Wild Horses (13 page)

“At the Flamingo Hilton,” she was saying. “Wait, I didn’t catch that — what was that room number again?”

“Hey. Hey!” he cried. “What is—”

Krystal grinned at him, slid down in the tub a fraction. Her leg shot out of the water, instep clamping over his mouth. Boyd sputtered and she giggled, splashed water at him with her hand.

“No, no, I’m not still entertaining now,” she said.

Boyd yanked her pruny foot from his mouth. “Like hell she’s not!” he shouted toward the phone. He struggled free of her leg and lunged for the phone in a great tidal surge. “You tell that degenerate at the Flamingo he’s got two good hands, and if he’s so horny, put them both to use!”

Krystal was swatting at him with one fist, twisting the phone from his reach. “Look, maybe it’s not such a good time right now, maybe you should send somebody else. Tia sort of looks like me. If he’s drunk maybe he won’t know the difference.” Boyd could hear a faint male voice, yammering from the other end. “Look, some things have come up, I sort of need some time — what? No, no, you silly, that was my brother, his wife’s just left him … I do so have a brother! Don’t be so paranoid!”

She talked her way out of it, then tossed the phone onto the heap of towels. Glared at him. “That was a dumb thing to do, Boyd, yelling at him like that.”

“Well, hell.” He squirmed, sloshing in the turbulence. Gazed down at the water, his nipples. His hairless chest looked boiled. “This call-girl thing, I don’t know about this in the long term.”

“It’s how we met in the first place, Boyd. How can you have such a problem with this?”

“You don’t think it’s going to take some adjustment on my part, that you’re planning on continuing in this line of work?”

“I don’t see why this should come between us. I’m sure you met lots of women in the casinos — you had to. Now did your last girlfriend hold that against you? Did she ask you to quit?”

“Blackjack doesn’t require condoms! Blackjack has no risk of venereal disease! And I would never leave you sitting alone in this tub to go deal a game of blackjack!”

“I have a job to do, and I have my reasons for doing it. And I have bills to pay, Boyd. You have bills, I have bills, everybody has bills. If we don’t pay our bills, they take our toys away. That’s how it works.”

He sighed. She had so much to learn. “If it’s bills you’re worried about, how many bills you think the two of us’d be able to pay with three-quarters of a million dollars?”

“That’s how much your ex took you for?” Krystal swung a hand into her forehead with a soft, wet slap. “Wow. Oh wow. I must be living right, finally, because this level of karma…” Then her widened eyes went narrow. “You’re not, like, planning on killing her or anything, are you? Because I can’t go along with that.”

“Would you relax? I don’t plan on killing anybody.”

Even if he were so inclined in the first place, there was no need. Most things that could be had by killing could just as easily be had for a well-told lie.

“But while I’m thinking about it,” he went on, “there’s one thing I need to warn you about. We get stopped by the police, or anyplace else I might have to flash ID, you have to remember to pretend my name is Peter Wackermann.”

CHAPTER 7

Allison’s first true look at Coyote Ridge came when Saturday was still virginal, the sun just high enough to glare over the red rocks that would forever prevent the town from expanding east. It was one main street and a handful of intersections, the gridwork layout falling apart at the edges, with half-conceived roads skewing off into odd angles and dead ends. A desert town scattered with sunbaked buildings, low on opportunity and high on dust. A sweaty tableau of red and brown, white and gray, beneath a sky lightening into cloudless blue. Green, however washed out, was striking, and limited to a few pines mangled by sun and wind.

For the first time in her life she’d slept on a public bench, a duffel bag for a pillow, awakening before most of the town. She sat for a while in the quiet dawn, watched Coyote Ridge come alive around her. Rubbed out the stiffness and found the diner that she knew had to be around here somewhere — just look for the cluster of pickup trucks with the gun racks.

She did not realize how hungry she was until setting foot in the diner, assaulted by the cruel aroma of two-dozen breakfasts. Mostly working men at the tables, all eyes up and lingering just a moment too long — a stranger in town and no idea who she was, their glances at each other full of subtle small-town telepathy.

You don’t want to know,
she almost said.

Allison ordered, washed up in the rest room, cleaned off the dust and a film of sweat that still carried the taint of Las Vegas; came back out and ate possibly the best breakfast of her life. She waited until the check came to grill the waitress.

“You wouldn’t happen to need any help here, would you?”

“Full up. Sorry, hon.” The waitress shook a head of peroxide hair, obviously guarding this job as a long-term investment. “You could check down at Dickory Doc’s. That’s a bar. There was some trouble the other night, I hear there may be an entry-level position for a bright young career woman.”

“And Dickory Doc’s, where’s this?”

The waitress aimed a chipped pink fingernail at the bank of windows overlooking the main drag. “Well, right here we’re at one end of the beautiful Sunset Strip. Doc’s is at the other.”

A decrepit truck then passed before the windows, swerving and farting clouds of exhaust. Allison could have sworn that in the pickup’s bed she had seen a man wrestling with a frantic and mad-eyed goat.

The waitress grinned, pointing after the truck. “That way,” she said. “Just follow the high rollers.”

*

Making up the posters was Krystal’s idea. Everyone looks at posters that lead off with HAVE YOU SEEN, she told Boyd, because they always think they might’ve. Telling him then how she could never pass by one for a lost dog or cat without wanting to cry, because she imagined the owners making their hopeful rounds, thinking this might be the one to reunite them with their lost pet. She would focus on the animal’s picture, trying to get a sense of where it might have gotten to, like a psychic aiding the police, but it never worked.

“It’s the thought that counts,” Boyd said, trying to cheer her up, for she had worked herself into such a state of sorrow.

He went through his luggage until he found a photo of Allison that would reproduce well, a close-up shot when he’d surprised her with the camera one morning. Allison, deep in thought the instant before, now turned to the lens, composed despite his interruption. Disheveled blond hair pushed back from her forehead, and her eyes as green as moss, staring clear and defiant, and maybe a trifle disappointed, as though she’d just awakened from a splendid dream and knew she could never find her way back. Tip of her thumb at her pensive lower lip. He wondered what she’d been thinking about; and why, when he met her gaze from that picture, a worm of hurt nibbled below his heart.

Boyd mocked up the layout on Krystal’s Macintosh computer, leaving a block of white space for the photo, and filling the rest with the promise of a reward for any information leading to his finding Allison Willoughby, last seen leaving Las Vegas on Friday, September 8. He added her height, her hair and eye colors, other vitals. Across the bottom he pasted a number for the answering service to which Krystal subscribed for the benefit of her regular clients. This allowed them to bypass the escort service, which she could in turn avoid dealing in for a cut of her private liaisons.

As he proofed it, Krystal read the mock-up over his shoulder. “Is all that true?”

“Not exactly,” he said. Obviously she was referring to the part about Allison having vanished without her medication, and how if she was off it for too many days, she would be at risk for seizures, delirium, worse. “I’m just trying to up the sympathy factor. How’s it work for you?”

“Strike that bit about spinal deterioration,” she said, “and put down miscarriage, instead.”

“Oooo, good idea! That really turns her into a ticking bomb, doesn’t it?” Boyd hopped from the chair and squeezed her around the waist. “You’re getting the hang of this.”

He printed a laser copy of the layout, trimmed the excess from the photo, double-checked the dimensions, then ran everything to a Kinko’s copy shop. He sprang for full color, leaving orders for the photo to be enlarged, then inset, with a rush-job request for a thousand copies.

“You really want to find this poor girl, don’t you?” said the clerk, a pudgy woman with tiny cross-shaped earrings and matching necklace.

He bowed his head, biting on one knuckle. “I’m all the hope she has left in the world.”

“And a much better world this would be if there were more out there just like you. God bless you, Mr. Wackermann.”

“No, God bless us, every one,” he told her.

*

Dickory Doc’s didn’t open until noon, every last grim thing Allison had expected and steeled herself to tolerate, from Wyatt Earp-era wooden floors, to the bison and cougar and coyote heads mounted on the walls, to the stuffy air whose molecules seemed to rub across the skin. The sign in the window read
Waitress Needed
, Magic Marker on cardboard. Allison grabbed it on her way in and walked it over to the bar, where a big-boned, leathery man with a gray ponytail and red bandanna stood alone, toweling off mugs.

“Can I tear this sign up now,” she asked, “or do you want to interview for a few days first?”

He looked her over, flat-eyed and deadpan, with the grizzled beginnings of a beard, or the advanced stages of a binge. “No, just leave it in one piece,” he said, amiable enough. “What if you get shot too, then I got to make up another one.”

“Shot,” she echoed. “The waitress I’d be replacing was shot. Here? In this bar?”

“The sheriff ruled it an accident.” The man watched her for a moment, then, taking pity, smiled through the graying stubble, dry lips like rawhide. “She’s not dead, if that’s what you’re worried about, and it wasn’t me. If it’s any encouragement, I got another one works here, been here six years and hasn’t been shot once.”

“Knifed?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“I’ll take it,” said Allison. Vagrants couldn’t be choosers. “I feel lucky.”

“Good attitude. I like that.”

He drew her a beer to seal the hiring, drew one for himself, and they sat at the dim bar, dust motes swimming all around. They watched the day grow hotter outside, coughing up as much of their lives as it took to keep the silence from becoming ominous. His name was Clarence, he told her, and he discouraged people from calling him Doc, let alone Dickory. He had given the bar its name because when he’d bought the building twelve years ago, it had been full of mice, like the clock in the nursery rhyme.

“Yeah, Punjab ate well
then
,” he grinned, and took her back in the stockroom to show her an enormous cat holding down stacked cases of Budweiser, curled into a surly wrecking ball of yellow fur, tattered ears, and attitude. “Of course, that was when you could still move your lean, mean self,” he said to the cat, then scruffed the back of its neck. Punjab blinked and rumbled like a wheezing panther.

“That’s the biggest cat I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Clarence nodded. “Nineteen pounds, last time I weighed him, and he waddles like two ducks sewed together. Don’t you?”

Punjab hissed with malcontention.

“Oh yeah, you’re the devil, all right. Hung around this bar long enough, he’s learned to understand English, I swear he has.”

Clarence ushered her back out to the bar, where they finished the last of their drafts. He pointed, finally, at her luggage on the floor. “Most people don’t bring along their bags to look for work. You just get into town this morning?”

“Just.”

“Know anybody?”

“You mean besides you and Punjab?” She shook her head.

“So what do you think of the place so far?”

She took a breath; looked out the window, where a strong wind swirled up a dust devil in the street. “I think if I’d gotten here a day or two sooner, I might’ve met up with Thelma and Louise.”

*

That afternoon, Clarence put her in touch with a local real estate agent who had two rentals available. Price was the sole determining factor, Allison opting for the considerably cheaper, silver-skinned and rounded trailer on an unshaded lot of cracked earth. It came with a few mismatched pieces of furniture, at the end of a three-quarter-mile walk from Dickory Doc’s.

She used the bar’s phone to call the sheriff in Prescott and report last night’s assault, wincing at the suspicious pause on the line after she gave Marshall Dillon’s name. “Look, I met a John Wayne once. It does happen,” she said. A deputy would be over to take a formal complaint later, she was told, and she then hung up feeling certain that nothing would come of it, that she would be bottom-of-the-pile priority. Even if Dillon was picked up, even if extradited from Utah, she’d have to come back in a few months to testify in court, word against word, hers against that of a fine community pillar who refused to send his kids to day care.