Eye of the Wolf (24 page)

“I'm not the police, Lucille.” He tried to tamp down the fear that surged inside him. He could imagine a SWAT team surrounding wherever Frankie was, going in with guns drawn. Frankie and Vicky could both be killed.

“You'll talk to him?”

It was difficult to nod at her, difficult to remain patient. “Yes,” he said.

“You won't tell the cops?”

“I'll talk to him.”

She was considering this, he could tell. Her eyes got darker, two black stones shining in the shadows. “I been thinking and thinking where he might've gone,” she said finally. “He's scared out of his mind, so he's not gonna be thinking straight and coming up with some new place. He's gonna go where he knows.” She hesitated so long that he started to think she'd changed her mind. He had to fight back the urge to shout at her, “Tell me, tell me!”

It was then that she told him.

YES, THE DRINKING
house was most likely. Lucille had dabbed the tissue at her face, closed her fist around it, and jammed her fist against her mouth. Father John had to lean forward to hear what she was saying. She'd been thinking about it all morning. Frankie would go someplace that was familiar. What was more familiar than the rez? He wouldn't bring her
here.
Not with his mother being home. There wasn't anybody else he'd go to. He doesn't trust a lot of people. But the drinking house on the dirt road off Trosper, he'd go there.

The house was just ahead, a quiet, yellowish cube with a wooden stoop and an abandoned look. Father John turned in to the yard, the pickup bouncing across the ditch. There were no vehicles around, yet the skin of snow in front of the house had been churned up and the tracks looked fresh. He could see the squiggly lines of tires.

He slid to a stop, slammed out, and pounded on the hollow wood that bowed slightly under the blows. He waited, listening for the slightest
sound. Nothing. He knocked again, waited another couple of seconds, then started walking along the front of the house to the rectangular window. Cupping his hands around his eyes, he leaned into the glass and peered through the crack at the edge of the curtains. He saw the shadowy outline of a sofa and a small table with a lamp turned on its side.

He retraced his steps and pounded again on the door, then tried the knob. It surprised him how loosely it turned in his grip. The door slid back against his weight, and he was inside the small, dimly lit room with a sofa and a couple of chairs scattered over the bare vinyl floor. No sign that anyone lived here: no papers or magazines, nothing on the table apart from the overturned lamp. An acrid smell permeated the air. He reached around the door and flipped on a light switch. Nothing happened. The only light came from the narrow columns of daylight shooting past the curtains into the shadows.

He crossed the room into the kitchen and flipped on another switch. The ceiling light stuttered for a moment before casting a yellowish glow into the middle of the room. Nothing on the counters. Nothing in the cabinets when he yanked open the doors except for the traces of what might have been salt or sugar scattered over the shelves.

He started down the hallway, checking the bedrooms on the left, on the right. He checked the bathroom. Nothing. Nothing. Just pieces of furniture left behind, cheap and flimsy looking, with dark stains on the thin, bare mattresses. Whoever had been here had left. Left in a hurry. One proposition followed the other to the only logical conclusion. Whoever used the drinking house had heard the news about Frankie and had figured that, sooner or later, the police would be at the door. They'd gotten out and taken everything that might identify them.

He went back outdoors and got into the pickup, aware of the heaviness inside him, like a weight dropped into his stomach. He worked the ignition until the engine finally turned over. The logic went further. If Frankie's friends reached that conclusion, so would Frankie. This wasn't where Frankie would bring Vicky. This wasn't the place.

If not the drinking house, where?

Father John stared over the hood at the front of the house, slabs of brown paint peeling off the siding, and tried to put the rest of it into a logical order. No one knew Frankie Montana better than his mother. He wasn't thinking straight, Lucille had said. He was too scared to think at all. Therefore, he would fall back on something familiar.

Logical. Logical.

Something familiar, somewhere else. Friends, maybe.
He doesn't trust a lot of people.
The bar in Riverton where he hung out.
He wouldn't bring her here, with me at home.
He wouldn't take her to a bar where someone would see them.

Dear Lord! Where, then?

He was half aware of the ringing noise at the edge of his thoughts—far off and out of place. A couple of seconds passed before he realized that it was his cell. He lunged for the glove compartment, his fingers tearing past the papers and maps, until they gripped the phone.

“Burton?” he said, pressing the cool plastic to his ear.

“We got a break, John.” A surge of confidence in the man's voice.

Father John felt his heart turn over. “You found Vicky,” he said.

“They're on their way out to Bates. We had a call from a witness who spotted an Indian couple out by Lysite in the tan pickup Frankie hot-wired. He's taking her where he took his other victims.” There was a pause at the other end, almost as if the man had regretted what he'd said. “Don't worry,” he hurried on. “We got deputies on the way. They'll stop the pickup before it gets to the battlefield. I'm heading there now.”

“It's not the right pickup,” Father John heard himself say. Logic. Logic. It was beginning to make sense now, all the propositions falling into place.

“What are you talking about?”

“Whoever killed the Shoshones,” he began, feeling his way toward the conclusion, “planned to kill them at the battlefield so it would look like revenge.”

“What's the point, John?”

“You said yourself that Montana's a hothead. He's not the type to plan anything. He's taken Vicky someplace that's familiar. He's fallen back on what's familiar, Burton. Bates isn't familiar to him.”

“You're making a lot of assumptions, John.” A horn bleeped over the man's voice.

It was true. All he had was an assumption. A logical assumption, he was thinking, and in that moment, he knew where Vicky was. “What about the houses that Montana broke into last fall?” he said. “He knows the houses, and he knows how to get inside. They're in the mountains, isolated. There won't be anybody around for another month.”

“They're isolated all right. County doesn't clear the roads. Probably a foot of snow up there. He wouldn't get far.”

Father John was already backing across the yard, the wheels whining in the snow. He shifted into forward, pressed down hard on the gas, and rammed the pickup across the ditch and out onto the road. “Where are the houses?” He was shouting.

“You're wrong, John. Montana and Vicky were spotted.”

“Which road are the houses on?”

“Look, I don't have that information with me.”

“It has to be in the files.”

“Take it easy, John,” Burton said. “We got a lot of men working this, and right now, they're heading toward Bates. Montana's got a gun, remember? We can't take any chances, not with witnesses saying they saw them. We don't want any more deaths. If this is a bum steer, we'll check out the houses later.”

“Later! You just said he's got a gun. Vicky could be dead later.”

Silence on the other end. The silence of exasperation. “Try to hold on, John. I'll get back to you the minute we know anything.”

There was a click in his ear. Father John tossed the cell to the side. It clanked against the tape player and slid onto the passenger seat. He was barreling down Trosper, sliding in the mud and slush. He could feel the rear end swaying, the tires lifting off the road and plunging down. He
reached over, grabbed the phone again, and punched in the numbers for information, glancing between the keys and the road. The pickup was weaving all over the place. He might have been drunk.

It was a long moment before he had the sheriff's office, with a woman's voice at the other end, breaking up. “Don't break up,” he shouted. To the operator. The phone. Heaven itself. “Don't break up.”

“How can I help you?” The voice was clear now.

He gave her his name and said he had to know the location of the houses that Frankie Montana had broken into last summer.

“Well, Father . . .”

He cut in over the woman's hesitation. “Montana was charged. It's a public record.”

“I know, Father. The problem is, there aren't any deputies in the office right now. We've got an emergency situation. Maybe you heard. Some Indian is holding a lawyer hostage.”

“He's holding her at one of those houses!”

“I don't think so, Father. He's driving north of Lysite. Soon as one of the officers gets in, I can have him look up the info . . .”

He hit the off button, then punched in the number to Vicky's office, jamming the phone to his ear, trying to hold the pickup steady through the curve onto Highway 287. He counted the number of rings: one, two, three. Then came the smooth, mechanical voice of a machine: “This is the office of Lone Eagle and Holden, attorneys-at-law. Please leave your name and number . . .”

He could feel the tightness in his jaw, the twitch of protesting muscles. Finally the message gave way to the beep. “Pick up, Adam,” he shouted. “If you're there, pick up. I know where Vicky is, and I need your help. I'm on my way to the office.” He pushed his coat sleeve back with the edge of the phone and glanced at his watch. Almost three o'clock, and he was thirty minutes away. “Meet me there at three-twenty,” he said.

THE LIGHT WAS
somewhere above, a small, round glow in the blackness. Vicky floated upward toward the light until, she realized, she had reached it, and she was staring at the gray squares of tile on the floor. And interrupting the flow of tile were wooden legs—table legs, she realized, chair legs. And something else, two brown boots were planted under the table. Above the boots, blue jeans were stretched around thick legs. Rushing over her was a rhythmic, rasping noise. Breathing, maybe. Breathing and snorting. She struggled to remember. Why couldn't she remember? She was conscious of the pain sawing into her head, breaking through the warm, cocoon feeling. She realized she had on her coat. She tried to move her arms—logs submerged in water. Finally, holding her head in one hand to keep it from breaking apart, she began pulling herself up along the hard face of a cabinet.

She remembered now: trudging up the snowy road, the cold, and Frankie Montana wrapping his arm in her coat and crashing it through the window of the house. He'd come at her with the towels that she could see dangling off the edge of the table. And the gun, she remembered it all, the gun in Frankie's belt. He'd intended to tie her up when she'd hit him with the chair before she had sunk into the blackness.

He was sitting at the table, snoring into the stillness, an arm flung out next to the whiskey bottle with about two inches of brown liquid winking at the bottom. His arm kept twitching, as if he wanted to grab something or keep something away.

Vicky kept her eyes on him for a long moment, then slowly lifted herself to her feet. Her head was pounding. She gripped the edge of the counter to steady herself, still watching the man slumped on the chair, neck twisted around, head bent into his shoulder. The stench of whiskey on his breath floated toward her and made her stomach turn. She could get out of here, she realized, head down the mountain. But he would come after her the instant he woke up, and he had a gun. How far could she get—half-mile, mile?—before he forced her back to the house.

Still watching him, half expecting his eyelids to slide open, she pushed off from the counter, moved to the table, and picked up one of
the towels. She carried the towel around the table, twisting it into a rope as she went. She was floating, feet barely touching the floor, boots skating silently over the tiles.

Gently, she took hold of a corner of his shirt sleeve and pulled the arm that was hanging at his side toward the back of the chair. She looped the rope around the chair rung, then around his lower arm, and—slowly, carefully—pulled his arm next to the rung. After making another couple of loops, she tied the ends of the towel into three hard knots.

She reached around, grabbed another towel, and twisted it into a rope before tugging at his other sleeve and dragging that arm across the table. The black tattoo crawled out from beneath the cuff of his sleeve. Frankie's head swung around. She held her breath. Finally he made a grunting noise and dropped his head forward until the folds of his chin pleated against his chest. She waited a moment before easing the arm down and tying it to the chair. His head lolled over his chest. He was shifting about, leaning outward, pulling at the constraints.

Then he was quiet, even relaxed looking, leaning into the constraints, head thrown back, Adam's apple bulging. Vicky swept the other towels off the table, dropped down onto her knees, and went through the motions: tugging on his jeans, dragging his legs back to the chair legs, looping and tying the towels.

She got back to her feet and stared at the black handle of the gun showing above his belt. All she had to do was take it, but her hands were shaking. It was hard to focus past the pain in her head. She had to get out of here. He'd started snoring again, a loud, menacing noise that propelled her around the table. She picked up her bag and started for the door. Then she went back, slipped the gun past the man's belly, the dampness of his shirt clinging to her hand. She stuffed the gun inside her bag, crossed the room again, and threw open the door. Daylight was starting to fade; it would be dark soon. A shower of sharp, moist crystals blew over her.

“Don't leave me.” The voice might have emerged out of a fog.

Vicky glanced around at the man slumped back against the chair,
arms tied at his sides. He looked pitiful. Not the man who had held a gun on her, forced her to drive up here into this isolation of snow and cold, the man who had knocked her unconscious.