Wild Horses (12 page)

“Then let me make
this
message clear: You’re making me very uncomfortable. Could you stop it, please.”

“I’m responsible for you now,” he went on. “What’s it been, an hour and a half, more or less? All this time and responsibility and I’ve been wondering what’s going to happen to you, if you keep telegraphing yourself this way, this way you—” His breath sounded ragged. “You could be hurt. You could be very seriously hurt, and, and … no one would know, no one would, would …
come
.”

“Stop the car and let me out. Now. Right now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you don’t have anybody to protect you.”

“The ones who were in charge of that did a pretty lousy job of it, so I’ve done fine on my own.” She tensed, glancing at the speedometer, saw they were doing seventy. She could never jump, not at this speed. Besides, the remaining core of her life was in the backseat. “Now stop this fucking car so I can get out.”

“Watch your language.” With a sigh of disgust he stabbed one finger at the tape player to shut it off. By dashboard light the rigid curves of his face gleamed with moist heat; a glow reflected from his glasses, turning the lenses to molten disks. “My children ride in this car. I will not have it profaned.”

One silent mile, most of another. Allison had pressed herself against the passenger door. Couldn’t read him, couldn’t decide on his intentions. He’d made no attempt to touch her. Couldn’t tell if he viewed himself as her guardian, her assailant, her—

(father?)

At the roadside leaned a sign announcing a scenic stop a few hundred yards ahead. She pointed.

“Could you stop here?” No reply. “I have to use the bathroom. If you want me peeing all over your seat, okay, but you might have a hard time explaining that one to your kids. And we haven’t even discussed your wife, have we?”

Dillon veered off the highway and into the darkened site with a violent spray of gravel. It was little more than a widening in the road, deserted, a few picnic tables and a trash barrel pocked with bullet holes, the expected rustic outhouses. Red sandstone crags zigzagged upward, and beyond a railinged lookout yawned the chasm of night.

As soon as the car slewed to a halt, Allison yanked at the door handle, found that Dillon had locked it from a panel on the driver’s door. She felt his fingers entwine in her hair, then curl into a fist, and her head was snapped painfully back. When she scratched at his wrist, his other hand punched her sharply behind the ear, and her vision burst with sparks of white.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he was saying, “you just … you remind me of someone…”

Allison twisted her head around, and if she’d thought she could reason with him still, that feeble hope was scuttled when her gaze fell on his lap. He’d undone his slacks, the fly gaping, the pale curve of his erection greenish in the dashlight.

“I — I have a gun,” and he dropped his free hand into the gap between seat and door. There it lingered as he jerked her head across and down, twisting the fistful of hair and forcing her head toward his lap.

She clamped her mouth shut, averting her face. Flailed with her arms, clawed at his leg, and for this he punched her again, banged her head against the steering wheel. When her elbow struck the dash she felt a small stem of hardware give beneath it, as her crazy bone jumped with nerve twinges.

Dillon was somewhere above her, apologizing in the night, so very sorry. She felt her skin flush with shame, with anger. Was the invitation tattooed somewhere on her face, visible to all but herself? A smell that drew any nearby predator? They took it for granted she was theirs, was this it, the license given as though by some scarlet letter?

Her nose was crushed against Dillon’s thigh as he squirmed, and she kept her face averted. Realizing that her mouth was not what he wanted after all, she felt the hot, dry length of him rub against the side of her cheek, her ear, in her hair. Above her, Dillon panted, while deep within, Allison gagged.

Deeper yet there rode all the wild horses, still waiting after so many years to carry her away, until her body had served its purpose to whoever had commandeered it. Until she could return to it, sore and bruised.
Ride away, ride away free from it all—

On the dashboard something popped, a metallic click where she’d banged her elbow. Allison turned from the horses when she realized what the sound was. Gun or not, she didn’t care. Dillon was bluffing, and if he wasn’t, maybe he would shoot through her and into his own leg and the last postmortem laugh would be hers.

Blindly, she fumbled at the dash, pulled free the warm stem of the cigarette lighter in the same instant she bit down on his thigh. He cried out, relaxed his hold long enough for her to stab her hand into his crotch, to press the glowing orange coils into the glans of his penis like a branding iron. Dillon screamed, and she caught a scorched whiff of bitter stink.

His hold on her broken, Allison surged upright and bailed over the front seat and into the back, cracking him along the jaw with her dusty brown boot. She righted herself on the backseat, then grabbed her Levi’s jacket from the front and whipped a sleeve around his throat. Tightened the noose with both hands, dragging her weight into it, shouting in his ear as his fingers clawed at the denim. He bent backward over the headrest, face bloating and darkening in the netherlight. She held the garrote with one hand, balling the other into a fist, to pound it down onto his face the way hungry men will pound upon a tabletop. Once, twice, seven times, eleven, breath and spittle exploding from between clenched teeth, pounding until her hand throbbed, then she unlocked the nearest door and dragged her jacket, her luggage, herself out into the clean chill of night.

She stood in the rocks and dust, beneath moon and stars, and tensed a moment, waiting for the gunshot that never came. Hearing only the faint sob of someone else’s tears.

Backtracking north, Allison got a hundred yards up the road before hearing the car start again. She looked back to see it returning to the highway, red taillights weaving away in the dark like the receding eyes of a banished devil. But this was no victory — the same devil would come again when she expected it even less.

North, she guided herself along the center line, keeping a watch on the road for snakes, and other things that bit.

*

Life was so good to him sometimes, Boyd was almost tempted to believe he didn’t deserve such a rich bounty of beauty and reward. While dealing blackjack he’d seen countless tourists learning that they could never beat the house edge, and turning in desperation to patron saints. If ever there was a tipoff to incompetence, a full-blown novena was it. Saint Expedite was popular, the bringer of money, and evidently on vacation much of the time. But somebody up there was always on duty for Boyd, it seemed, and he supposed he should just accept it. Clearly, his was a charmed life.

Take his luck. Down for a day, Allison ransoming his computer files, but he’d decided this was Los Angeles’ fault. L.A. was just plain evil, a smog-filled trench where his big brother would always be waiting to laugh at him. He never should have planned on living there in the first place. Krystal would say that the very intent had injected bad karma into his life. Within a few scant hours of returning to Vegas, he was back on top of the world again. Love had returned to his life. Of all the call girls in all the flyers along the Strip, he had to call Krystal Lyte.

After seeing him turn up the Lovers card from her tarot deck, Krystal made him pack and they’d left the motel together. She led him back to her apartment as though it were the most logical next step in the world. That he was moving in seemed implicit — she’d told him that the motel was beneath him, that she wouldn’t be able to stand the thought of him languishing there. Boyd prided himself on being astute enough to realize that most men would by now begin questioning this turn of events, and thereby spoil everything. Not him. He had once again been patted on the head by grinning angels, and surely it would only be a matter of time before they clued him in on how to get his money.

“Interesting decor,” he told Krystal as he surveyed her apartment. Suns and moons and stars, rising and setting in each room. Every flat surface held a candle or an incense burner. And then there were the rocks. Oh yes, rocks aplenty. Crystals lay everywhere, in every size imaginable. Scatterings like jeweled gravel, jagged chunks the size of his fist, massive geodes like meteorites whose hollow shells had split open to reveal miniature galaxies. As for walls and fabrics, she had a definite affair going with peach and rose pastels.

“I thought you’d like it. What I’ve tried to do is create an environment for myself that’s both energizing and harmonious.”

“That’s
so
apparent. It’s very tranquil. Like a Zen garden.” Boyd noted with approval the sunken, kidney-shaped bathtub. “Are those Thermajet Model 1200 airflows I spy down there?”

“Wow, you don’t miss a thing, do you?” Krystal bit lightly down on her lower lip while tossing her head back, the raven spill of her hair glimmering. She was the pinnacle of human evolution. “Are you wanting to take a bath now?”

“Krystal Lyte, you read my mind. Let’s fire up this little bit of paradise, why don’t we.” She cranked handles, and faucets gushed. “You wouldn’t happen to have any champagne chilled, would you?”

She did. As water thundered, from the kitchen there came a clink of glasses and the pop of a cork, while Boyd raided the linen closet for towels. Carrying a plush armful, he lingered before a hallway bookcase he’d passed over when she’d first shown him around. Most of the titles on her shelves struck him as about what he would expect to find in this well-appointed fairy palace.
Crystal Magic. Crystals: Pebbles from God’s Driveway. Tracing Your Ancestors to Atlantis. Blame It on Your Past Lives.

“I could make a reading list for you.” Krystal had rounded the corner from the kitchen, carrying a tray laden with a black bottle, stemmed glassware, fruit. “Some of those you wouldn’t want to read right off. They’re a little too advanced for beginners.”

“Ah,” Boyd said. Most he wouldn’t want to read, period. Then a matched pair of book spines caught his eye.

“Hey.
Hey.
Wait a minute.” The titles alone filled him with dread. “
The Complete Marquis de Sade
, volumes one and two? What are these doing here?”

She shook her head. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“I’m not into pain, Krystal, really I’m not. I can’t stress this to you enough: Boyd Dobbins is not into pain.”

“Then hush up about it, you silly, neither am I. And if you’d just get in that tub, I can show you how much I’m not either.”

Boyd lit candles while she sowed a handful of bath salts into the water. When she pressed a switch to activate the airjets, the entire tub metamorphosed into a steaming cauldron. She was out of her dress in moments, and stepped down into the bubbles, stood in the center smiling at him, arm extended. Her hair began to dampen with sweat and cling to the contours of her shoulders, her breasts, and for a moment Boyd could only stare with the awe of a boy opening one of his father’s secret magazines, to see for the first time the mystery of the unconcealed other.

“You really are Venus on the half shell, you know that?”

“And you’re just the sweetest guy. Now pour the champagne.”

They soaked and wallowed, fed each other grapes and slices of mango and papaya, tipped their glasses to each other’s lips to let the champagne tickle from within, while the surging water tickled everywhere else. They leaned against opposite ends with their legs twining together in the center, and she would lift her feet to diddle his chest with her small, nimble toes.

“I didn’t think this was, like, any of my business back at the motel,” she said, “but now that, well, things have turned out the way they have … what happened to your shoulder?”

Boyd touched the skin, still tender and red, speckled with a dozen tiny scabs. “I went through a very upsetting breakup the other day. It just … came out of nowhere, but it was for the best. Obviously. She wasn’t a well woman, in a lot of ways. Would you believe she did this to me with a cactus?”

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Krystal recoiled with empathy. “After we dry off, maybe I can help you with that. I’ve got crystals to promote healing and reduce pain.” Of course. Of course she would. “You aren’t married, are you? This wasn’t your wife?”

He wiggled his fingers. “You don’t see any evidence of old rings, do you? No, she was just the final stop on the path to your door. We broke up, I was dealing with the loneliness, then I found you. See how it all fits together? Would the cards lie?”

Krystal squealed and lifted both legs to drum her feet onto the roiling water. “So you’re not planning on seeing this woman again, ever?”

“Well, I need to talk to you about that…”

And then he felt awful, because her sweet little face seemed to crack right in two, so he hastened to explain that while his heart belonged to her, access to a substantial amount of his money belonged for now to Allison. Seeing Allison again would just be business, about which Krystal, he was dismayed to learn, had no room to complain. When her pager went off, he sat in the bubbles with growing dejection as she put their conversation on hold, grabbing her cordless phone and checking in with what he assumed was her escort agency.