your meds.

  “Something bad is going to happen, Iver,” Debbie had told him the day she’d moved out. “I can’t be here when it happens.” His ex-wife’s parting words.

  Iver shook his head. “I don’t—” He had to cough the words out. “I don’t know anything about a dead woman.”

  And he didn’t.

  Or maybe he did, and he couldn’t remember it.

  CHAPTER 7

  LILY

  Lily lasted ten minutes down a dirt road before the pain in her ankle was too debilitating for her to continue. She was about to sit down on the shoulder when she heard the spit and crunch of tires on the icy gravel road coming up behind her. She scanned the area for a place to hide but found only low grasses, nothing higher than her ankle. The driver slowed, and adrenaline washed through her belly. As the pickup stopped, Lily adjusted her hair to hang across the right side of her face, unsure if there was bruising at her temple.

  The window was down. The driver, an older man in a flannel shirt and a trucker hat with a gas-pump logo on the front, was alone in the cab. His hat read Hills Drilling, North Dakota. His face was stern, but something about it was reassuring. “Where you heading?”

  “Town,” she said, pulling her gaze from the hat. North Dakota. Had his license plates said North Dakota, too? She hadn’t thought to look. Her identification card was from Arizona, but Brent Nolan’s license was from North Dakota. How the hell had she ended up in North Dakota?

  “You’re in luck,” he said. “Hop in.”

  She pried the door open and used her arms to lift herself so that she didn’t have to put weight on her ankle.

  “Name’s Jim,” he said. “And what’s your name?”

  Never tell anyone your name. She searched her mind for another name.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he continued before she could respond. “You’re little Lily Baker.”

  Lily felt her lips part in a rush of breath, as though she’d been punched in the gut. She looked outside. Surely this wasn’t Arizona, so how did this man know her?

  “Wow,” he said, staring alternately between her and the dirt road. “Look how grown up you are. I remember when you were knee high to a grasshopper.”

  Still, she said nothing. Questions swirled in her mind, but how could she ask? Where did she start?

  The truck idled loudly as Jim removed his hat as though to give her a better look at his face. “You probably don’t remember me. It’s Jim Hill. I was a friend of your parents.”

  The word parents made her chest swell. Tears burned in her eyes. She did live here. She searched the landscape for something familiar, but it was low hills and grasses in every direction.

  “You look just like your mom did at your age—you’re, what, twenty-five, twenty-six?” Jim grinned, and Lily felt her own angst lessen. This was home. “The trouble your dad and I used to get in. We were the same class, did you know?” Jim glanced over conspiratorially. “We used to ride our bicycles right down the main hallway of school, and your father would leave these huge skid marks. He could stop that bike on a dime.”

  Lily smiled. Her father was funny, a clown.

  “Another time, your dad loosened the joints on the math teacher’s chair. Mrs. Penderson, she was a fussy, uptight thing who liked to slam herself into her chair when we misbehaved. Sure enough, your dad got her all frustrated, and she slammed down, and her chair just collapsed.” Jim laughed.

  Lily looked out the window as Jim told stories about her father, and she found herself smiling at the antics. Even the pain in her ankle seemed to abate. Within ten minutes, they arrived in a small residential area and then a single street of businesses. As Jim turned onto Main Street, a sign welcomed them to Hagen, North Dakota. Population 864. She read the numbers again. Eight hundred and sixty-four people.

  “Don’t k
now when they’ll fix that sign,” Jim said. “Got to be near fourteen or fifteen hundred by now, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah,” she said. Fifteen hundred people. It was so small.

  “Where am I taking you?” he asked as he headed down Main Street.

  “I might just go home,” she said.

  “Sure thing, Lily. Where are you living these days?”

  Her ID had an Arizona address. Where was she living?

  She cleared the dust from her throat. “Actually, I need to visit a friend at the hospital.”

  “Oh no. Nothing serious, I hope.”

  She clamped her mouth shut.

  Jim shook his head and raised a hand. “Sorry,” he said quickly. “Starting to sound like my wife, Annie, asking all sorts of questions. None of my business. I’ll drop you at the hospital straightaway.”

  “That would be great. Thanks.”

  Lily watched the streets, the small houses, the businesses. Home, she thought to herself. This is home. She would go to the hospital to check on Brent, and then she’d find her own house. Contact her parents.

  She searched the truck’s dash for a clock. “Do you happen to have the time?”

  Jim turned his wrist to look at his watch. “Just about nine fifteen now.”

  “Nine fifteen,” she repeated.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what’s the date today?”

  He glanced over at her.

  “I should know,” she said quickly. “I’ve been on the road a few days, and I’m afraid I lost track.”

  He glanced at her again before answering. “This here’s the seventh.”

  “The seventh,” she repeated. “Sure.”

  “January seventh,” he said, eyeing her.

  “Of course,” she told him.

  A beat passed in quiet, Jim watching her from the corner of his eye. “I was at your dad’s service last year,” Jim said, his tone softening. “Guess it’s been almost two years now.”

  Service. She blinked back the well of tears. Her father was dead.

  Jim shook his head. “I should have come up to say hello, but there were so many folks, you know,” he went on. “I was sorry about his passing.”

  She nodded mutely, trying to stir up memories of her father’s funeral. But it was blank.

  “Oh, jeez,” Jim said, patting her awkwardly on the shoulder. “I didn’t mean to upset you. You surely been through enough not to have to listen to an old man prattle on.”

  Lily shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  Jim turned into a parking lot and pulled to the front of the hospital, a small, single-level brick building. “You sure you can get inside on that ankle?” he asked. “Looks like you hurt it.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she assured him. “Thanks again.”

  Jim turned to face her. “Your dad was a good man, Lily, but he never did recover from losing your mom. She went way too early.”

  Lily barely heard the words, her hand on the handle of the door. She couldn’t escape the truck fast enough.

  “You be careful,” Jim called after her. “Call on us up at the house if you need anything.”

  Not just her father. Both of her parents were dead. A tear slipped down her cheek, burning against her skin. She wiped it away and hobbled toward the hospital door.

  CHAPTER 8

  IVER

  Cal whined, and Iver put a hand on the soft fur of his neck in an effort to calm the dog—or maybe to calm himself. Davis pulled out his phone and placed it in front of Iver on the table. “Does this woman look familiar to you?”

  Iver set down the pill bottle and drew breath through his teeth, filling his lungs before lifting the phone. The vision in his left eye was still blurry, and he couldn’t quite make out her face. He used his fingers to zoom in until he could see her features. She was about the right age to work in the bar. He tended to employ women in their mid- to late twenties and always from somewhere other than Hagen.

  The girls who grew up in Hagen were sisters or cousins of guys he’d known in high school. No one wanted their sister or cousin working in his bar. Mostly he hired from the community college two towns over—the students were better workers, more focused. But she was not familiar. He shook his head. “No,” he said, the word catching on something in his throat. Not something. Fear.

  “You’ve never seen her in here?” Davis said again.

  “No. Never.” He looked up at Mike. “You seen her?”

  “No. And Nate and Kevin and Wyatt neither.”

  Iver felt the slightest bit of relief. If no one had seen her in here, then he hadn’t seen her either. Right? “Nate would know,” Iver told the sheriff. “He’s good at faces. Or Donnie, since he’s at the door. I spend most of the night back in the office.”

  “And the office doesn’t have a door to the outside?” the woman detective asked.

  Iver’s pulse seemed to beat directly through his left eye.

  “No,” Sheriff Davis said to her and turned back to Iver. “Only way out of the office is through the bar.”

  Iver thought about the small window above the desk. As kids, he and Mike used to climb into the bar through that window to steal liquor. Until his father had caught them.

  Iver nodded. “Right.” He could barely hold her gaze, the way his head was pounding. Maybe these were routine questions. Maybe they asked everyone. The pain was escalating. He felt like he might throw up. He needed to lie down.

  “What time did you come in yesterday?” Davis asked.

  “Around three,” he said. “Nate and Mike were already here.”

  “And you left at ten thirty, you said?” Davis asked.

  “About then,” Iver said, unable to get rid of the bitter taste now caught in his throat. Maybe they were right to ask him. He tried to remember what he’d been doing before he’d left the bar. The night would have been in full swing. Sometimes, he stood behind the bar and watched. Other times, he stayed in his office and drank alone. Most nights it was all a little fuzzy. Last night, it was a black hole. He recalled that Nate had come in at some point to tell him they were running low on Seagram’s Seven. He’d made a note. Or was it Beam?

  “And you didn’t come back for any reason?” Davis asked.

  He shook his head, willing the words from his mouth. “No.” It sounded like he was choking.

  “Anyone corroborate your story, Iver?” Davis asked. “Was your wife home?”

  The word wife jolted his insides. Every damn time. Iver forced himself to look Davis in the eye. “She moved out,” Iver said. “Almost a year now.”

  Mike shifted beside him, his gaze aimed at the floor, as though uncomfortable hearing Iver talk about his divorce. They didn’t talk about stuff like this. They weren’t that type of friends. Not anymore, anyway. Somewhere along the way, they’d stopped talking about things that mattered.

  Maybe it was him. Maybe Afghanistan had made him into someone who was hard to talk to.

  “I’m sorry,” Davis said, and the table was quiet a moment. Perhaps Davis was thinking about his own wife. Iver couldn’t remember her name now.

  What was the right response? I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry and pissed and angry, and most nights I’m so lonely that I stay at my bar until I’m just buzzed and tired enough that I can go home, take my meds, and not even know that I’m in my own bed, let alone that no one is there with me.

  “You see any new faces in the bar last night?” Davis asked. “Guys from the camp or anything?”

  The “man camp,” as they called it, was a Quonset-hut-like building on the north side of town that housed the fracking workers who’d come to Hagen when the drilling had started. The building contained tiny single bedrooms and communal showers where the men who worked the drilling could live on the cheap. Drilling in Hagen wasn’t a huge operation, nothing like the Bakken area. In Hagen, drilling jobs were more highly prized and scarce, so the camp residents tended to keep to themselves and stay out of trouble. But Iver hadn’t n
oticed anyone new last night.

  “Don’t think so,” he said.

  “Me neither,” Mike agreed.

  “Doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone from up there in the bar,” Iver added, thinking it would be good to have another suspect. A suspect, he corrected. There was no suspect here. Not unless he was one.

  Davis was still watching Iver. “Mike said he and Nate, Wyatt, and Kevin all left at the same time, around one forty-five,” Davis said.

  Iver shrugged. “Last call is twelve forty-five, bar closes at one, so that’s about right.”

  “But no wife at home?” Davis asked Mike, and Iver could see from his friend’s expression that it wasn’t the first time he’d asked.

  “No wife.” Mike’s gaze was nailed to the floor, as though not having a wife were deeply shameful.

  “He lives in an apartment above his parents’ garage,” Iver said.

  Mike shot him a look of surprise.

  “Your mother still a light sleeper?” Iver asked, remembering how hard it used to be for Mike to sneak out. His mother woke if he hiccupped in the night. “She would have heard you come home.”

  Mike shifted in his seat. “True. She does sleep pretty light.”

  Davis looked like he was about to say something but closed his mouth.

  The pain swelled in Iver’s brain until his head threatened to explode. He bent over and gripped his temples between his palms.

  “Can I ask what you have?” the detective asked.

  “A headache,” he said, holding his breath and trying to sit back up.

  “Migraine?” Her gaze shifted to his pill bottle.

  She was definitely like one of those head doctors. He tucked the pills in his pocket. “Something like that,” he told her.

  “You okay?” Davis asked.

  “Yeah. Sure,” he said.

  “What happened to your hand?”