TWENTY-TWO

“Now you know,” Tyson said, “why we had to cook up that bullshit story about Mike falling asleep while he was on watch.”

Tommy bobbed his head. “Had to.”

With some effort, Lola lifted her hand to signal the bartender. “Whiskey,” she said. “Jameson’s, if you’ve got it. A double.”

“All around?”

“Hell, yeah,” Tommy and Tyson said in unison.

The Jameson’s burned, doing exactly what it needed to do, focusing her thoughts on something other than the horror that had just been laid out before her. “Better to think Mike died falling asleep—”

“Yeah. As a, you know, mercy,” Tommy said.

“To his family,” Tyson added. The words had the air of rehearsal. They held the shot glasses over their beer mugs and released them with a splash, lifting mugs to their lips and canting their heads back, Adam’s apples jerking until the shot glasses clinked against their teeth.

Lola was tempted to follow suit with her own whiskey, but sipped instead. “A mercy to you, too. That court-martial business. That’s some scary shi—. Some scary stuff.”

“It would have been on Pal.” Tyson called for more shots and fresh mugs.

Lola decided that the wiser course was to go along. Even though she knew, and they clearly did, too, that the shooting of an unarmed civilian would have fallen on the whole group, and fallen harder still for their not reporting the true circumstances. She glanced at her blank notebook.

Tyson followed her gaze. “All of that was—what do you guys say? Off the record. That’s it, right? Off the record.”

Lola slapped some money on the bar. “That’s exactly how you say it. It means I can’t quote you on anything you just told me. So your asses are covered.”

Let them think they had their secret, she thought. Now that she knew what had really happened, all she had to do was verify it elsewhere. She gathered up Margaret and bade them a distracted goodbye, already thinking of the new request for information she was going to file with the Department of Defense.

Pal was sitting on the porch steps when they pulled up to the house, lacing up her running shoes.

“Anybody want to come on a run with me? Lola?” It was the first time she’d made anything resembling a gesture of friendship. Earlier, Lola would have jumped at the chance. Even if it meant running, a direct contradiction of her opposition to all forms of exercise. Now, the idea of running with someone who’d killed an innocent man, and not only killed him but for fun, nauseated her. Lola had been in the villages, and she knew that widowhood could bring slow starvation for the man’s wife and children.

“God, no,” she said. Then, to soften it, added, “I can’t leave Margaret alone.”

“We can just run back and forth, so that we can see her on the porch. Besides, Bub and Jemalina are with her. Neither of them would let anyone get within three feet of that child. Come on.” She looked Lola up and down, taking in her T-shirt and shorts and the running shoes Lola wore in place of her wintertime hiking boots. “You’ve got the right shoes.”

“But I don’t run in them,” Lola protested. “I just wear them because they’re comfortable. To walk in. Slowly.”

Pal grabbed Lola’s arm and pulled her away from the truck. “Just a little ways. It’ll be good for you.” She broke into a jog, still holding Lola’s arm. Lola pulled back. Pal’s grip loosened not at all. Lola stumbled, then found herself moving beside Pal in the slowest of shuffles. Her fists clenched. Who was this murderer, dragging her away from her child?

Pal let go just in time. “Let’s pick it up.”

Lola glanced back. As Pal had promised, she could still see Margaret, flanked by Jemalina and Bub, neither of them looking particularly happy with the situation. That makes three of us, Lola thought. They ran up a slight rise. Lola’s breath came harder. Sweat ran into her eyes. It stung. Right about the time she thought her lungs would burst, they came to the top of the rise.

“We’ll run along the ridgeline,” Pal said. “Otherwise we won’t be able to see Margaret.”

Back on level ground, she picked up the pace yet again. Lola lengthened her own stride. If she was going to be this miserable, she thought, she might as well make the most of it. She pulled alongside Pal. “I don’t know if your cousin told you,” she gasped, “but I spent some time in Afghanistan, too. Years, actually. I’d love to compare notes.” If her oxygen deprivation hadn’t approached dangerous levels, Lola would have held her breath awaiting Pal’s response. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. Pal turned her head and gave her a long look, then sprinted away, down the other side of the ridge, out of sight of Margaret, where she knew Lola wouldn’t follow, kicking up her speed so that Lola couldn’t catch her even if she’d tried.

“Charlie?”

Lola pressed her cellphone tight against her cheek, wishing that, for all her ambivalence about marrying the man, she were in his arms instead of being separated by nearly six hundred miles. Charlie’s most compelling appeal was his quiet, uncompromising strength, which was also the quality that left her most wary. When a potential threat—which was how she was starting to see Pal—presented itself, Charlie could be counted on to handle it effectively, without fanfare. But this time, Lola had brought the threat, if there was one, upon herself. And not just herself, but Margaret. Charlie had little patience with Lola’s tendency to get herself in trouble, and Lola knew that if he thought the trouble might involve his daughter, he’d break speed limits all the way through Montana and Wyoming to get to Margaret. Lola lectured herself to play it cool in their conversation. But apparently she’d already given herself away in the single word she’d uttered.

“Lola. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Why do you think something’s wrong? All I did was say your name. For heaven’s sake, Charlie.” She kicked herself, a real physical kick, left heel to right shin, reminding herself too late not to blather, a sure sign of guilt.

“It’s in your voice. And you didn’t answer any of my messages last night. What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Honestly. It’s just—” The last few days caught up with her, the terrifying truck chase, the watery dalliance with Dave, the revelations about Pal, and all along, Pal’s lies and avoidance. Lola turned her head and faked a sneeze and held her face to the hot wind, hoping it would dry her tears. She sneezed again, a real one this time. “This place is giving me allergies. So much dust.”

Silence. Charlie knew better than to talk when someone was doing a fine job indicting herself.

Lola pasted a smile onto her face, hoping it would carry through in her voice. “How are you? How are things going with the new deputy?” It didn’t work.

“Where were you yesterday? Why you didn’t answer your phone?”

“It ran down. I misplaced my charger.” A fine and believable excuse. Lola was always losing things. She was on her fifth phone charger.

“What about the car charger?”

Damn. Because Lola lost her charger so frequently, she kept a backup in the truck. “I didn’t go anywhere yesterday. It seemed silly to run the truck just to charge the phone. Anyway, nothing much happened yesterday. I figured we’d just wait to talk to you today.” Her voice was stronger now, skipping blithely from one lie to the next.

“Speaking of we, put Margaret on.”

Lola waved to Margaret and held up the phone.

“Daddy!” Margaret charged toward her, Bub and Jemalina twin clouds of dust in her wake. Lola sidestepped Jemalina’s beak and handed the phone to Margaret.

“Daddy, I miss you.”

Charlie spoke for a long time. Margaret’s face brightened by degrees. “We are having fun, Daddy. Mommy lets me have ice cream here. And I have a chicken! Can I bring her home with me?” Margaret, no fool, didn’t give him a chance to answer the question. “And yesterday we went swimming! Me and Mommy and her friend, Dave.”

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Lola didn’t even have time to think of a good story before the phone landed back in her hand. She waited for Charlie to speak. He didn’t. She waited some more. Gave up. “Dave’s a reporter at the paper here. I’m, ah, sort of helping him out with a story.”

“A story about swimming?”

Shit.

Lola’s laugh was so weak as to barely qualify. “No, he told us about a swimming hole. He thought Margaret might like it. Then he offered to show it to us.”

“Showed it to you yesterday? When you said you didn’t go anywhere? And you’re helping him out with a story?”

The question about a story was, Lola thought, a marginal improvement only in that it got them away from the topic of the swimming hole.

“Yeah.” She’d gone monosyllabic way too late. Charlie’s questions came so fast that she might as well have been sitting in the dingy interview room in the sheriff’s office, with its foul carpet, gray-painted cinder-block walls and tiny opaque one-way window through which an unseen video camera peered.

“What kind of help? What story? How’d you meet up with a reporter, anyway? Something tells me you went looking, right? So whose story is it, anyway? His? Or yours? It’s yours, isn’t it? Which means you’re working on your alleged furlough. Are you trying to get yourself fired? How do you plan to sell a Wyoming story to the Daily Express, anyway? Or is it even a story for the Express? Is that how you’re getting around this? Freelancing? And what about Margaret? This is supposed to be a vacation for her, real mother-daughter time, isn’t it? What sort of quality time is she getting if you’re working? Goddammit, Lola.” He’d asked all his other questions in the low monotone he’d perfected during his just-shy-of-a decade in law enforcement, but his voice broke on the final one. “Do I need to withdraw my question?”

Lola didn’t have to ask which question. He meant his proposal. This time, the silence was hers. She’d resented his ultimatum. Now, she found out she didn’t like having the option of marriage yanked away, either. He’d let her hear his anger. She fired back with a dose of her down frustration. “Dammit yourself, Charlie. Why couldn’t we just go on the way we were?”

Charlie’s words escaped on a long breath. “No matter what happens, we can never go back to the way things were.”