Dakota Read online

  ALSO BY GWEN FLORIO

  Montana

  DAKOTA

  GWEN FLORIO

  Copyright © 2014 Gwen Florio

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Florio, Gwen—

  Dakota / Gwen Florio.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-362-3

  1. Women journalists—Fiction. 2. Drug traffic—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Sihasapa Indians—North Dakota—Fiction. 5. Indian women—Fiction. 6. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.L664D35 2014

  813'.6—dc23 2013043538

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my parents, Anthony and Patricia Florio

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m so grateful for the support and expertise of Permanent Press publishers Martin and Judith Shepard, agent Barbara Braun, editor Judy Sternlight, and copy editor Barbara Anderson. Lon Kirschner designed another terrific cover and Shaila Abudullah is the best of website gurus.

  This book benefited immensely from the input of the following:

  The Creel crew at the Guthrie cabin on the Rocky Mountain Front, the best place in the world to write and to talk about writing: Alex Sakariassen, Bill Oram, Jamie Rogers, Camilla Mortensen, Matthew LaPlante, Aaron Falk and Stephen Dark.

  Journalist Amy Sisk for her guidance on life in the very heart of the oil patch, and Jerry and Maryellen Navratil for their stark accounts of life on the edge of the patch.

  On the Blackfeet Nation, Jessica Racine and Pat Cross Guns for pointing a clueless writer who walked into their workplace in the right direction, which in turn led me to Marvin Weatherwax and Boss Racine, who generously provided much-needed cultural information.

  A young woman calling herself Chloe who detailed the workaday world of exotic dancers. And yes, I freely embroidered upon it.

  Along those lines, although many locations in the book are real, others—such as St. Anthony’s Church—are fictional. However, a similarly unnerving statue of Saint Lucy stood in the stairwell of my childhood church in Dover, Delaware.

  Love and gratitude to Scott Crichton, who deftly piloted a Subaru among the towering truck traffic in the patch as I scribbled notes; and to my parents, Pat and Tony Florio, and my children, Sean and Kate Breslin, all fine writers and downright carnivorous readers.

  PROLOGUE

  The truck driver hunched and swore, peering through the slanting assault of snow. The steering wheel dug into his potato-sack gut. The teenager beside him looked away. She was small and breakable-looking and the sex between them, in the confines of the cab, had been problematic.

  “I can’t see a goddamn thing,” he said. “I never seen it snow like this.”

  “It’s not snowing.” Her voice was hoarse, as though despite her cries of feigned pleasure, she hadn’t used it much recently. “It’s just a ground blizzard.”

  “Say what?”

  “It’s when the wind picks up the snow and blows it around.” As if to prove her point, the curtain of white draping the windshield briefly parted. Beyond, all was black.

  “I never heard of any such thing. I worked on a refinery down in Louisiana where we had snakes by the bushel. But it beats this cold and snow you all got up here. At least you can kill a snake. But there’s no getting away from this. Speaking of which—” He straightened and looked in the rearview mirror, then hit a button. The side window slid down halfway. Cold blasted through the cab. The girl ducked away. The driver scraped at the sheet of ice dulling the side mirror. He yanked his arm back inside and raised the window and blew on his fingers. “Huh.”

  “Shouldn’t you be watching the road? You just told me you’re not used to driving in this kind of weather.”

  “I was checking on that guy behind us.”

  The girl turned her head so quickly that skeins of black hair lashed the dashboard. She’d been slouched against the passenger-side door, as far from the man as she could get, but now she sat up straight and hitched an inch toward him. “What guy?”

  “Truck that’s been on our ass ever since we stopped so’s you could pee.”

  The girl checked her own side mirror. The wind quieted again and the swirling snow lay down. She saw a blur of light. “There are trucks all over this road,” she protested. “Every day. Nothing but trucks.” She reached into the pouch of her oversize sweatshirt and ran her fingertip along the vane of the spear-like feather there, imagining she could feel the place where its color changed from white to bronze. She forced her gaze away from the lights behind them and stared through the windshield as though somehow, despite the dark, she could see the mountains ahead that had sheltered her people since the beginning of time. They were close, she knew, their presence signaling safety.

  The driver spoke in the querulous manner that afflicted some big men. “When was the last truck you saw tonight? Nobody’s on the road but us and our friend back there. All those other drivers got more sense. Daddy always said my dick would get me in trouble. Trouble’s one thing. Killed’s another.”

  “What do you mean, killed?” The girl’s voice jumped an octave. She moved closer to him still.

  “I mean I could end up sliding right off this road, smash my fool head to pieces and your pretty one, too.” He touched a meaty hand to her cheek.

  She twisted and looked again at the mirrors. The lights winked behind them. “How do you know it’s the same truck?”

  “It’s riding high. Most trucks coming out of the oil patch are full, traveling down lower to the ground. That, and the fact it stuck with me on this little detour we’re taking to drop you off. Might be he’s lost. If he’s still with us when we stop, I’ll talk to him. Tough night to be out here alone.”

  The girl’s thin chest rose and fell. The other trucker wasn’t lost. Her hands scrabbled at the seat. “Listen. I changed my mind. I’m getting out here.”

  The man gaped. “Girl, are you crazy? It’s only four, five miles yet to the reservation. I’ll drop you off there like you asked.”

  The lights behind them drew nearer. The girl stared into their reflected glare. “A big bend’s coming up, and then the road goes uphill. I’ll get out once we’re around the curve. You’ve got to slow way down, but don’t stop. If you do, you’ll never get the truck up the hill.”

  “You don’t even have a coat. You’ll freeze to death. Let me drop you where there’s people.”

  “I know a shortcut.” Her lips thinned and tightened in a mirthless smile. There was no shortcut. But she’d take the storm over the menace creeping closer behind them. “Just let me out. Here’s the curve.” A yellow warning sign depicting a fishhook bend flashed past. The man worked at the shift. The gears ground down. The girl put her hand on the door. The truck crawled around the curve. The lights behind them disappeared.

  “Tell a single soul you ever saw me,” the girl said, “and I’ll tell the world what a tiny, worthless dick you’ve got.”

  She pulled the feather from her sweatshirt, shoved open the door and flew into the night.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The dead girl in the snowbank could have been asleep, one hand curled beneath her cheek, hair feathered across the pillowy drift. Only the cruisers’ blue-and-red lights, flashing across her face, disturbed her tranquility. Lola Wicks extracted a notebook from deep within her parka and edged into the circle of uniforms surrounding the body.
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br />   “What’s going on?” Nobody replied. Lola stepped between two tribal policemen. “Good Christ. It’s Judith Calf Looking.”

  One of the officers detached himself from the group. “What the hell are you doing here?” The tribal cops shifted their attention from the dead girl to a live face-off between sheriff and reporter.

  “I heard it on the scanner. What are you doing here? Aren’t we on the rez? This is their turf.” She nodded toward the cops. They dipped their chins in return.

  But for the difference in uniform, Charlie Laurendeau, the county’s first Indian sheriff, could have been one of them, brown and broad, easy on his feet despite his heft. Lola floundered toward him through the snow, mentally cursing the impulse that had led her to move from Baltimore to Montana at the end of summer, just weeks before winter blew in. Charlie met her halfway, careless of his steps, steady nonetheless. “County automatically gets notified whenever there’s a felony. There’s no saying that’s what this is. But just in case, the feds are on their way, too.”

  The tribal cops’ faces went still and stern at his words. Even in her short time in Montana, Lola had learned that decades worth of turf negotiations between tribal and outside law enforcement had spun a web of local, state, federal and Indian nation regulations that seemed to hinder any single agency’s ability to deal with crime involving the Blackfeet. Charlie’s tightrope walk as both an Indian and the sheriff of the white county that largely surrounded the reservation served only to make each of those roles more difficult. Indignant Blackfeet mothers whose sons went astray off the reservation and ended up in Charlie’s jail accused him of forgetting his roots; white townspeople groused that during Charlie’s tenure as sheriff, Indian kids were getting away with everything short of murder. And then Lola had come along.

  “I thought you weren’t listening to the scanner anymore,” Charlie said. “Hasn’t Jan handled all the crime stories ever since—”

  “Ever since you and I started sleeping together?”

  The tribal cops looked up. Lola could only imagine the laughter that would burst forth in the retelling. Lola had met Charlie that summer, when she’d traveled to Montana to visit a friend who worked there as a reporter, only to find her dead—murdered—upon Lola’s arrival. During the investigation into Mary Alice’s death, Lola and Charlie had become close, so close that he’d been able to convince her to leave her newspaper job in Baltimore for one at the small daily paper in Magpie that covered the news for a county whose population wouldn’t have comprised a single Baltimore neighborhood. At the time, with Lola still smarting from being downsized from an overseas posting to Kabul, it had seemed like a perfect kiss-off to the Baltimore paper. Now, especially as the reality of a Montana winter settled in, she wasn’t so sure.

  Charlie took Lola’s arm and tugged her a few steps away. “Lola. For God’s sake.”

  “Jan’s out on another story,” she said. “Besides, you know I cover the reservation. The scanner only said something about a body. It didn’t say anything about a crime. Is this suspicious? Because if it is, I’ll pull Jan off whatever she’s working on.” She tapped her pencil against her teeth—it hadn’t taken her long to learn that ink froze when the temperature dove to single digits and below—and waited for his answer. The shapeless coat, its still-slick synthetic surface proclaiming recent purchase, hung halfway to her knees. She was almost as tall as the men, nearing six feet. But where they were thickset through shoulder and thigh, solid as the grain elevators that marked the surrounding High Plains towns, Lola’s gangly frame swam within the outsize parka. A fresh blast of wind sent her staggering. The men moved not at all. Her breath caught and froze in the curls escaping her wool watch cap. Tiny icicles tinkled when she gave Charlie an encouraging nod. The sheriff was bareheaded, lips blueing in the subzero cold. Exhaustion knuckled bruises beneath his eyes, and dug cruel grooves from mouth to chin. He’d been up most of the night dealing with a fatal semitrailer crash, and now this. The wind wrapped his uniform pants around his legs. Lola had watched him dress that morning, holding the blankets tight beneath her chin as he pulled on a pair of silk long johns, then the traditional waffle weave, before finally stuffing his legs into pants and then starting the whole process again with sock liners and two pairs of socks. The radio announced twenty below. “They say some cowboys wear pantyhose under their jeans to keep warm,” he’d said when he caught her looking. “Me, I never went that far. But on a day this cold, I’m tempted.”

  Judith was long past feeling the cold. Which was good, Lola thought, as she studied the men’s pants Judith wore, rolled into sloppy cuffs around bare feet stuck into cheap sneakers. Lola’s years as a foreign correspondent had featured war zones distinguishable mainly by the inventiveness of their butchery, experience recent enough to make her grateful for the mercifully intact corpses in her own country. One of the tribal cops pulled a camera from within his coat, aimed it at Judith’s body, and clicked twice. The dime-size star tattoo on her neck, tucked just below her earlobe, shone newly distinct against skin gone waxen. He tucked the camera back inside his coat, walked a few steps for a different angle, took the camera out and clicked quickly before replacing it against the warmth of his body. Something thin and lacy fluttered beneath Judith’s hooded sweatshirt. Lola stooped for a better view. “It almost looks like a nightie,” she said to Charlie. “You never said whether you think someone killed her. What’s that in her hand?”

  “An eagle feather.”

  “That’s odd. Isn’t it?”

  “Stop fishing, Lola. She probably died of exposure. We haven’t turned her over yet, but there’s no obvious injury. Maybe she was trying to hitchhike home from wherever she ran away to last year. If somebody dropped her off at the crossroads in the middle of the night, the cold would’ve gotten her before anyone else came along, given that storm last night. It’s a shame. She didn’t have much farther to go.”

  “If she was hitchhiking,” Lola asked, “what’s she doing all the way out here? Did an eagle drop her from the sky?” The tribal cops’ heads swiveled as one, turning to take in the road a quarter mile away. Lola had bumped across the prairie’s frozen ruts in her pickup, a ride that challenged the very fillings in her teeth.

  Charlie didn’t respond to her question. He dropped his mittens into the snow, snapped blue latex disposable gloves over his hands and stooped beside Judith’s body. He hooked a fingertip in the sweatshirt’s sleeve and drew it up to Judith’s elbow. Checking to see if Judith had been using again, Lola thought. The girl’s struggles with whatever drug was most easily available at any given moment were public knowledge. Lola leaned over Charlie and looked. “Hell,” she said. Bruises with pinpoint centers laced the soft pale skin of Judith’s inner arm. Something else, too. Charlie’s breath caught. The tribal cops crowded close. Charlie ignored the track marks and ran a gloved finger over a tilted heart shape. The lines were raised and brown and shiny.

  “That’s new. Right?” Lola said.

  “Yes.” Charlie bit the word off.

  “That is one messed-up tattoo.”

  “It’s not a tattoo,” Charlie said. “It’s a brand.”

  CHARLIE’S ANNOUNCEMENT occasioned an outbreak of subdued activity. A tribal officer turned his head and hawked and spat. Another walked a slow circle in the snow. A third took off his gloves, blew in them, and put them back on. Lola stood and bent backward from the waist, as though to ease the nonexistent crick in her back. Only Charlie remained motionless, kneeling beside Judith’s body as though in prayer.

  “I guess it’s the latest trend,” he said. “Tattoos and piercings weren’t enough.”

  “But Judith didn’t really go for those,” Lola pointed out. “Other than the star. And earrings—everybody’s got those. Everybody.” She liked reminding Charlie of the faint dimple in his earlobe, a reminder of a youthful exuberance she could hardly imagine. As far as she could tell, Charlie had been born old.

  Charlie stood and peeled off the gloves. He
threw them into the snow and kicked at them. The sun hung pale and indistinct within the mottled sky, lowering over a line of mountains whose names bespoke their history as Blackfeet territory, despite the fact that the reservation’s whiteman-drawn boundaries relegated the mountains to nearby Glacier National Park. Lola studied their shapes. Somewhere over there was Sinopah. As a way of filling the long winter evenings, she’d set herself the challenge of learning the names of the more imposing peaks, poring over atlases and online photos, and querying Charlie as to their Blackfeet names. Her most recent focus, Sinopah—a woman’s name, the daughter of a chief—was known for the perfection of its shape, the snowcapped triangle of a child’s drawing. But to Lola, a born flatlander, all the peaks looked distinctive. A gust shoved exhaust fumes into her face. The cruisers and Lola’s pickup sat running nearby. Lola knew each vehicle’s heater was blowing full blast. She stuck her hands under her arms and hopped on one foot, then the other. She wore padded arctic boots with layers of synthetic stuff between her feet and the snow, along with the requisite multiple pairs of socks, and still her toes were icy. “Does Joshua know yet? It’s going to be tough on him, losing a twin.”

  “We called the tribal offices as soon as I saw who it was,” one of the cops said. “They said they’d send somebody over to tell him. That was about an hour ago.”

  Lola groped at her sleeve until her watch emerged. She peered at it and pulled the cuff back down over the exposed skin. “So you all got here around three? Who found her?”

  Charlie’s boots squeaked across the snow. He opened the door of Lola’s truck. A black and white dog peered out, then shrank back into the warmth. “Hey! You’re letting all the heat out. Bub’s going to freeze.” Lola kicked her way through the snow and tried to wrest the door from his hands.

  “Forget it, Lola. You’re not doing this story. This isn’t officially a death by natural causes until I say it is. And I’m nowhere near that point. You go back to the newspaper and do whatever you were doing before you started listening to the scanner. Have Jan give me a call. I’ll give her what I’ve got.”