Wide Open (7 page)

He grabbed at her again, but Hallie was too quick for him, out of range and walking away. She didn’t look back, though she felt an itch between her shoulder blades, like she had a target painted there.

Lightning bolts. What the hell?

She had just ordered a beer at the bar when a huge commotion, all whoops and hollers, started at the exact same moment someone dropped a hand on Hallie’s shoulder.

“Jesus, Lorie,” Hallie said when she turned.

Brett, who was just behind Lorie, stepped up and got a beer for herself and a Coke for Lorie, and they found a table away from the dance floor. Lorie kept up a running monologue, pointing out who’d been here the last time she’d come to the Bob, who’d been in their graduating class in high school, who hadn’t graduated from high school, who had a job, who hadn’t worked a single day since last July, and who was dating, stepping out on, leaving, or marrying who. At some point, she worked in an apology for brushing Hallie off earlier on the phone. “There were people around,” she said, then went right back to talk about who she saw at the post office three weeks ago.

Hallie didn’t stop her, knew she did it like a wall between herself and the fact that this wasn’t a celebration—more like the way life was going to be from here on out. No more Dell. Ever. Because it was noticeable here, like a black hole, because they’d all been here with Dell at one time or another, because she’d loved it here.

Lorie leaned forward. “Do you remember her?” she asked, pointing at a woman sitting three tables away from them with three other women her age. She wore a tea-stained straw hat with a hondo crown, tight blue jeans, and a sleeveless top. “Jennie Vagts?” Lorie continued. “She was, like, two years behind us in school. Went to college over in Brookings, but she’s taking a semester off. Or … that’s what she told Dell when she interviewed out at the company. I think she got in trouble or something, and her mother made her come home.

“I saw her over at Cleary’s yesterday, because that’s where she’s working now. She had a good job—I mean a
good job
out at Uku-Weber, and she just up and quit last week.” Lorie snapped her fingers. “Like that. Who would do that?”

Dell’s ghost settled in just behind Hallie. The icy cold of an arctic winter cut through Hallie’s shoulder blade like a knife. Brett tapped her index finger against her beer glass. Hallie could feel Pete watching her, like an itch she couldn’t scratch. She turned around, spotted him in the growing crowd, and stared back. Pete nodded to the man across the table from him, a heavyset man in his mid-twenties, who looked over at Hallie and laughed. Pete smirked, then turned back to his companions.

You fucker,
Hallie thought,
I could take you.
He was bigger than she was, probably meaner, but she’d learned things in the army, in Afghanistan. And she wasn’t the same girl who’d left.

“Hallie!” The sharpness in Brett’s voice told Hallie she’d already said her name more than once.

“Yeah?” There was another beer in front of her. She picked it up and took a long swallow.

Brett leaned closer. “Don’t mess with Pete,” she said. “He’s not like you remember him.”

“I thought he left,” Hallie said. “After the … after that fight.”

Several months after Hallie left for Fort Leonard Wood and the army, Pete had gotten in a fight with two other young men in the parking lot at the Bobtail Inn. The way Hallie heard it later, the other men started it. But Pete had finished it. Put both men in the hospital, one of them for two weeks while his jaw was rebuilt with wire and steel plates. The only reason Pete hadn’t served time for it was because his father had money and wasn’t afraid to use it.

“Oh, he left,” Brett said, leaning toward Hallie as the band began to play. “He was gone for two and a half years. But he came back last fall, bringing in men, buying purebred cattle—Charolais and Simmental, some weird Chinese breed. We thought he was actually going to make a go of the ranch.

“Not make money,” Brett added after a moment. “Because you don’t on purebred cattle—not around here. But we thought he was going to run it like a ranch, make it a showplace or something.”

“Yeah,” Lorie said. “Then he brought in the lions.”

“No one knows if that’s true or not,” Brett said.

“Oh, it’s totally true,” Lorie said. “Maggie Torvall’s mother told her, and she told me. Her mother used to work out there. For Pete’s father, not Pete, because who would want to work for Pete? Except I suppose people do, though not always local people, although—”

“Lorie!” Both Brett and Hallie said it at the same time, and it seemed so normal, it took Hallie’s breath.

“Sorry,” Lorie said. “Anyway, the lions are real.”

“Seriously? Lions? Why?”

Brett shrugged. “Who knows.”

“We think Pete has a meth lab up there,” Lorie said confidentially.

“Lorie!” Brett said.

“Well, don’t we?”

“A meth lab?” asked Hallie, because that didn’t sound like Pete, except … well, there had always been a streak in him of recklessness and desperation.

Dell had always been a little in love with Pete from back as far as sixth grade. He
was
handsome—dark hair just long enough in back that it curled a little along his neck in summer heat, tall, and lean—Hallie’d always thought he was mean, always looking for a way to get something over on people. “He’s good with horses,” Dell had said, which settled it in her mind, because how bad could he be if he could handle horses? Hallie remembered once when their father was gone and one of the horses had gotten tangled in fence wire. It was Pete whom Dell had called when neither she nor Hallie could get close. He’d walked right up to that horse like it was easy and talked calm and quiet while Dell had cut it free.

But that was before. Now, he had a lightning bolt on his belt buckle, just like the one on Dell’s neck. And he’d threatened her. “Do you think he had something to do with Dell’s death?” she asked.

Brett looked at her sharp from underneath her cowboy hat. “Dell’s death was an accident or … an accident,” she repeated. “Why do you think anyone had anything to do with it?”

“C’mon, Brett. Is that what you really think?” Hallie asked.
Is that what you really think of Dell?
what she meant.

Brett rubbed a hand across her nose, unconsciously tracing an old scar. The band was playing; Lorie had just departed for the dance floor. “Sometimes shit happens, Hallie.” She looked bleak for a minute. “Sometimes it just does.”

“Like I don’t know that,” Hallie said with a flash of anger. Like she’d just been playing at being a soldier, like she hadn’t been in Afghanistan, like bombs never exploded, like no one ever died. “But why was she on Seven Mile Creek? Why did she run into that tree? There’s hardly a road. And she’d been coming back up, not headed down. Why? How did it happen? That’s what I want to know.”

Brett looked at her, steady and quiet. Then, she blinked. “Maybe because it really was suicide,” she said quietly.

“Fuck that,” Hallie said just as quietly. She shoved her chair back so hard that it almost toppled right over onto the floor. “Fuck. That.” She walked away.

8

Someone grabbed Hallie’s arm as she made her way through the growing crowds. She shook it off, realized after she’d done it that it was Jennie Vagts. Hallie held up a hand—
just leave me alone
—and kept going, so angry. Just—angry. Not at Brett for saying what everyone else was saying. Not even angry at Dell for dying like she had. Just so … damn … angry. At the army for sending her to Afghanistan. At herself for dying and coming back. At the ghosts for being dead.

She reached the women’s restroom. It was quieter, the music reduced to a bass vibration. And warm. Until Eddie drifted in behind her. “Goddamnit,” she said. The other two women in the room looked at her in the mirror as they stood at the sink. She rubbed her hands across her face.

Suck it up, Hallie,
she told herself for the umpteenth time.

When she left the restroom a few minutes later, the band had switched to seventies country music, Gatlin Brothers and Emmylou Harris. Eddie slid casually through her arm, and though she should have been prepared for it—he’d done it enough times before—it made her gasp.

She hadn’t taken two full steps from the restroom door, was turning sideways to let a broad-shouldered woman with close-cropped ginger hair pass by, when someone grabbed her hard and shoved her against the wall.

“Pete says you’s a real good time.” Hot breath against her neck, and she almost flipped out right there—too much, too close, made her gag. She turned her head. It was the guy who’d been sitting with Pete at his table earlier.

Goddamnit
.

She tried to break his grip on her arm, and he shoved up closer to her, pressing against her and jamming his knee between her legs.

“Let me go, you son of a bitch,” she growled.

“Pete says you’ll go with anyone,” he whispered low in her ear. “Says you like it rough. That right, honey?”

“Let go of me now,” she said, each word enunciated like a schoolteacher with a brand-new certificate. Tried to make it sound like she had ice in her veins, though she didn’t, was furious and frightened and so, so tired.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. He grabbed the front of her shirt and—shit—he had a knife, right here, right in front of everyone—which told her a lot about Pete and his friends and what kind of crazy he was mixed up in now.

Hell
.

She’d faced a man with a knife one other time, in an alley in Germany. She’d trained for it, before that, but training was different. You didn’t die in training, were facing blunted weapons. In the alley, she’d heaved a half-full trash can at the guy and run like hell.

She couldn’t run here. She had no place to run.

The band struck up “Tennessee Waltz,” and half the Bob gave a whoop of recognition. People who hadn’t danced all night got up from their tables and moved toward the dance floor. In another minute, it would be packed. A couple pushed past them. The grip on Hallie’s shirt tightened, snugging her up even closer. He smelled like Jack Daniel’s, old hay, and stale tobacco.

The knife lay flat along her ribs. He shoved her sideways half a step. “Come on,” he said, wheedling. Jesus! Was he trying to persuade her? “I’ll show you things you ain’t never seen.”

Everything went white. All the anger, all the fear she’d carried every day in Afghanistan, bubbled up inside her like lava. “No!” she shouted. “Fuck, no! Get off me.”

She shoved him so hard, the knife caught in her shirt, sliced it clean like paper. He stumbled and tried to catch himself, tangled with the legs of a couple of Sigurdson hands, knocking them forward into the girls they’d been dancing with. One of them shoved back, managing to elbow a tall ropy cowboy in the chest, who came back with a quick rap to the other guy’s head.

Hallie dived across a table and landed on top of her assailant before he could get his legs back under him, hit him solid in the mouth hard enough that it numbed her ring finger. “Goddamn you!” she yelled, and hit him again.

Someone dragged her off, and she kicked him. He cursed and grabbed her by her shirt, and she kicked him again, knocking him into one of the tables by the dance floor. One of the men who’d been sitting there shoved himself backwards and knocked over a waitress carrying two pitchers of beer. She came back up quick and whacked him on the shoulder with the empty pitcher, then slipped on the wet floor and went down again. Someone at another table laughed, threw his hat to a friend, and dived into the middle of the mess with a big grin, as if this was the thing he’d been waiting all night for.

Someone grabbed Hallie’s arm.

She swung as she turned and almost hit him before she realized it was Boyd, dressed in his sheriff’s uniform, all khaki and white and looking like a choirboy. Jesus!

She dropped her fist. Boyd started to drop her arm, but then he stopped, just stood there like a statue and stared at her as if something he saw had surprised him.

“Hey—,” Hallie started to say. Then, “Shit!” She grabbed him by his shirtfront.

He had enough time to say, “What the—?”

Just as she said, “Look out!” and shoved him sideways out of the path of a descending barstool.

One of the stool’s legs caught Hallie a sharp glancing blow on her arm, knocking her down, her arm numb to the elbow.

“Stay down!” Boyd shouted at her. Or at least that’s what she thought he said before he dived back into the crowd.

She would have gotten up anyway—because who the hell was he?—except Eddie and Dell chose that moment to descend on her. They were practically on top of her, as if to protect her—as if they could. She felt like she was frozen to the floor.

“Goddamnit!” If she were the sort of person who cried, she’d be crying. Instead, she was the sort of person who got crazy-pissed, and crazy-pissed got her to her feet even though all the blood in her veins felt as if it had been replaced with water cold as ice.

Somebody hip-checked her into a table.

Then it was done.

The lights came on, which someone probably should have done first thing, because it was always harder to have a really ripping tear-down fight under the harsh glare of fluorescent lighting.

Dell was floating in the exact same spot Sandy Oliver was standing, though Sandy didn’t give any sign that she noticed. It made Hallie dizzy to look at them, Sandy’s face blurring into Dell’s then slowly blurring back again. She closed her eyes and turned away, shaking her arm to force feeling back into it.

Lorie came up behind her, eyes sparking from the excitement. “Are you okay?” she asked Hallie. “What happened, anyway?”

Two deputy sheriffs had four men, plus the waitress who’d been wielding the pitcher, lined up against the far wall. Brett joined Lorie and Hallie. “First time in the Bob in how long?” she asked Hallie. “And you had to start a fight.”

“Shh,” Lorie said. “She’ll go to jail.”

“I didn’t start it,” Hallie said.

“Nobody’s going to jail,” Brett said.