Montana (16 page)

The kitchen light felt needlessly harsh after the night’s cloaking comfort. Her open laptop mocked her from the table. She needed to look up TMResources, the name of the group that had paid for the campaign literature. A yawn caught her, then another. That particular task, she decided, could wait until morning. She closed the laptop and dumped food into the dog dish and stumbled toward the bedroom. She reached to draw the curtains. There weren’t any. The bed itself—an outsize log affair that must have been Mary Alice’s idea of an over-the-top Montana-style joke—took up most of the space, frustrating Lola’s routine of dragging it away from the window. She kicked off her boots and removed the packets of money from them, pulling the rest from her clothing. She slid the bills between the mattress and box springs, and fell onto the bed and dragged a quilt atop her. She realized she’d forgotten to lock the door and remembered Verle’s comments about locking her car. Maybe it was time to let go of some of her precautions, along with her sleeping pills, she decided, reaching for the bottle before replacing it unopened in the nightstand’s drawer. She took a last look out the window and realized why Mary Alice had chosen to forego curtains. Stars confettied the sky in a great glittering display, flawless diamonds on a jeweler’s black velvet swatch. A flash of heat lightning merged the stars’ light into a single crackling vein across the sky. “Oh,” Lola whispered to Bub, who had crept on the bed and was nosing about, seeking maximum warmth. “It’s so beautiful.”

She floated into blessedly dreamless sleep, not waking until a chunk of limestone exploded the bedroom window and landed an inch from her head.

CHAPTER TWELVE

L
ola, half-sunk in sleep and waking fast, rolled away from the window and off the bed, crawling backward on knees and elbows.

She lunged for the kitchen, sweeping her hand along the counter, wrapping her fingers with relief around the bear spray. She slid back to the floor in a far corner of the kitchen, clutching the canister in both hands. Tried to still her breathing to listen for footsteps—as if she’d be able to hear anything over Bub’s crazed barking. She hissed and he quieted immediately. It was not an improvement.

The sounds of the night flowed in. The wind swept past with its usual fanfare. Branches scraped irritably against one another. Lola’s heart walloped her ribcage. Things took shape. The bedroom doorway, with its glimpse of the bed, serenely adrift in the starlit darkness, trailing shards of glass like phosphorescence. The window’s jagged hole, larger than Lola would have thought, indicated considerable velocity. Whoever had flung the rock had been close. She tightened her hands around the bear spray and wished she’d read the instructions more closely. It was meant for grizzly bears, five hundred pound behemoths whose teeth could pierce her skull with the ease of a toothpick sliding into an olive. Anything that might discourage a grizzly could certainly knock a man on his ass. Then she thought of Mary Alice. She’d had a gun. It hadn’t stopped a goddamn thing.

She whimpered. Bub’s head whipped around. Then he resumed his singular, quivering stance. The phone mocked her from its spot across the room. In the time it would take her to whisper a plea to a 9-1-1 operator, someone could come through the door and dispatch her. Besides, she’d interviewed too many snipers. “Movement and sound, they’re our best friends,” one had said. He spoke approvingly of deer and rabbits, the way they froze. Lola had never liked the analogy. Deer and rabbits were prey, she’d pointed out, meek, trembling creatures.

“But they’re prey that have figured out ways to survive,” came the laconic response. “Ever notice how many deer and rabbits there are in the world?”

So she sat frozen with her back pressed into the corner, barely daring to breathe, reasoning that her only chance was to hear her assailant before he heard her. The microwave’s green glowing numbers showed three
A
.
M
. Two hours before the sky would brighten. Of course, Lola thought, daylight meant only that she’d be able to see his face as he came for her.

She wondered what Mary Alice had seen.

She drew her knees against her chest and rested the bear spray atop them, and pressed her lips tight against the moan trying to escape.

S
OMEHOW
, at some point, she dozed. She awoke to grey light leaking through the windows and Bub’s low, humming growl. She caught her breath and squinted toward the bedroom. As far as she could tell, Bub had not moved from his place all night. His growl lowered and deepened. A moment later, she heard a car. “God,” she said aloud. Her stalker must have left at some point. She could have dialed for help. But now he was coming back and it was too late.
“God.”

She leapt to her feet, possibilities racing through her mind as the sound of the approaching car grew louder. If she fled through the front door, she’d run right into him. She reached for the phone, but realized she could be dead several times over before the sheriff could get to the cabin from town. She heard the car make the final turn that would bring it into the yard. Bub began to bark. Lola cast a last, frantic look around the kitchen. The two bottles of fruity wine from the convenience store sat on the counter. She jammed the bear spray into the waistband of her pants, grabbed one of the bottles and flattened herself against the wall by the front door.

Slam of car door. Scrape of Bub’s nails skidding into the kitchen, his barking hitting a crescendo. Footsteps on the porch. The doorknob turned.

Lola raised the bottle and swung it like a bat at a rising fastball. The glass exploded in a pink, sweet-smelling froth against a man’s head. She yanked the bear spray from her waistband, slid the safety away with her thumb and depressed the spray tab and held it down, following the man as he crumpled. He let out a gargling scream. Bub fled. The man hit the floor and rolled onto his back, hands over his face. Lola dropped the spray and reached for the shattered bottle and fell onto his chest, her knees digging into his ribs, holding her breath against the burning cloud of bear spray. She grabbed at his hair, but it was too short for purchase. She put a hand to his forehead and shoved it back, pulling his neck taut. With the other, she pressed the razored edge of the broken bottle against his throat, drawing it across the skin to a wildly throbbing spot. “Feel that?” she gasped through the spray. “It’s your carotid artery.”

He groaned. His throat convulsed. A thin scarlet thread arose beneath the glass. The floor beneath his head was a mess of blood and bits of glass and pink wine. Smell of fruit cut by blood’s coppery tinge, the bear spray overwhelming it all, searing Lola’s eyes and throat. She turned her head to one side and spat. Her hand twitched. She wanted, badly, to slide the glass deep. But she needed something else first. “Move your hands,” she commanded. “I want to see the bastard who killed my friend.”

His Adam’s apple jerked again and a different sort of noise came from him. He let his hands fall away, and despite the blood and the wine and the eyes already puffing shut from the bear spray, there was no mistaking Sheriff Charlie Laurendeau.

H
E SAT
at the table, pressing ice wrapped in a tea towel to the back of his head. Lola counted the towel ruined. He’d already stained a bath towel and the entire kitchen sink, trying to clean himself up. “You’d better hope I can get this bleeding stopped,” he told her. “Then I won’t need stitches. I don’t know how I’d explain this to Margie at the clinic.” He’d moved the bear spray and the second wine bottle to a spot behind him, and then he’d gone through the kitchen drawers and removed the sharp knives and put them in the same spot, positioning himself solidly between Lola and anything she might conceivably use as yet another weapon against him. His gun lay in his lap, his hand resting atop it. “You’re lucky I haven’t cuffed you.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you.”

All the windows in the house stood open, welcoming the wind, which obligingly rushed in, lifting the cloud of pepper spray and carrying it away. Lola and the sheriff glowered at one another. Bub crept to Charlie’s side and lay his head on his thigh, rolling a fishy eye toward Lola when she turned her glare his way. Charlie dug a finger behind the dog’s ears.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. An explanation occurred to her before he answered. “You came to make sure I haven’t left town. Well, I haven’t. Not even for a minute.”

He adjusted the ice pack. “Not unless you count that little side trip out to old Verle’s last night. Which I don’t. Lucky for you.”
Old
Verle’s. “Nice setup he’s got out there,” he continued. “You should have seen it a few years ago. You wouldn’t know it’s the same place.”

“What do you mean?” Not liking the conversation, not one bit, but grateful for a shift in focus. Sleeping with Verle was one thing. People knowing about it was quite another.

“He about lost it. He was on his way to bankruptcy, along with a lot of other folks around here. You could get yourself a Montana ranch for peanuts. Problem is, nobody even had peanuts. A lot of folks went under. Verle, though, he came back from the edge. Hooked up with some oilmen down in Denver and did well for himself. Real well, by the look of things.”

As the sheriff spoke, Bub oozed by degrees into his lap, curling like a cat beneath the big caressing hand. “I’m pretty sure he’s not supposed to do that,” Lola said. Anything to get Charlie off the topic of Verle. “Bub. Get down.” The dog opened his eyes just long enough to shoot Lola a heavy-lidded stare before falling back into some sort of canine fakery of contented sleep.

“He doesn’t respect you.” The sheriff pointed out the obvious. “You’ve got to fix that. He’s a working dog. He needs jobs. And you’ve got to take care of that horse. I’ve fed and watered it a couple of times already. That’s what brought me up here this morning. I saw your car and then the window when I drove up. Hustled on in here to make sure you were all right. Sure glad I made the effort.” He took away the towel and touched his fingers to the back of his head. They came away scarlet. He replaced the towel and pressed until his knuckles whitened.

“I checked on the horse yesterday,” Lola said. Meaning she’d stood a good distance from the corral as the horse bobbed its blocky head at her and stamped its feet on the other side of the fence. She’d gotten just close enough to ascertain that there was water in its bucket and hay in some sort of a manger affixed to the side of the shed. Other than the sugar offering before she’d gone to sleep, she’d ceased to give the horse another thought. She didn’t want to think about it now, either, given the matter at hand. Charlie would be well within his rights to charge her with assaulting an officer of the law.

He pushed himself to his feet, leaving a wet red handprint on the table. “Let’s get this over with.”

Lola sat rooted. “Are you taking me to jail?”

“No. I’m going to go take a look at the bedroom. Have you touched anything?”

She shook her head, speechless with relief.

“That’s a nice change,” he said. “Do you remember what time it happened?”

“A little before three,” she said. “I looked at the clock right afterward.”

“Okay. That’s good information. I’m going to look in the bedroom and then I’m going to look out on the porch and around the yard to see if I can find anything. You sit right here. I mean it. Don’t move.” He grabbed Bub and dragged him over to Lola. “Hold onto him. I don’t want him running around through my crime scene. Do you have some baggies?”

She started to get up, but he held up his hand. “Do. Not. Move,” he said. “Just tell me where.” She pointed toward a drawer.

He pulled plastic gloves from his pocket and snapped them onto his hands, then retrieved the baggies from the drawer. He was in the bedroom a long time. He emerged holding a jagged rock, encased in one of the bigger baggies. “Here. Look how sharp it is. You’re lucky it didn’t hit you in the head. You’d look like me right now.”

Lola tried a smile. He didn’t return it. He left the rock on the table and went outside, and came back after a few minutes with a red bandana flapping between his gloved fingers. “This yours? If it is, I won’t bag it.”