Wild Horses (4 page)

Gunther’s mind worked the problem until inspiration clicked. “I know how to settle this. Really prove it. Blind test, like the Pepsi challenge. They blindfold you, say, ‘Here, drink this — now, which is better?’ Like that, except with pussy.” He could feel every neuron firing with brilliance. “Promote something like that, you could make a fortune. Vegas’d be out, but in Nye County, say, nice and legal? Get, maybe, a sixteen-year-old side by side with a forty-year-old. Guy antes up for the test, puts on the blindfold, then gets to hop in each saddle. Then he votes, which was better, one or two?
Then
we’ll see who gives the better ride. Ten to one the majority vote comes back for the experienced woman.”

Gunther’s head swam with possibilities. Tapping his glass on the bar, he listened to the sound of dollars racking up as clearly as the dead thud of slot machine rollers behind him, some guy feeding it his paycheck a dollar at a time. Pulling the bandit’s arm, settled into a rhythm that even Jehovah couldn’t interrupt.

“Shit, I really should be checking into this. This could be the next big thing to hit Nevada.”

Kevin nodded. “It’s an inventive concept, all right.”

“I need a new line of work anyway. Those Guidos’ll have me thumping heads and lugging bags forever. Just can’t get ahead.” Gunther feeling itchy; better still, lucky. He slapped a hundred-dollar bill onto the bar. “Shot of tequila. My special deluxe.”

“Aw, shit, Gunther,” Kevin moaned. “When’ll you ever give up on this? You never nail it, every time you miss I lose one more bottle back there — sometimes two — and I have to patch another hole in the wall. Not to mention cleaning up the mess.”

Gunther blinked at him. “Yeah, so?”

“And someday you’re gonna fucking kill somebody in here, and then the only pussy we’ll be arguing about’s the kind we’re buying down in the prison laundry with a carton of smokes.”

Gunther slapped another hundred atop the first.

“Well, okay,” Kevin said. “But just this once more.”

He racked open the register to cover his action, four hundred on the bar, while he set things up. First the shot of José Cuervo, looking like an ounce and a half of yellow bile. Then the saltshaker and a wedge of freshly cut lime.

Gunther flexed his shoulders, cracked his neck to one side, then the other; twisted his spine with a satisfying pop. Then he chambered a round in his Glock 9mm and tucked the muzzle in his waistband, loose, for an easy draw. “Peter Gunn” tearing through his head, all macho-heavy bass and brass.

Gunther licked the back of his hand, the thick triangular web inside the left thumb; tapped a sprinkle of salt on the wet spot.

“Take cover!” Kevin shouted, and from the perimeter came the sounds of clinking glass, scrambling feet — and that same cretin on the slot machine, refusing to break his mechanical stride.

Gunther licked away the salt, then tossed back the shot of Cuervo. He was lightning, he was thunder. With a sharp clack he slammed the shot glass back to scarred wood, an instant away from giving it a hard flick down the length of the bar, when the door banged open, and a harsh flood of desert light seared his eyes—

And everything was lost. He slumped where he stood.

“Fate intervenes,” Kevin said with glee and no little relief. Gunther lowered his head to the bar, his prime moment dissolving into anticlimax while footsteps clicked toward him and Kevin swept away the shot glass and ate the lime himself.

“The money stays,” Gunther said, but Kevin would have none of it, so Gunther had to raise his head and give him the look,
the
look he’d long ago cultivated for deadbeats who didn’t pay their debts. The look that promised pain and disfigurement, all those troubles that could be avoided if one was reasonable enough to see things the way they really were: Gunther’s way.

Men like Kevin forgot sometimes — men who remembered what it was like to hurt another man, but just barely. For them it was all in the past, the only blood they saw now from the scraped knees of their kids. Families softened a man, but all it took to remind them of primordial reality was one annihilating glare.

“Interference,” Kevin said, quieter now. “Nobody’s fault.”

Gunther nodded. “Play over.”

“Not this routine again. Oh, would you just grow up one day.” Madeline limped over and slid onto the next barstool. Limping?
This
should be good. “Honestly — cut you open and a five-year-old would crawl out.”

He scowled. “Your timing’s for shit today. I was on a roll.”

“Oh yeah? If that were the worst of our problems right now, well then, this world would be such a happy place I don’t think I could stand it.”

“Something’s wrong?”

Madeline gazed at the pack of Virginia Slims pulled from her purse. “Something’s wrong, he asks.” She gave him a sideways look, reeking of low tolerance. “Once again that keen brain of yours has grasped the obvious.”

She lit her own cigarette. Only once had he made the mistake of trying to light one for her, ten minutes after they’d first met when she had dropped by Two-Eyed Jacks to scout table talent.

The downtown grind joint had been built more than twenty years ago on a loan from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund and had been laundering money ever since for the two generations of loan-sharking Guidos who were its silent partners: Toby Costas and his father before him. Gunther worked collections, employed aboveboard by Two-Eyed Jacks as security, meaning he came in whenever he pleased, and sat around watching the dancers while waiting to eject a rowdy, or to be unleashed to terrify a suspected card counter away from the blackjack tables.

The day Madeline walked in, she couldn’t help but catch his eye. After three numb hours of staring at shimmying silicone and saline implants, he had found her the most real and finely seasoned thing in the room.

He had earnestly believed lighting her cigarette to be the gentlemanly thing to do. Instead she’d tried to burn his hand with her lighter, and he’d drawn his fist back to his chest, crinkling his nose at the stink of flash-fried hair. Nothing was worse than that smell. His hormones made an instant leap from lust to love.

“Shouldn’t you be at the Coast now?” he asked.

“Yep.” Plumes of smoke went gusting up through the sprig of coppery bangs that brushed her forehead. “He blew town today.”

“Who did?” Gunther realized then that there was only one
he
in the world at this point that mattered. “Not Boyd, don’t you go telling me it’s that numbnuts Boyd…”

“Looks like the big jackpot for
you
, Gunther.”

He tried to see the bright side. “So you stop skimming his table now, we’re still seven hundred grand ahead.”

“It gets worse. I didn’t find it until today, but yesterday when he was at my place, he trashed my hard copies of the deposit records, all the statements. He closed out the local account that we were routing through into the Caymans. You and I, we can’t get to that money. Only he can now.”

Gunther gawped with dull horror. For a day that had begun with as much promise as any day, it really was turning to guano, one thing after another before he’d even left this barstool.

“Any particular reason he left?” Gunther asked. “Or you think maybe you just drove him away all by your own charming self?”

“What are you implying by that?”

Head in hand, leaning heavily on the bar, Gunther motioned to Kevin — two glasses of anything, just make them strong. “I mean maybe Boyd starts getting the idea he hangs around you much longer, he’ll wind up with a crotch like a Ken doll, watching you barbecue whatever you managed to cut away.”

Madeline jabbed the cigarette at him. “Don’t you start with me, Gunther, don’t you dare. As far as Boyd Dobbins is concerned, I was the frigging geisha girl he’d always wanted.”

Gunther snorted. “Not that you see too many geisha girls with stretch marks.”

“I’m closing my eyes now. And I’m counting to ten. If you say one word before I’m finished — one word — then I swear I will find the sharpest thing in my purse and stick it through your hand.”

Kevin brought two whiskeys, neat, a welcome diversion. While Madeline counted, Gunther drank and thought how remarkable his forbearance with her had been these past months. It was the rare man who could step aside and let his woman make time with another man. Madeline had opened both her home and legs to Boyd Dobbins, a purely mercenary act, knowing that his rogue dingus was the key to controlling the rest of him. But mercenary motives made them no less naked on those afternoons when Boyd dropped by before their shifts at the Ivory Coast, dealer and pit boss in bed together in more ways than one.

Gunther had insisted on hiding in the bedroom closet one day, the acid test — could he handle this infidelity for the duration? He found that he could. Amazingly pragmatic about the situation. That Madeline most workday afternoons wrapped her erstwhile showgirl’s legs around Boyd’s frantically bobbing ass and begged for mercy was just a cost of doing business. Still, Gunther did look forward to the day when he would put a bullet through Boyd’s head. Call it Boyd’s cost of doing business.

And Boyd Dobbins had hoodwinked them both? Somebody at this bar had committed a serious judgmental error.

Madeline made it to ten, then tipped back her whiskey. “His girlfriend found out about us. I don’t know how — maybe Boyd talks in his sleep. Like I’d know what he does in his sleep? She showed up at my place yesterday afternoon five minutes after he got there and went on a rampage. Corn-fed-looking bitch, you know what she did? She destroyed that big fern out on the deck. Started throwing cactus all over, even tried to hit me with one. I was picking spines out of my foot all day.”

When Madeline sighed, he could tell the drink was working a calming magic on her.

“Last night Boyd and I went on like usual. Honestly, Gunther, I didn’t have any idea he was planning on running out. We’ve only skimmed a little over seven hundred thousand — who quits there? State lotteries, nobody even much notices anymore until they get into eight figures.”

“So let me guess.” Gunther was ready for the bottom line. “Everything’s just peachy, you think, until you get to work this afternoon and there’s a vacancy at Boyd’s table.”

“I stayed awhile, then told the shift boss I was getting sick — blamed it on oysters from the bar. He bought it. Six people got sick last week from the slimy things.”

“Boyd go by himself, you think, or you think maybe he took your little cactus-tosser with him?”

“No, she’s still around, I just came from there. She thinks it was just the sex, she doesn’t have a clue.”

“Maybe that was an act. Maybe Boyd left her behind to wrap up some business and she’ll meet him later.”

“My ass. He’s left her as high and dry as he left me. And she didn’t see it coming. Any woman knows that look when she sees it. You wouldn’t understand.”

Gunther sighed. A man could get tired of hearing that. To hear Madeline tell it, when a mood was upon her, if he was covered with poison ivy he wouldn’t understand scratching.

“I’ll tell you what I do understand.” He killed off the whiskey and motioned to Kevin for a replay on the shot of tequila. “Boyd Dobbins has planted himself on the receiving end of some serious truculence.”

Madeline’s glass froze halfway to her lips. She looked at him sideways, almost a frown, nearly a laugh, close to worry. Just the oddest expression.

“Truculence?”

“Yeah.” He nodded grimly. Skimmed a hand through his hair so that it stood on electric end, watching Kevin fill the shot glass. “Means terror, pain … you know … horrible things.”

“Yeah, but
truculence
?” Madeline was scrunching up her face. “That’s a stupid-sounding word. Especially coming from you.”

“You got some problem with it?” His itchy feeling returned when he saw Kevin’s knife split the green peel of the lime. “Let me tell you something. You don’t know this, but last week, when you called me a maladroit humanoid, I went out and bought myself a dictionary. Yeah, I looked it up. And what I been doing since is, every day I learn a new word. So: truculence! I like that word a lot, so maybe you should just get used to hearing it.”

“Oh, Gunther.” She leaned in closer to him, curling one slim hand around his croquet-ball biceps and giving it a squeeze. “You’re so cute when you try to prove you have an intellect.”

He grinned and looped an arm around her shoulders, then waved her back away from the bar, as Kevin once again set before him the accouterments of wager. Rituals were repeated, from the cracking of knuckles to the tapping of salt, to Kevin’s bark of warning to all who watched:

“Take cover!”

Gunther licked the salt away, dropped the shot of Cuervo down his throat in one gulp. Smacked the glass to the bar and gave it a smooth flick to his left, down the runway like a draft beer in a western movie. He slid backward off his stool, pivoting clockwise on one heel and drawing his Glock while on the spin. His right arm was whipped up and out by the time he braked at a three-quarters turn and snapped a bead on the skittering glass. He squeezed the trigger, nothing to rely on but instinct. Chips of wood flew from a gouge across the bar, and a bottle against the wall burst with a thick nut-brown splatter.