Cassie Dewell 01 - Badlands Read online

  The only topic of conversation all day on the job were the body parts being found all over town. Winkie was pretty sure he was staring into the eyes of the man who’d been responsible.

  Maybe T-Lock deserved it, Winkie thought. T-Lock had put him in this position. But Rachel didn’t, and Kyle didn’t.

  And he didn’t.

  Winkie said, “I’ll go right now and bring him here. I’ll tell him to bring the duffel bag. Then I’m out of it, okay?”

  “Who is this man?” La Matanza asked.

  Winkie hesitated. If he gave up the only thing he had to bargain with so quickly …

  La Matanza turned and shut the door that led to the kitchen. Winkie could no longer see the two women.

  Then he felt two hands on his head from behind, one on top and the other in back, gripping his hair. Silencio.

  Winkie was wrenched back and to the side and even as quickly as it happened he knew better than to reach out to try and shield his fall with his bare hands.

  But he wished he would have when his face was pressed hard into the top of the glowing woodstove.

  The pain was incredible but short-lived because it just reached a crescendo and blinked out after a second or two. What frightened him even more was the sizzling sound it made, like a raw steak dropped in a hot frying pan. And the horrible acrid smell.

  “Don’t burn his mouth,” La Matanza said calmly to Silencio. “We need him to be able to talk.”

  “Holy shit, man,” Dietrich whispered.

  PART THREE

  DAY SIX

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  AS HE rode home from his paper route, Kyle was thinking he’d never been out in such cold in his life. The vinyl covering of his bicycle seat had actually shattered into shards that morning when he sat on it. He knew it was more than twenty degrees below zero because Alf Pedersen had been complaining about it when he picked up his newspapers two hours before.

  Kyle had covered his entire face except for his eyes with a scarf Alf lent him that smelled of Alf’s cigarettes, but even his eyeballs were cold. He could barely feel his feet and hands. His tires made a high-pitched squeaking sound in the fresh snow that was irritating, and the chain to his rear wheels was stiff. It had been an awesome sight, though, to look out over the prairie from the bluff that morning: steam rose from the frozen river and made the flares in the distance glow and pulsate. The sight made Kyle imagine the aftermath of a great battle.

  It had been the first time since he’d started his route that people were waiting for him when he delivered their newspaper. The headline on the front of the paper that morning was: SAVAGE: BODY PARTS DISCOVERED THROUGHOUT TOWN. One lady offered to let him come inside to warm up, but he said he’d be late if he did that.

  If there had ever been a morning he could have used some help with his route—like driving him from house to house—this had been it. But he hadn’t even asked his mom because he’d overheard her and T-Lock fighting most of the night. He knew she needed some sleep before she went to work.

  He didn’t know what the argument was about. Something about T-Lock’s friend Winkie not showing up. T-Lock cursed his friend and his mom said he’d never been any good anyway, and T-Lock got mad at her for saying that. Kyle had buried his head in his pillows to drown out the argument but not before doing a couple of practice grabs for the arrow under his bed in case he needed to act. Eventually, the house got quiet.

  In his dream, Raheem caught a fish in the river and reeled it up to the boat. It was huge and so heavy Raheem couldn’t pull it in. It took the two of them to wrestle it over the gunwales where it flopped around. Kyle didn’t know what kind of fish it was but it was impressive. Some people having a picnic on the bank saw the size of the fish as they hauled it in and they started cheering. Kyle tipped his hat to them as they floated by.

  When Kyle had gotten up that morning he found out why the house was still. T-Lock had taken the new van he’d traded for and left. Kyle hoped he never came back, although he’d sure like his money back so he could take care of his mom.

  * * *

  HE BUCKED a frozen berm of ice that had been pushed to the side of the street by a snowplow and took the sidewalk the last block and a half toward his house. As he turned the corner on his street he saw a vehicle idling in the road directly across from his house. It was so cold that the exhaust from the big SUV ballooned out the back and was tinted cotton-candy pink from the brake lights.

  Then he saw the light bar on top of the car in the glow from a streetlight and recognized it as one of the sheriff’s department SUVs like he’d seen three days before at the site of the car crash.

  It was just sitting there, idling. Like the driver inside was looking at Kyle’s house.

  Kyle slowed to a stop, hidden from the SUV by a camper trailer parked on the street. He wasn’t sure what to do. Probably, he thought, T-Lock had gotten himself into some kind of trouble. The cop was there to tell Kyle’s mom about it.

  But no one got out of the vehicle.

  Kyle knew he couldn’t stay hidden very long and keep still or he’d freeze to death. At least riding the bike home had kept him warm. Now, though, he could feel his legs stinging with cold even through his long underwear and jeans.

  He heard a second motor but stayed out of sight on the side of the trailer. The tires of the second car squeaked in the snow-packed street. The car was going the same direction as the SUV, and it would have to go around or wait for the SUV to move out of the way, Kyle thought. He leaned forward so he could see around the corner of the trailer, hoping the cop car would drive off.

  Instead, the second car—a flashy silver pickup truck—slowed down until it was right behind the SUV. It stopped. Kyle could see three forms in the pickup, two in front and one in the back.

  Then he saw the glimpse of an arm, the cop’s arm in the headlights of the pickup, through the back window of the SUV. The cop was gesturing toward Kyle’s house, as if pointing it out for the people in the pickup.

  Then the cop slowly drove off.

  As he did, a pair of headlights came around the corner at the far end of the street. The SUV and the oncoming car went by each other. Kyle noticed that two of the heads in the pickup, the front passenger and the person in back, both ducked as the oncoming car approached them.

  The oncoming car seemed to slow as it got near the pickup and Kyle’s house, then picked up speed and drove by. Kyle got a good look at T-Lock’s profile in the new van as he passed by the trailer. T-Lock looked scared.

  Kyle frowned beneath his scarf as the pickup moved up the street a few houses before finding a space on the curb to park. No one got out. Like the SUV a few minutes before, it just sat there idling. But no doubt, Kyle thought, watching his house. Maybe waiting for T-Lock to show up.

  T-Lock had fooled them by showing up in a car no one had seen before. But rather than stop and go inside and protect his mom, T-Lock had driven away.

  Kyle thought he had to warn her. He could retreat back down the street and get to his house through the alley in back. That way, the people in the pickup wouldn’t see he was home.

  Before he turned his bike around, though, another car—smaller, beat-up—came down the street and turned into the driveway of his house. Kyle’s mom, pulling on a heavy coat over her McDonald’s uniform, came out through the front door and climbed into the little car. Kyle figured his mom had called a coworker for a ride since T-Lock had taken the new van.

  He was happy she was safe and he started to sit back on his bike when the bare metal post poked him hard in the butt. He’d forgotten about the missing seat.

  As the little car took his mom to work, Kyle decided as long as that pickup was there he didn’t want to go into his house.

  He knew where he’d go, and it wasn’t school.

  * * *

  THE EASTERN sky was turning a cold purple but it was still dark when Kyle reached Grandma Lottie’s house at the end of the road. The horizon bled through gaps in the trunks of tre
es that bordered the frozen dirt road. Her house was at the end of the road and it was small but lit up. Of course she was awake.

  He leaned his bike against the trunk of a tree in her front lawn and stiffly walked to the front door. He could smell wood smoke from the chimney, which was something he always liked. The smoke seemed to hang suspended in the icy still air.

  Kyle’s boots scrunched in the snow as he walked to the side of her house to the woodpile and gathered six or seven lengths, enough to make him sag under the weight. He returned to the front door and because he couldn’t used his hands, he rapped on it with his forehead like a woodpecker.

  The inside door opened and he could see her silhouette through the frost-covered storm door window.

  “Kyle!” she said, surprised. She was in her old red housecoat and slippers. Her gray hair was in curlers. Grandma Lottie was the only person Kyle had ever met who wore curlers. “Come in, come in. You little angel—you brought me some wood for the stove.”

  He nodded. He remembered she’d always said a good person always brings something when he visits someone’s house. The wood was the best he could do.

  “Just dump it over there by the stove,” she said. “Why aren’t you at school?”

  Kyle stepped inside her house and she closed the door behind him. He knew it was warm in there—probably hot, even—but he couldn’t yet feel it. He’d never been so cold. The lengths of wood tumbled out of his arms into a cast-iron bin.

  “Let me make you some hot chocolate,” she said, helping him unzip his coat because his fingers were too stiff to grip the zipper. “We’ve got to get you thawed out. Do you think it’s July? What are you doing out there riding around on your bike?”

  “My job,” Kyle said. His voice was thicker than normal. But Grandma Lottie had always been able to understand him when he talked. “I deliver the Tribune.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, drawing out the word “know.” That’s because Kyle’s mom and his grandma Lottie rarely spoke anymore. They’d ask him about the other, but they didn’t talk directly.

  She said, “You’d think on a day like this the paper could wait. Or maybe someone could drive you.”

  He knew who “someone” was.

  “So why aren’t you in school?” she asked again. The warmth from the stove was starting to penetrate his clothing. His entire body ached as it did and he felt like hopping around.

  He said, “My speech teacher is still sick. She’s the only one I like. And Mr. Pedersen said he heard they’d cancel school today because it’s so cold.”

  She nodded and said, “Mr. Pedersen?”

  “He’s the newspaper guy.”

  “Alf Pedersen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve known Alf all his life. I didn’t realize he was still around. I thought maybe Alf was, you know, somebody with your mom in your home.”

  No, that would be T-Lock, he thought.

  She said, “They never canceled school when it got cold when I was a girl. This is North Dakota. It gets cold. But I guess they do that these days. Now go over there and stand by the stove. I’ll make you breakfast while you get warm. How does bacon, eggs, and lefse sound?”

  How did she know he hadn’t had breakfast?

  “It sounds really good,” he said. Lefse was a kind of flat potato pancake made by Norwegians. Grandma Lottie made the best lefsa Kyle had ever had. She riced potatoes and added ingredients and rolled the dough into sheets before frying them on an ancient Norwegian lefse griddle. It was an all-day process.

  For breakfast, Grandma Lottie cooked the eggs in bacon grease to make the edges crispy, then swabbed the lefse in the grease and folded it over the eggs. No one else Kyle knew ate lefse that way, but he loved it.

  “So how is your mom?” Grandma Lottie asked from the kitchen while Kyle warmed up.

  “She’s good,” he lied.

  “I’m happy to hear that. One egg or two?”

  “Two, please.”

  * * *

  THE SUMMER before, Grandma Lottie had taken Kyle and Raheem to the Badlands south of Grimstad. Raheem had just moved in and Kyle had just met him but he asked his new friend to go along. Kyle had never been there before and “going to the Badlands” sounded exciting. The two boys piled into her old Buick. Grandma Lottie turned to them with a smile and said it was the first time there had ever been a Negro in her car, but Raheem was more than welcome.

  Although Raheem was kind of bored with the scenery, Kyle was not. Kyle was so used to flat farmland that he couldn’t believe there was land so foreign-looking and alien just a couple of hours away.

  The Badlands were crazy with rock formations, deep crevices, and spires that looked like they should have been inside a cave. There were places where egglike rocks were piled on top of each other and there were long narrow bands of grass that coursed through the rock formations. They saw buffalo, deer, and golden eagles along the river. Kyle especially liked the prairie dogs.

  They ate a picnic lunch in the national park on the grassy lawn at an old castlelike home called Medora. Grandma Lottie said it was called a château, which was French. When they finished lunch, Grandma Lottie urged the two boys to join in a talk given inside the château by a park ranger to a bunch of tourists. It was mostly boring, Kyle thought, but one story the ranger told captured him in a way that was completely unexpected.

  It was about Theodore Roosevelt, who had once lived there as a cowboy. He later became the president.

  In the late winter, when the Missouri was just breaking up and still filled with huge plates of ice, three outlaws had stolen Roosevelt’s boat from his ranch and had taken it downriver. Roosevelt and his ranch hands built a new boat of their own and gave chase. After three days of harrowing travel on the cold river with huge chunks of ice all around them, they found the camp of the thieves and captured them at gunpoint and got their boat back. The ranger went on to tell a long story about how many days it took for Roosevelt to deliver the thieves to law officers a long distance away and how all the locals thought he should have just shot them or hung them on the spot, but Kyle couldn’t take his eyes off an old photo of Roosevelt holding a shotgun and guarding his three prisoners on the bank of the big river.

  Raheem had asked Kyle why he was staring at the photo, and Kyle said, “Don’t you have a boat?”

  Raheem got it and immediately grinned.

  Grandma Lottie had no idea what the boys were thinking, but she said on the way back to town how pleased she was they’d enjoyed the trip.

  * * *

  “I SUPPOSE I should call Rachel and let her know you’re here,” Grandma Lottie said while Kyle shoveled in the eggs, bacon, and lefse. “I don’t suppose she knows, does she?”

  Kyle shook his head. Grandma Lottie sat at the table with him and sipped a cup of coffee. She was always drinking coffee, just like all the old people Kyle had ever met.

  “If Grandpa Sven was here I’d ask him to call her.”

  Kyle had vague memories of his grandfather. All he could remember was he had jet-black hair and he wore bib overalls and he died. He’d been a wheat farmer.

  “She’s at work,” Kyle said.

  “Ah. Still at the McDonald’s?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “That’s better than where she used to work, for sure. I heard they pay their people seventeen dollars an hour plus health insurance. Is that true?”

  Kyle shrugged. He had no idea.

  “I don’t even know this town anymore. The stories I hear are just … unbelievable. And most of the people I know have either died or moved away. Sven always said we’d never move. But I think maybe he’d forgive me now.

  “So she’s doing okay?” she asked.

  Kyle nodded but didn’t look up and meet his grandmother’s eyes.

  “It was so rough for such a long time,” she said. “She was out of control. She…” Then nothing.

  Kyle looked up. Grandma Lottie just shook her head. She’d never told Kyle what
had happened between her and his mom, but he knew it had a lot to do with him.

  “Should I call her at work?” she asked after a long pause.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll ride my bike there later because I need to talk to her.” He needed to warn her.

  “You will not,” she said. “I’ll get the car warmed up and I’ll take you there. It’s not supposed to get warmer than twenty below today. I’ve got a hair appointment at eleven.”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  AFTER BREAKFAST, Kyle curled up on the couch under an afghan Grandma Lottie had made a long time ago that had always been there and he watched cartoons on her old television set. Her cat Duchess formed a ball near his stocking feet.

  It felt good to feel safe and warm. He’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel secure, which is how he’d always felt with Grandma Lottie when his mom was sick. He tried to imagine his mom living in this same house as a little girl, but he couldn’t.

  He thought about the pickup and the three men in front of his house, and the cop in the car who had pointed it out to them.

  He now knew for sure that T-Lock had actually been right about something: he could never go to the cops and tell them what he knew.

  And he thought about Theodore Roosevelt and that boat.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CASSIE WAITED impatiently inside her office at the law enforcement center for Sheriff Kirkbride to arrive for the morning briefing. She looked expectantly every time the elevator announced its arrival with a chime, but thus far he hadn’t showed. She checked her wristwatch: ten minutes until the briefing began. Most of the deputies had already filed in, and she could hear the general hum from the briefing room down the hall.

  She’d been pleased to find that Judy had either scrounged or repatriated office furniture: a decent fabric-covered chair on rollers, two hardback chairs for guests, and a plastic fern that looked very out of place in North Dakota.