The shorter of the two women spun on her heel and shouted something Nate couldn’t hear at someone out of view inside the house. The taller woman paused, dropped her head in fear or panic, and reached out to the shorter woman to urge her on.
Then Scoggins appeared, flanked by a barrel-chested younger man who had the build of a weight lifter and a smirk on his face. He also wore an oversized shirt and cargo pants. Nate had deemed him Thug One because he rarely left Scoggins’s side.
Scoggins wore a loose-fitting robe and oversized slippers on his feet. Two thin white naked ankles could be seen beneath the hem of the robe. Maybe it was Scoggins’s hunched slouch and widespread eyes that, even at that distance, reminded Nate of a toad. He was smirking as well, but also flipping his fingers at the women, obviously urging them to go away.
When the shorter woman kept talking and gesticulating and wouldn’t leave, Thug One shouldered around Scoggins and rushed her with three long and quick strides. As she turned to run, the big man kicked her hard enough beneath her buttocks to lift her off the ground and send her sprawling. When she scrambled to retrieve the clothes that had flown into the air, the thug wound up for another kick and the taller hooker yanked the shorter one down the pathway, leaving the clothes strewn on the grass.
Nate could only guess the cause of the altercation. Maybe the hookers had objected to what they were asked to do, or they’d tried and didn’t satisfy their customer. Maybe one of them got mouthy or tried to steal something. Or maybe Scoggins decided to throw them out instead of pay them. Nate planned to find out.
What he did know was that the altercation made his blood boil. It wasn’t Alisha, of course, because Alisha had been murdered. A lock of her hair hung from a beaded band on the barrel of his .50 caliber revolver. But she looked like Alisha and it brought back a wave of guilt, shame, and lethal rage. And when the thug kicked the girl hard enough to send her flying, Nate barely resisted drawing his weapon and charging down the hill to what would likely have been his certain death.
Later, he watched through his spotting scope as Thug One came back out of the house and gathered the scraps of clothing the prostitute had left behind. He walked them over to a trash barrel behind a storage shed and burned them.
“You bastard,” Nate whispered.
He caught up with the two prostitutes walking up the middle of the narrow two-lane highway in their bare feet. The taller one dangled a pair of spike heels from her index finger. The women were cold and disheveled, and when they heard him approach in his rented SUV, they turned and grinned desperately, hoping for a ride. Nate slowed and drove around them and signaled them in.
“Car break down?” he asked.
“Something like that,” the shorter one said, taking the backseat.
“You are a sight for sore eyes,” the taller one said, jumping up into the passenger seat and dropping her shoes on the floorboard. The interior of his vehicle was suddenly filled with a combination of sweet perfume and musky sweat.
The short one was named Candy Alexander and the tall one who looked less like Alisha than he thought previously said her name was D. Anita LittleWolf. Both were from Crow Agency on the reservation, but they wanted to get to Hardin to the north because that’s where they’d left LittleWolf’s pickup.
“It’s parked on the side of a bar,” LittleWolf said. “I’m really happy you picked us up. Thank you.”
“Yes, thank you,” Alexander said from the back. He glanced up and saw her dark eyes in the rearview mirror. Streaks of black mascara ran down her face from her lashes and she rubbed it clean with the heel of her hand.
As he drove to Hardin, he made small talk with them about the weather, about fishing, about how odd it was to find two women in their underwear walking up a deserted highway in southern Montana. Although they didn’t get specific, they said they’d been invited to “party down” at a big house on the river, but the host had kicked them out and not even offered to drive them back to where they’d been picked up. Alexander was still fuming about it, but LittleWolf was serene and seemed to take it in stride.
“So the owner of the house invited you to his place and then kicked you out?”
“It wasn’t the owner who took us out there,” Alexander said, and described Thug One. “We didn’t meet the owner until we got there.”
“He said he doesn’t like dark meat,” LittleWolf said without a hint of irony.
“He sounds like a jerk,” Nate said.
“He’s an asshole,” Alexander said, nodding. “They’re both assholes. I’d like to round up some friends of mine and go back there…”
“Forget about it,” LittleWolf said. “You’d never get in that place again.”
Nate feigned ignorance and asked her why she said that.
After putting on clothes from overnight bags they’d left in their vehicle, LittleWolf and Alexander loosened up over beers in the bar and told Nate about their adventure, from being contacted by Thug One to being met by him at the bar and transported to the big house on the Bighorn River. How the man asked the gate guard to buzz him in. How he punched a keypad on the front door to unlock it. How the owner of the house had come down the staircase and disapproved of their looks and sent them away, the scene Nate had witnessed. Now that they were safe and warm and their pickup was just outside, they laughed about the details. LittleWolf said she was glad they were gone, because the owner of the place gave her the creeps.
Nate asked them to back up to when they entered the main house.
“There was a keypad?” he asked, and slipped his notebook out from his pocket.
Nate asked D. Anita LittleWolf and Candy Alexander to close their eyes and recall what Thug One had done when he opened the door while it was still very fresh in their memory. LittleWolf said she couldn’t see the pad from where she had stood on the porch, but Alexander smiled and described the scene. The keypad was metal and had three rows of numbers: one-two-three on top, four-five-six in the middle, seven-eight-nine on the third row, and a single zero button on the bottom. Nate had sketched out the sequence of the pad on a napkin and handed it over. Alexander closed her eyes in recall, and punched 4-2-2 and another button in the third row. It was either an eight or a nine, she said. She wasn’t sure.
When Nate asked her how she could recall the sequence, she said she learned it by looking over the shoulders of rubes using the ATM at the convenience store on the reservation across from the Custer Battlefield, where she used to work. Both women collapsed in laughter.
“It eventually got me fired,” Alexander squealed. “But not before I scored a few hundred dollars from turistas.”
Later, after two more rounds, LittleWolf invited him to follow them back to Crow Agency. “We’ve got a place where we can party,” she said. She looked into his eyes without a hint of guile, and for a moment he saw Alisha again.
“I’ll have to pass,” he said.
“You don’t like dark meat, either?” Alexander said, teasing him.
“Actually, I do,” Nate said. “But I don’t like that term. There’s no dignity in it.”
Chastened, they gathered their purses and shoes. He saw them to their pickup but didn’t follow.