The Taking of Libbie, SD (29 page)

No, no, no. Stop it. Get out of your head
.

Easier said than done. I became obsessed with the notion that if I died out there, no one would ever know what had happened to me. Without my wallet, no one would even know who I was, assuming someone stumbled upon my body, which seemed unlikely.

Stop it. Just stop it
.

I’ve been here before, I told myself. Just the other day, Miller’s minions locked me in that damn trunk. Things looked bleak then, too. Remember? What did I do about it? I got tough, that’s what I did. There was a nun, my sixth-grade homeroom teacher back at St. Mark’s Elementary School, Sister John Evangela. Do you know what she used to tell us? “You can live for forty days without food, four days without water, and four minutes without oxygen, but you can’t live four seconds without hope.” Well, guess what? I had hope, and plenty of it.

“Hear that, bitch?” I spun in a circle, making sure the Great Plains knew I was talking to her. “You ain’t putting me down. A little heat, a little wind, a couple of miles of empty country? C’mon, is that all you got? It didn’t stop the pioneers, did it? It didn’t stop them, and they had ornery Indians to deal with, too. It isn’t going to stop me, either. Get used to the idea. Great American Desert, my ass.”

That’s telling her
.

Despite my defiance, dehydration and hunger were taking their toll. I was no longer sweating; I wiped my brow with my thumb, and my thumb came away dry. My pace had dropped off dramatically; if I was making two miles an hour now, I was lucky. It was becoming harder to walk in a straight line. It was becoming harder to walk, period. Just breathing the furnacelike air in and out had become a burden. Hell, I decided, was a place where you found yourself under a relentless, unmoving sun in a land that did not change, where the wind never stopped blowing.

I stumbled and fell, not for the first time. I rolled onto my back and looked up at the sky. A bird with a long, curved bill circled above me.

“You gotta be kidding,” I said.

I thought about it—I really did. I thought about just lying there, about giving up. Only I couldn’t do it. No voice spoke to me; I wasn’t visited by images of my dead parents or friends or Nina or some ethereal creature sent by God. I just couldn’t do it—quit, I mean. I got up and I started walking. I had no idea if I was heading east or not. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. All that mattered was that I remain on my feet.

What we have here is a stand-up fight with Death
, my inner voice proclaimed.

Damn, that’s heroic, I thought.

Except that you’re losing
.

It was when the sun was as low as my heart, when I was sure that I was slipping away, that I first saw it, something white moving in the distance. It came and it went, and for a few moments I was convinced I was seeing things.

It was heading toward me, so I started toward it.

After a while, I saw that it was a horse.

There was a rider on the back of the horse.

The rider was a young woman.

The young woman was beautiful. Her hair was the color of wheat and neatly tucked beneath her wide-brimmed cowboy hat, the hat tied beneath her chin to keep it from falling off. She wore a blue cotton short-sleeve shirt tucked inside worn blue jeans. Her eyes were blue. Her soft face and arms glistened with sunscreen.

She reined up in front of me.

I kept walking until I was standing next to the white horse. I ran my hand over its neck, patted it.

“You’re real,” I said.

“Are you all right, mister?” the young woman said.

She slid out of the saddle and dropped to the ground. She unwound the strap of a canteen from the pommel of her saddle. She unscrewed the cap and offered the canteen to me. I took the canteen and drank. I tried to drink slowly.

She asked me what I was doing out there.

I stopped drinking just long enough to tell her that it was a complicated story.

She asked if I needed help.

I told her that I did.

I drank some more of the water and handed the canteen back.

She suggested that I wasn’t from around there.

I asked if it would be too much of an imposition for her to take me to Libbie.

“Who’s Libbie?” she said. “Is there someone else out here?”

“No, Libbie—Libbie, South Dakota. It’s a town.”

“Mister, this is Montana.”

But not Canada
, my inner voice said.

“I better take you to our place,” the young woman said. “Can you ride?”

I told her that the only time I was ever on a horse was during a vacation in Colorado.

She showed me how to mount the horse. I sat in back and she sat in front, holding the reins. She told me to hang on tight and I did. I hung on for dear life.

We set off at a trot.

“Our ranch is just a few miles over the rise,” she said.

Rise?
my inner voice said. I didn’t see any rise, but I took the girl’s word for it. I asked her name.

“Angela,” she said.

No one is going to believe this
, my inner voice told me.
Saved from a
slow and probably agonizing death on the Great American Desert by a beautiful young woman named Angela riding a white horse. Hell, I don’t believe it
.

“May I ask how old you are?” I said.

“Seventeen.”

Well, of course she is
.

“Are you in high school?” I said.

“I start my senior year in September.”

“What are you going to do after that?”

“I’d like to go to college. I have a list of about a dozen schools I’m going to apply to. Except times are tough, you know? Where I go, if I go, depends on how much scholarship and grant money I can scrape up.”

“Well, don’t worry about it.”

“Why not?”

“I know an eccentric millionaire who will guarantee you a full ride to any school you can get into.”

Angela turned in the saddle to look at me.

“Why would he do that?” she said.

It wasn’t a particularly funny question, yet it made me laugh just the same.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Angela halted the pickup in front of the Pioneer Hotel and put it in park. As I slid out of the passenger seat, she jumped out of the driver’s side and sprinted around the truck to my side. I didn’t need her help. A full day in the comfort of her family’s ranch house, being ministered to by both Angela and her mother, had set me up nicely. Even the sunburn didn’t hurt anymore, unless someone hugged my neck like she was doing now.

“Thank you, McKenzie,” Angela said.

Her eyes were as bright, wet, and shiny as they were when I had H. B. Sutton transfer fifty thousand dollars into her father’s money market fund. He thought that was a sufficient reward for saving my life, despite protests that I considered my health and well-being to be worth considerably more than that. ’Course, now that I had his account numbers, I figured I could deposit a couple more bucks when he wasn’t looking. Call it a tip for letting me use his razor.

“Thank you, Angela,” I said and hugged back.

“I’m glad I met you.”

I laughed at the remark. Just about everything she and her family said Wednesday and Thursday morning while I was recuperating from my two days on the plains had cracked me up.

“Believe me,” I said, “the pleasure was all mine.”

I smiled when she went back to the pickup, smiled some more when she drove off, and smiled again when I turned and faced the front door of the hotel. No one in Libbie knew what had happened to me except for the people who arranged it. While I was convalescing at Angela’s ranch, I made calls to Nina and the Dunstons and Harry. They told me that both Big Joe Balk and Chief Gustafson had made inquires when it became clear that I had disappeared. After assuring them that once again rumors of my demise were greatly exaggerated, I made them all promise not to reveal that I was alive and well. Surprisingly, Harry seemed most annoyed by what was going on; even more so than Nina, who pretended—I knew that she was pretending—to take it all in stride. I reminded Harry that the FBI field office in Minneapolis covered all the counties in South Dakota, and then I explained why he should care. That brightened his disposition considerably. I glanced at my watch. I expected to see him in a few hours.

“This is going to be fun,” I said aloud.

Sharren Nuffer was in her usual spot behind the registration desk, her glasses balanced on the tip of her nose. When she saw me, her eyes grew wide and her entire face became one enormous smile. I was happy to see it. It confirmed my hypothesis that she was guiltless in my abduction. She threw her cheaters down and circled the counter.

“McKenzie,” she said way too loudly. I silenced her with an index finger quickly pressed to my lips. She hesitated for a beat and then continued toward me until her arms were wrapped around my shoulders and her cheek was pressed hard against mine.

“I thought you were gone like Rush,” she said. “I thought you were gone.”

“Not me,” I said.

“Oh, you’re hurt. What happened to your eye?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But I do. I do worry. After you disappeared—I found your sports jacket draped across a chair, and you weren’t in your room, so I called the police, the sheriff—”

“Where is my sports jacket?” I said. I didn’t need the coat; I needed the cell phone in the pocket. While at Angela’s ranch, I also made a call to Greg Schroeder and told him what I wanted and why. Only to make it work, I needed my cell.

“They took your coat,” Sharren said. “They searched your room; they confiscated your belongings; they impounded your car. The sheriff, they say he found guns hidden in your trunk. A lot of guns. They thought—they thought the worst. McKenzie, what happened?”

“Yeah, about that. Where’s Evan? Is he working?”

“Yes, Evan, he’s tending bar. Why, McKenzie? Why?”

I pressed my finger against my lips again.

“Stay here,” I said.

“McKenzie?”

I marched through the lobby, under the arch leading to the dining room, and around dining room tables and chairs toward the bar in back. Sharren followed despite my order, but I knew she would. My legs were heavy and stiff, reminding me that I seldom seemed to be in as good a shape as I thought I was. My ribs ached, too, but then they hadn’t stopped hurting, not even for a moment, since I found myself on the Great Plains. I tried to ignore the pain.

Evan was behind the stick, brushing his fingers through his blond hair with his fingers. He was busy speaking to a girl who looked like she graduated from high school yesterday and didn’t see me until I stepped between two stools and rested my elbows on top of the bar.

“McKenzie,” he said. He pronounced my name as if it were a particularly deadly virus and stepped away from the bar as if I were a carrier; bottles on the shelf behind him rattled and fell when he backed into them.

I glanced at the girl and the cocktail in front of her. In South Dakota, an eighteen-year-old can drink alcohol if it’s done in the immediate presence of a parent, guardian, or spouse over twenty-one years of age. I threw a thumb at Evan.

“Is this your old man?” I said.

The girl said, “What?”

“You should leave. Leave right now.”

The girl glanced first at Evan and then at Sharren. They both looked frightened, and suddenly the girl became frightened, too. She slid off her stool and headed for the exit as fast as she could without actually running. I gestured with two fingers at Evan as if I wanted to place a drink order.

“C’mere,” I said. I deliberately kept my voice light and nonmenacing.

“McKenzie—”

“It’s okay.”

Evan very slowly, very cautiously inched to where I stood at the bar.

“Closer,” I said. I was speaking in a whisper.

Evan turned his head as if he were straining to hear.

“McKenzie, it wasn’t me,” he said.

“What wasn’t you?”

“McKenzie…”

As soon as he was close enough, I lunged forward, grabbed him by his shirt and his upper arm, pulled him over the top of the bar, and threw him as best as I could onto a round table. The table collapsed under his weight. I clutched my left side.

Dammit, that hurt
, my inner voice said.

Evan shook his head and tried to rise from the barroom floor. I moved to his side, grabbed a tuft of his blond hair, yanked his head up, and punched him in the jaw with all my strength. A vast pain rippled all the way up my arm from my knuckles to my shoulder. A spray of blood jetted from the side of Evan’s mouth, and he sagged against the floor. I shook my right arm.

That hurt, too
.

It probably hurt him more, I told myself.

One can only hope
.

Sharren was taking quick, short steps in Evan’s direction. She seemed to be trembling. I held up my hand to keep her from coming nearer.

Evan was slumped onto his side. I gripped his shoulder and rolled him over so I could see his face, so he could see mine.

“I’m going to ask you once and only once—”

“Don’t hurt me,” he said. Blood splattered from his mouth as he spoke. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”

“Evan—”

“It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault. He made me do it. I’m not responsible. You can’t blame me. I was just following orders. I was just doing what I was told. McKenzie—”

“Whose orders?”

“Don’t hurt me.”

“I’m calling the police,” Sharren said.

“Go ’head,” I said.

“No,” Evan said.

“No?” Sharren said.

“Evan doesn’t want the cops,” I said. “He doesn’t want to be an accessory to kidnapping and maybe attempted murder, too. Do you?”

Evan shook his head.

“Whose orders?” I repeated.

“He said you wouldn’t leave town of your own free will so you had no one to blame but yourself for what happened.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Miller.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Is he the one who kicked me?”

Evan hesitated before he answered. “Yes.”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t; maybe it was both of them
, my inner voice said.
Does it matter?