Free Fire - C. J. Box [26]
Sheila D’Amato admitted to McCann after the trial that she was getting old and her clothes were too tight. All she wanted was her old life back, before she’d been dumped. She was pathetic,he thought, but he enjoyed her stories of being a kept woman in Atlantic City, being passed from mobster to mobster for fifteen years. She claimed she hated Montana and all the tight-assed people who lived here. She’d left town with men a few times since her arrival, but had drifted back after they cut her loose. She said she didn’t know why she kept ending up here.
“Do you plan to stay around?” she asked him. Sheila had an annoying little-girl-lost voice, he thought.
“Why are you asking?” But he knew why.
She shrugged and attempted to look coy. “Well, everybody hates your guts.”
“Not everybody,” he said, saluting her with his beer bottle.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, letting a little hard-edged Jersey into her voice, but cocking her head to make sure he knew she was teasing.
“I won’t be here long,” he said. He knew not to tell her too much. But she could be of use to him, even if he couldn’t trust her. She probably didn’t trust him either. They had that in common.
“Where will you go?” she asked, trying not to be obvious.
“Someplace warm.”
“What’s keeping you?”
That, he couldn’t tell her. “I’ll leave when the time is right.”
She nodded as if she understood. He drank another beer and she started to look better.
“What was it like?” she asked, her eyes glistening. She wanted him to tell her killing was a rush, a high. He wondered what the mobsters used to tell her it was like.
“It solved the problem,” he said, measuring his words, lettingher interpret them however she wished. How could he tell her it meant nothing to him? That, in fact, it was hard work and unpleasant but simply a means to an end?
He waited her out until she finally asked if he would take her with him when he left.
Of course not, he said to himself, not in a million fucking years. To Sheila, he said, “It depends.”
“On what?”
“On you.”
She had paid her legal bill to him for the shoplifting charge in blow jobs. They’d haggled and determined $50 per. She was pretty good. He’d been in jail for three months. He’d make her keep those too-tight clothes on.
Early the next morning, after shaving in his office and deciding that maybe he would look into some sort of hair coloringthat would drown out the gray, McCann dropped the .38 into his coat pocket and went outside into the chill. Sheila had been gone for hours, but not before they’d made a date for later that night. At least she was someone to talk to, he thought, although he preferred her with her mouth full. Maybe she wasn’t so patheticafter all. She’d do until he left, at least.
West Yellowstone was called a gateway community; it existedalmost solely as a staging area or overnight stop for tourists en route to the park. With a permanent population of less than two thousand people, the little town swelled to seven or eight thousand on summer nights and about half that with the snowmobile crowd in the winter. The place was unique in that they didn’t plow the roads so snowmobiles could be used legally on the streets.
West, as it was called, was rough-hewn and blue collar, consistingof motels, fly-fishing shops, and souvenir stores. Winters were severe and the people who lived there were rugged. Of the five places McCann had practiced law—Chicago, Minot, Missoula,Helena, and now West Yellowstone, West was by far the bottom of the barrel for a lawyer. Not that he’d had any choice, of course, after the trouble he’d had. For McCann, West was the place he ended