Wild Horses (26 page)

Undoubtedly he would be better off. The feudal appeal of mob life notwithstanding, Madeline knew that most of its members were hardly the intellectual cream of society. Routine stupidity cost them plenty. More than a decade ago, in one of the few brilliant things he’d ever done, Gunther had left Philadelphia after a tipoff, not thirty-six hours ahead of a dragnet of indictments and raids that swept through the Philly mob, which among gangs and lawmen alike had the reputation of being the stupidest criminal organization in history. Casualties of turf wars lay bloody in the streets instead of disappearing without a trace. Grunt-level soldiers who’d grown up on one side of the city had no idea how to navigate on the other. They couldn’t run the city, said an FBI informant, because they couldn’t find it.

The roundup that Gunther narrowly escaped had begun shortly after an entire carload of them agreed to turn state’s evidence. They had smartened up only enough to realize that dead rivals were better off vanishing, so after a hit one night, they’d stuffed the body in the trunk of a car, intending to bury it in New Jersey, except none of them had noticed the bloody Armani jacket hanging out onto the bumper. They nearly made it as far as the state line, but entrapped themselves at their first toll booth on the Penn Turnpike when among the lot of them they could not come up with enough change.

Madeline recalled a book titled
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
. But poor Gunther. He had fit right in with something far worse: the gang that couldn’t
think
straight.

So by now both of them had nothing left to lose, and Madeline supposed this would give them the will to do whatever it took to make things right for once.

And it all began here, beside this ice cream hut.

“What’s this, coming up?” Gunther pointed down the street, a block and a half away. “That look like a black van to you?”

*

They’d gotten out of Arizona yesterday through subterfuge and guile. Local and state jurisdictions would be watching for a man and a redheaded woman in a white Cadillac, so they had instead shown them a blond woman alone driving a gray one. Gunther had ridden on the rear floor until they were deep into New Mexico. The Dolly Parton wig she’d worn since Phoenix was the most hideous accessory she’d ever touched.

Gunther opined that they would be better off intercepting Allison Willoughby on the road rather than waiting until she got to Mississippi. The sooner they recovered whatever she had taken from Boyd, the sooner they could get after the money and head for Mexico. Plus they had no idea what kind of circumstances they’d find Allison in once she got off the road. Conceivably she could be staying with family or friends who spent all their free time oiling a houseful of guns.

They’d spent last night in Abilene, Texas, and first thing this morning Gunther had her call the Panama City business line for Thomas St. John. They’d already tried it Saturday, after Joey Ferret had supplied the goods on Allison’s ride, but had been turned away by a recording that suggested they call back during weekday business hours.

When she got through from their motel this morning, Madeline asked to speak with Thomas St. John about doing some custom work — price being no object — and was told that he was out on a delivery trip and not expected back until the end of the week.

“If that guy’s making deliveries,” Gunther mused, “chances are he was in that pisspot Arizona town on business.”

The only place either of them could imagine moving leather goods was the motorcycle dealership near the diner where they had eaten breakfast. Neither of them could recall the name of the place, although Gunther still had his receipt in his sport coat pocket. He got the diner’s number from information, then called.

“There’s a motorcycle place, catty-corner across the road from you,” Gunther said. “Right?”

“Coyote’s Paw Harley, you mean?” said a waitress.

“That’s the one,” he said, and hung up.

He got their number as well, then called the dealership for the owner’s name: Teddy Serafino. Madeline kicked back with her coffee and cigarette and watched him go. A gleam of cunning lit Gunther’s eye as the hunt overtook him, this one thing at which he excelled. It was not unarousing. She felt a heat apart from the rising Texas sun as he phoned Panama City again, and now it made sense, why he’d had her place the first call. You can’t have the same voice calling twice with different stories.

“Hey, who’s this?” he asked. Then: “Lianna, how you doing, it’s Teddy Serafino, from Coyote’s Paw Harley. Arizona, right.” Gunther tried to wink, just couldn’t manage the same effect with the gauze bandage. “Say, Tom was by the other day, you know, and when he got out of here, he left behind a big envelope of papers — invoices, like that, looks like stuff he might be needing. I’m guessing he hasn’t missed it yet, since he hasn’t called, see if he left it here. But, say, you got an itinerary on him, where he’s planning on being today? Maybe I can catch him someplace, see if he’s needing this stuff. Overnight it to him someplace else tomorrow if he does.”

The woman put him on hold for a couple of minutes, came back with the list of stops that her boss had mapped out. Four of them, they slashed southeast through the middle of Texas. He would be starting out from Odessa, then making stops in San Angelo, Brady, and finally San Antonio, where he would spend the night. She gave him the numbers of each place Tom would be stopping.

After Gunther hung up, they spread the road atlas across the bed and began to triangulate distances and intercept points.

“Okay, here’s us, and here’s them.” Gunther’s finger picked out Abilene and Odessa. “Looks like we overshot them yesterday by about a hundred and eighty miles. That’s not bad, really, considering.”

Without a firm idea of when St. John would be leaving Odessa, trying to beat him to San Angelo would be risky. Brady, almost due south of Abilene, would be the better place.

“Look at this, we got barely over a hundred miles between us and Brady,” Gunther said. “They got over two hundred from Odessa, plus however long they lay over in San Angelo. We can be there way ahead of them.”

“Hawg Heaven?” Madeline read it off the list.

“That’s the way she spelled it for me.” And Gunther looked so cute all of a sudden, the one good eye wide and blameless, as if he sensed another pending attack on his education. “That’s
exactly
the way she spelled it.” Shaking his head. “Hawg. These motorcycle and leather freaks, I don’t understand them one bit. They got no respect for the English language.”

*

A black van it was, and just maybe the one they were waiting for. It slowed, pulled into Hawg Heaven’s asphalt lot. Stopped.

“Okay, Cyclops,” said Madeline. “What’s the next move?”

“If he’s making deliveries, they’ll be here awhile, so what I’m thinking about is another ice cream, as long as you’re hogging that fan.”

“Bring me another chocolate-dip cone, while you’re at it.”

Gunther left the car as soon as they made sure it was Allison who emerged from the black van. He appeared unconcerned, loose and easy and content. Saturday’s fiasco with Boyd was forgotten, the bruises and injured eye something he no longer acknowledged.

Seeing Allison again, even at a distance, was enough to bring back their confrontation from two and a half weeks ago: Allison’s furious arrival that afternoon, catching her with Boyd, ruining everything. Madeline decided that she could not hate Allison for that part of it, at least — there was no way she could’ve known. Moreover, you had to respect anyone willing to unleash that much anger against her man.

Allison’s voice, though, above the clamor of the car alarm:
What’s your problem?
she had said.
You can’t hear yourself age?

Another woman was worse as an enemy, more cruel than most men, because she instinctively knew where to find the jugular and how best to open it. Another woman could leave you dying inside before most men were even able to sense a weakness.

She could hate Allison all right, but for the proper reasons. Madeline could hate her for seeing so much so quickly, and for knowing how to exploit it. She could hate Allison for her smoother skin and her rounder eyes, for the hair that she knew would look great even after a night’s sleep. Most of all she could hate her for the years that Allison had not yet lived.

Gunther was back, bearing ice cream cones, licking at the creamy rivulets the sun sent trickling down both fists. She bit into the chocolate-dipped bulb of her cone, the thin shell crunching between her teeth like a tiny skull.

“Nothing happening yet, huh,” he said.

“They carried in some boxes. Now they’re inside. What do we do about that, Gunther?”

“Here and now, nothing. Big-ass van like that, sticks up over most everything else on the road, it won’t be hard to follow. All we do is hang back this afternoon, till they stop someplace that’s running low on one thing.”

“And what would that be?”

Gunther looked at the roof, disappointed, as if expecting her to know better by now.

“Witnesses,” he said. “What else?”

CHAPTER 16

Southeast across Texas, the contrasts in the land ahead and the land behind became more manifest. The deserts had been left for good, tended as they had always been by their red stone spires and arches, like the remnants of a vast cathedral prevailing from some aloof and pitiless antiquity. East and west Texas were two different states, even if the map said otherwise. It was green here in the east, full of bristling pines, with lush hills and shaded bowers that owed more to the south than to the west.

The more the land began to thicken around them, the deeper Allison withdrew inside herself. An hour out of Brady, Tom made the connection: They were getting closer to her home, its nearness more inescapable every time she looked out the window.

Allison broke her silence once they started listening to the blues, tapes that she dug from her bag, well-played cassettes that must have seen a hundred rooms, a thousand bottles. Old music, as primitive and powerful as the elements, those hounded voices made tinny by the funnel of decades. Her favorite was a collection of historic recordings made on the old southern state pen work farms and plantations. Unknown black men who sang not for fame or money, but because it was the last true freedom left to them.

“Listen to this line,” Allison commanded, and he tuned in.

It ain’t but the one thing I done wrong,

I stayed in Mississippi just a day too long…

“I have an idea how he might’ve felt,” she said. “Did you ever wonder how come it’s the innocent that usually get locked up in the worst prisons? And I don’t mean the kind with bars. I mean the kind of prisons that people carry around inside themselves.”

“It’s crossed my mind.” Tom saw, in a culvert ahead, the armored shell of an armadillo as it trundled through the weeds. Rounded and happy in its prison, because it knew no other way.

“A lot of them down here believe in original sin. No one’s innocent, they’ll preach at you. But I think that’s just something they’ve convinced themselves of so they won’t go crazy. It’s a lot easier to hang on to your mind when you think you’re getting what you deserve. A lot easier to turn your back on someone else when you’re sure they are too.”

“And they’ve still got the gall to call it love,” Tom said.

“But then you have to wonder what kind of prisons those good neighbors believe eight-, ten-, twelve-year-old girls deserve. Especially when their fathers are holding the keys. In their cold hands.” Her jaw tightened, words squeezing past clenched teeth. “What do you want to bet they don’t spend much time trying to fit
that
into this system they’ve worked so hard to get a handle on?”

He wasn’t going to argue with her there.

For he’d noticed that the more they stopped, the more people everywhere were intent on proving her right. At gas stations and truck stops and diners, they’d walk in and gazes would flicker their way. Newcomers were always checked out, over coffee or an ice-cold drink, with a lazy eye and feigned disinterest, surface details taken in while idle minds filled in the rest. Tom and Allison were one thing but most people saw another.

Her bruises had deepened into more vivid colors, as bruises will do. Royal purple, sunrise yellow. At stop after stop, Tom had caught similar reactions on too many of those assessing faces. An admission to a brutal brotherhood in the eyes of too many men; a grim recognition in those of too many women.

It happened again south of Brady when they stopped for a late lunch. The café was all flyspecks and sizzle, squeaking hinges and faces that glistened with sweat, mostly oilfield roustabouts and salesmen. The only one with no attention to spare was a young mother, trying to shepherd her three little ones around the table.

The looks from the rest were not lost on Allison. “Maybe I should wear a sign around my neck,” she said. “‘He didn’t do it.’”

She laughed softly and nudged his shoulder. It was the first time that they had touched. A warm circle on his arm felt as if it were glowing, and he realized how badly he wanted her to touch him again. And this time, to linger.