Wild Horses (20 page)

He shook his head. “You’re not taping me to this chair. I’ve been more than patient, but I’m drawing a line with this. What, you’re going to shoot me? I know you better than that.”

So sure of himself — she couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t hold her arm still. Allison swung the pistol and cracked its short barrel against the side of his forehead. His knees buckled but her arm kept swinging, out of control. She whipped him as he fell, another split opening on his head; struck him on the forearms as he lifted them to shield himself. On the shoulder as he sagged into the chair, then Krystal swooped in, throwing both arms around him, begging her to stop, please,
stop
. And so Allison did.

“You don’t know anything about me,” she told Boyd, with quickened breath. “Not one damn thing that ever counted.”

As Krystal began taping, Allison tossed a paring knife onto the table so she could cut the stretchy black vinyl. Boyd watched them with dazed eyes, cuts trickling blood along his hairline. He voiced no objection when Allison went through his pockets. A deck of cards — typical Boyd. She dropped it onto the table beside him. A comb. His wallet. She counted more than $140, took all but a twenty.

“I’m leaving you enough for gas. You’ll owe me the rest, but if I never see you again, it’ll be worth it.” Allison stuffed the cash into her pocket. “I swore out a warrant for your arrest the day I left Vegas, so you might watch out for that. But even if they pick you up, you’ll get away with it. I don’t plan on going back there for anything, ever again. Not even to see you tried.”

“How long do I have to stay like this?” he mumbled. Strips of tape manacled his wrists behind the chair’s back, lashed each ankle to a metal leg, and coiled around his torso, chair and all.

“I’ll have my ride drop Krystal off in town, and she can walk back here to cut you loose.
Don’t
come looking for me.”

“Would you at least turn the air conditioner back on?”

“Sweat it out, Boyd. Maybe it’ll purify you.”

He asked for a drink, so she had Krystal oblige. Allison watched her kneel beside him, holding the jelly jar to his lips, and wondered what peculiar devotion had grafted her to him.

“I’ll get the rose quartz and amethyst out of the car just as soon as I get back,” she was telling him, “and we’ll go right to work on those cuts. Okay, sweetie? Just think cool thoughts while I’m gone.”

Allison scowled at their kiss, and the twist in her stomach made no sense at all. Boyd neither wanted nor needed her anymore, and she was better for it. So why did it still seem to matter that he so plainly demonstrated it in front of her?

Life after Allison — she supposed she’d always hoped that such a thing didn’t really exist for a man, and here was proof it did.

She had Krystal leave the trailer first, then dropped the gun into her oversize purse and slung it from her shoulder. Looped the duffel’s strap over the other and hoisted the suitcase. Looked at Boyd sitting captive in the kitchen and peering glumly out the window.

“Don’t stab this one in the back like you did me,” she told him, so Krystal would not overhear. “Why she adores you, God only knows, but I think she’s a lot better than what you deserve.”

He looked down at the floor a moment. “She’s a hooker.”

At one time Allison might have laughed; could find no reason to right now. “So?” was all she said, and walked out into the harsh light of day.

Eight-nineteen. They stood in front of the trailer, her bags on the ground, both of them staring in silent expectation until she heard the rewarding sound of an engine rounding the far bend.

“Was it your father?” Krystal asked, without looking at her.

“What?”

“Your father. Was he the one?”

Allison stared at the toe of her boot, grinding in the dirt. How had she known? Not that it mattered.

“My father. Yeah.” She followed the van in, as if taking her eyes off it would make it disappear. “He was the main one.”

“With me it was my grandfather.” And then Krystal laughed, as if she just couldn’t believe it all, that life was too strange for anything but laughter. “What gets into them, what do they think?”

Allison shook her head. “Too many pricks, not enough brains. What happens to their hearts is anybody’s guess.”

*

It wasn’t until after he’d already left the barmaid in the parking lot last night that Thomas St. John realized he hadn’t gotten her name, nor given his. Introductions would be in order this morning, as well as an apology for running late. Hardly his fault, though — some bickering couple in the diner had monopolized the waitress with questions while he cooled his heels at the cash register.

Unlikely-looking couple. Tall, both of them, and older than Tom by a few years, although the woman carried it worse, with a nasty air about her, and a natural sneer, as if each passing year left her angrier. The man appeared impressively fit but had a bizarre combination of blond hair and olive skin, and a Germanic-looking face that lacked only a dueling scar. He would spear each bite of his pancakes as though killing them.

“Getting like a message center, this place,” the waitress apologized when she hurried to work the register. “People all the time losing track of each other, this town’s not
that
big.”

Tom followed the directions the barmaid had given him. Her trailer sat at the end of the road on a baked slab of desert browns and scruffy chaparral, a tin can that had been kicked from one edge of Coyote Ridge to the other.

She stood waiting outside for him, moving toward the van with her entire life in a suitcase, a duffel, and a purse as big as a saddlebag. She wasn’t alone; a friend come to say goodbye, maybe.

“Don’t worry, I’m not trying to sneak in another one on you,” she said. “Can you just drop her off in town on the way out?”

“Sure,” he said, and helped toss the luggage into the back of the van, in a spot he’d cleared. Names were exchanged, finally, and they got in. For friends, the two women seemed awfully quiet.

He turned the van around, backtracked up the road. No one said a word until Allison Willoughby pointed toward the last few stores along the edge of town, near the motorcycle shop.

“This okay, Krystal?” she asked, and it was.

He slowed, idling as Allison let Krystal out, and maybe there was some closeness there after all. He couldn’t hear what was said, just watched them, curious. Some mystery shared that wasn’t his to know as each touched the other’s arm, tentatively, and nodded. They did not hug goodbye.

Allison returned to the van. The moment he wheeled onto U.S. 93, her middle fingers popped up like a pair of switchblades, and with jubilation she jammed both arms out the window. He honestly believed that had they known each other, she might’ve skinned down her cutoffs and jammed her bare bottom out instead.

“Worst week of my life,” she told him, before one last lunge out the window as Coyote Ridge began to slide out of sight: “Fuck you all and the inbred horses you fell off of!”

She laughed then, laughed like a woman freed of weights, now ready to spread wings and soar. She tumbled back into the seat, radiant with relief, propping her feet against the dashboard in their dusty brown boots, and bare-legged up to faded cutoffs and a purple shirt. Last night’s blood and oil and grime were washed away, leaving only the black eye, the bruises, the burn. She’d tried her best to hide it with the thick sweep of her hair, but it made for poor camouflage. Pretty enough, under it all, her face as oval as a cameo locket, but the wary set of her eyes and the tiny lines around them hinted of other nights just as bad.

“All that hatred in one week,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t sleep much, so it felt like two.”

“I’m guessing you weren’t there by choice?”

“Real Rhodes scholar, aren’t you?” She glanced at him, her clear green eye widening, softening with apology. “Sorry. We can, um … we can talk later if you want, but right now, if you wouldn’t mind…”

He nodded, said sure, there would be plenty of time, then she turned her back on him to stare out her window at the roadside gliding past — every view different and every view the same, and he thought for a moment that that was an awful lot like life.

CHAPTER 12

The temperature in the trailer was climbing past cruel and unusual. The door stood wide open, but that didn’t help matters. The place was a prison farm sweatbox. For a while Boyd had to blink as though his eye had a twitch, to keep it clear of stinging blood, but now the flow had dried and his forehead felt stiff. Strain as he might, he could do nothing to loosen the tape. Krystal and that work ethic of hers again. Do a good job, even if it meant trussing up her sweetie like a frayed toaster cord.

Pistol-whipped by an old girlfriend, taped to a chair by the new one. Today wasn’t going down as one of his better karma days.

Boyd had thumped himself, chair and all, over to the kitchen window so he could keep watch, spot Krystal the moment she came into view up the road. He heard the car before he saw it, sailing around the far bend and emerging from behind a miserable screen of shacks and other trailers: a big white Cadillac. Bless her kind heart — she’d flagged a ride so he wouldn’t have to suffer as long.

The Cadillac coasted to a stop in a churning brown cloud, and the driver stepped out first, a stranger to Boyd. Nevada plates, so he was no local. He looked the trailer over, his blond, brush-cut hair stiff against the breeze, eyes concealed behind a pair of Ray-Bans. Boyd drew back from the window, starting to sour on this turn of fortune. When the passenger door opened, his last hopes fled on a sigh of resignation. Madeline? Here? Now?

He recalled his one glimpse of the back of the blond Titan that Madeline had employed for their skim’s chip exchange, and Derek’s insistence that Boyd was their disposable patsy. Damn that brother of his, and his gigantic brain.

Heavy footfalls on the wrought iron-steps, then the doorway filled with the Titan’s angular frame. He stood casing the empty living room, slipping off his shades before looking to his right, into the kitchen. He bent forward at the waist, as if mistrusting a mirage.

“Howdy!” the guy said, and broke into a laugh, this one word all he needed to say: the guy on the phone last night.

I,
Boyd thought,
am one dead blackjack dealer.

“Maddy. Come here. Have a look at something,” he called out. “I got a surprise for you.”

She joined him in the doorway, a fresh Virginia Slim dangling from the corner of her mouth. The both of them bubbled with slow, welling laughter.

“Hey, Madeline.” Trying to muster up a little of the Dobbins charm. “You’re looking good.”

They sauntered into the kitchen like two old friends invited for coffee. Madeline’s thug leaned against the refrigerator.

“Where’s my money, Boyd?” she asked.

“Right where we left it.” He saw no harm in the truth, for all the good it would do her. “It’s the getting to it that’s the bugaboo right now.”

She picked up the depleted roll of tape, then dropped it back to the table beside his comb and wallet and deck of cards. “Your former honey do this to you and leave you like this for us?”

“Who, Allison? She was in a mood again.”

“I’m almost starting to like her.” Madeline took a luxuriant drag on her cigarette, fuming like a chimney and looking him over as she might inspect a cut of veal. “So where is she now?”

Boyd tried shrugging. “Take a peek around — does it look like anyone lives here now?”

She reached forward with the cigarette, tapped ash onto the crown of his head. He shuddered and shook like a wet dog. Madeline laughed, but stopped when she saw her dead-eyed thug hunkering down to examine the cabinet beneath the sink.

“Gunther? Gunther. What are you looking for down there?”

“What am I always looking for? It’s not here anyway.” He rose, pulled a pistol from beneath his jacket, and drew a bead on Boyd’s head, and Boyd ducked and weaved as though trying to slip a punch. Gunther followed, watching him dance, then turned the gun over to Madeline. “That’s only if you need it. Don’t get carried away.” To Boyd, then, hitching his thumb down the length of the trailer as he began to walk: “Bathroom back this way?”

“You tell me, I never made it that far.” To Madeline, then: “You know, this is the second gun I’ve had on me and it’s not even nine in the morning? Yours has lost a little impact that way.”

“Yeah? Wait.” She teased the muzzle down one cheek, then the other, as he stiffened, waiting for the worst. “The difference is, the first one wasn’t fired.”

With Gunther gone, banging mysteriously around the other end of the trailer, Madeline straddled him in the chair, gun in one hand and cigarette in the other. She held the glowing coal near his eye while dry-humping him as he squirmed.

“So Allison’s gone, you were telling me,” Madeline said. “Did she go alone? Or with somebody else?”

His eyes were squinted shut, his neck craned and head twisted back to tendons’ limits. He could feel the small circle of heat millimeters from his eyelid, the muscled grind of her hips.