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print there, clear as day.”
    “Let me guess. It didn’t match the driver’s shoes.”
    “Boots. Not even close.”
    “Maybe somebody stopped to see if he could help and left when he realized he couldn’t. Who called it in?”
    Charlie’s words came slow and sepulchral, dragged up from whatever small part of him was still awake. “Unidentified male. Said he was too busy trying to keep his own rig on the road in all that snow to give us any more than the location. Actually, what he said was, ‘all that fucking snow.’ ”
    The house shuddered within the wind’s renewed attack. Snow pinged like gravel against the windowpanes. These Montana storms were nothing like the gentle snowfalls of Lola’s childhood on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, with their fat flakes seesawing lazily toward the ground, settling in soft sparkling heaps, clinging to each twig and bit of brush, creating postcard prettiness in tired oystering towns too far from Washington, DC, to have been revived by tourists. In Montana, the wind slammed snow against earth frozen hard as iron and then packed it tight enough to hold cattle on a surface so glazed and brittle that when the occasional steer broke through, it emerged with legs sliced and bloodied by the sharp edges.
    “I know how that guy feels. I hate the snow here,” she said to Charlie, trying to keep him awake, surprised when he responded.
    “What about Afghanistan? You said it was a lot like here in terms of weather. So the snow must have been the same, too.”
    “I was hardly ever there in the winter.” The various warring factions, made pragmatic by a quarter century of war with the Russians, then one another, then the Americans, generally put away their rifles and grenades and IEDs when winter fell. Ever wary of an underemployed reporter, Lola’s editors promptly sent her on the road to other war zones in a constant churn of travel that she’d complained about at the time, but now found she missed. Other than near daily trips back and forth to the reservation, she’d barely left Magpie since her arrival.
    Charlie’s breath puffed against her back, a prelude to the easeful snores whose rise and fall would compete with the wind’s low howl. A lifetime insomniac, Lola considered the finality of Charlie’s sleep a thing of wonder. She’d tried various experiments in their time together—turning on the light, the radio, even one memorable night running the vacuum cleaner across the floor—only to see Charlie pull his pillow over his head and plunge more deeply into slumber. She pressed her thumb and forefinger together, feeling the calluses of her nightly experiments with the candles. “That brand on her arm. It was creepy.”
    “Gang sign, I guess.” The words floated on a long, slow breath.
    Lola knew that gangs had launched operations on reservations around the country, having divined with criminal efficiency the opportunities existing within the vacuum created by the wrangling among law enforcement agencies. But still. “A heart? That’s way too girly for any gang I know. Not the Crips or the Bloods, for sure, nor the Nortenos or Surenos, either. Not the Mongols or the Angels or the damn Pagan’s.” The last, a motorcycle gang, particularly irritated Lola with its grammatical flaw.
    Charlie’s chest quivered with a deep chuckle. Lola relaxed. He wasn’t as far gone into sleep as she’d feared. “Here all this time I’d been worried that you might be a terrorist, given how much time you’ve spent in all those bad places,” he said. “Now it looks like you might’ve been a gangbanger. How do you know this stuff?”
    “Live where I did in Baltimore and you learned about gangs fast. Plus, I covered courts for awhile before I went overseas. I sat in on every bullshit drug trial there was. Man.” Lola shook her head, remembering. “I earned that Kabul posting.” Which she had, but never was able to shake the conviction that the only reason she got the job was