Wild Horses (40 page)

“Do you have to watch this?” he said. “Is this something that arouses you? Because if it is, just get it out in the open and hold the cup yourself.”

“Maybe I’ll cut you off at the root instead. Give you a dress and let you piss yourself from now on, like her.” He pointed at Krystal, then backed out into the hall.

“I’m sorry,” Boyd told Constance. “I’m sorry to make you do a thing like this…”

She shook her head. “Not as bad as dirty diapers, overall.”

A night of little or no sleep had left her face drawn and pale, her brown eyes darkly rimmed. The beginning of a soft little double chin seemed tauter than it had earlier, but underneath she was far harder than she looked, and bearing up well.

Boyd glanced at the doorway, then riveted her gaze and leaned forward as he began to urinate. The first chance they’d really had to talk, and it could last only the duration of his flow.

“Listen to me,” he whispered. “What they want. Computer disks of Allison’s. I think they may be here already but those two don’t know it. In the boxes she shipped ahead. Where are they?”

“The garage,” Constance whispered back. “You mean what they want’s been here all along? Then why don’t we give it to them?”

“They’ll leave a houseful of dead people as soon as you do. I don’t know how, but if you could get to them first, that’d be our only leverage.”

“This is the most they’ve let me out of their sight since they got here,” she said, and Boyd could feel his flow starting to dwindle. “They’ll never let me outside.”

“I’m just saying
if
,” he said, and then heard slow footsteps approaching in the hall, beneath tart-tongued bickering between Gunther and Madeline. “Listen. Don’t ask why, just do what I tell you. I have a loose tooth. Right side bottom. In back of the hole. Pull it, but leave it in my mouth.”

Constance looked at him with horrified eyes.

“Reach in and
pull
it.
Now.
”

He gaped like a bass with his dribbling penis in hand. As the footsteps came closer, and a nauseated look washed over her face, Constance plunged her fingers past his swollen lips. In the course of his life he could recall no moment more absurd than this.

Constance seized the tooth, with a twist and a yank. Nerve endings squealed. Broken edges grated with a rasp that conducted through jawbone, and the edge of his gumline tore like a split cuticle, while hot tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes and ran down the lumps and valleys of his face. She withdrew her hand from his mouth, wiping blood on her blouse, and he swallowed a salty sip of it, feeling the free tooth on his tongue like a chip of porcelain. He tried to ignore the throb, shifting the tooth beneath his tongue and leaving it there for now.

Constance backed away from him with the cup held in two shaky hands. Gunther stepped into the doorway, sensing something amiss, sniffing tension in the air while his eyes flicked from one to another to the next. His grip on the shotgun tightened.

“Boyd,” said Krystal, sharp as an icepick. “
That
wasn’t nice, you can’t say whatever lewd thing you want just because you’ve got your pants open. She is, like, a married woman.”

He loved her then, truly, swallowing more blood, and Gunther relaxed and told Constance to feel free to empty the cup over Boyd’s head if she wanted.

“Not anymore I’m not,” she said to Krystal, with a spare and chilling resignation. “Married, I mean. Not anymore. Jeff died sometime in the night down there. Alone. He died.”

Constance looked at Gunther as the origin of miseries great and small, then brushed past him and went to rid herself of the waste.

CHAPTER 24

They dawdled beneath the sheets as though reluctant to leave the bed, then dawdled about the room as though reluctant to leave the motel. And when they finally did, it was with the sense that up until now this journey had been a fantasy, sometimes violent and sometimes redemptive, and now had come the moment to begin living within the confines of their deeds and of each small day.

Tom drove them back to town and Allison thought how unchanged it looked, as if yesterday’s killing might never seep past those childhood walls. A false hope — he would be found eventually. But for today she liked to believe that her father’s body would remain upon its chair, preserved by the air-conditioned chill, and when at last the power was turned off, the enveloping heat would cure him and dry him, making of him a leathery mummy left to sit alone in the loveless tomb he’d created.

While she went on, forgetting him a little more each day.

“You shouldn’t keep that gun,” Tom said. “We get caught with it, that’s it, all it’ll take to convict.”

“I know. I hid it, back at the motel. I put it in the shell on back with the spare tire.”

“It needs to disappear better than that.”

“It will. But not today. Tomorrow, maybe.”

Allison watched the passing houses along the way to her cousin’s — the biggest, oldest, grandest homes, whose balconies and cupolas harked back to a time that was only half a myth. When they were growing up, it had been Constance’s wish to someday make her home in one of them, tending its gardens and raising children who would respect their heritage and traditions. It had been all she’d wanted, and she’d only missed it by a few city blocks.

“I’ll get rid of it,” she said of the gun, “but I want to do it right. I want to wait until Florida. I want to go for a walk on the beach, just myself, and find the most secluded spot there is. And around sunset I’ll wade as far out on the flats as possible, then I’ll throw it as far out into the Gulf as I can. And that’ll be the end of that.”

Allison thought she recognized Constance and Jeff’s house when she saw it, working from the memory of old snapshots, then confirmed it by the address. They parked along the curb, in the shade, having decided to stay only a few hours. They would eat and drink and talk. They would pretend yesterday never happened. And then they would return to the road, all the way to Panama City.

She pressed the buzzer, and they waited, then the door opened with a peculiar slowness. The moment she saw Constance, Allison thought with a shock that something must have gone badly wrong since they’d spoken last. She smiled and tried not to let it show.

“Guess who,” she said. No change in her cousin at all. “If we came at a bad time…”

“It’s all about the same now, Allie Cat,” Constance said.

After they walked in, the door shut, shoved by another hand, and only then did she see Gunther behind it. He racked the slide of a shotgun that had been aimed at her cousin’s head, then pushed her aside, bulled past Allison as well, and flung Tom unsuspecting to the floor of the entry hall. Gunther spiked the shotgun down, butt-first, into the small of Tom’s back, over a kidney.

“Be pissing blood for a week, you lived that long,” he said.

Madeline came next, rounding the corner from the parlor with a pistol in both hands. Allison wondered how this murderous pair had anticipated them here, then dismissed it as irrelevant.
Take what you want, and pay for it,
God said.

“You,” Gunther said to Connie, pointing toward the door. “You bring in their luggage. And if Maddy sees you even look at anybody outside, I’m going for a steak knife and I’ll be all over your cousin like stink on rice.”

“White!” shouted Madeline. “
White
on rice! Stink is on
shit
!”

“Don’t you start up with me, you skanky old troll, not this time!” Spittle flecked from Gunther’s mouth, and in his rage he stomped on Tom’s back, then began to kick him in the ribs while continuing to rant — ”You keep track of these things, is that what you do? Can’t you just once let something go? Finally get this business taken care of, I’d think you’d cut me some slack, but no, I still gotta hear about every fucking wrong word comes out of my mouth, like this is what you live for, you diseased harpy, you!” — kicking, turning Tom into a curled ball with both arms wrapped about his head, until he shouted himself out and stared down at Tom with glazed and unappeasable eyes.

“Watch yourself, Gunther,” Madeline said. “She was carrying the other day.”

“So get on it yourself, why don’t you.”

He knelt, pressing a knee into the back of Tom’s neck as he ran a hand over him. Madeline took Allison’s purse, pushed her against the wall to frisk her too, that hard hand like a claw. A bitter smell of cigarettes and coffee rode on Madeline’s breath and in her hair and seemed to exude from her pores.

“Where is it?” she asked.

“Where’s what?”

“You need a hint, I’ll give you a hint.” Madeline thrust the gun beneath Allison’s chin, jabbing up, until her throat stretched taut. “Like that, the other day. Except mine holds more bullets.”

“I got rid of it in Texas,” she said to the ceiling, “because I was afraid we’d get stopped.”

“Bullshit. But as long as you can’t reach it, then it might as well be in Texas.”

Gunther yanked Tom to his feet, and with his arms dropped now from around his head, Allison saw that his face had gone as hard and blank as slate — no hint of pain, nor anger, nor even will. He had become unreadable.

“You. Luggage. What are you waiting for?” Gunther said to Constance, then prodded with the shotgun to get everyone moving.

Allison led the way down the second-floor hall, and time felt as though it were doubling back on itself — twenty years come back around, sent up to her room again to await the worst, and if she was taller now, this was the only thing that had really changed; that, and her willingness to now look her violator in the eye.

*

Allison was more surprised to find him here than Boyd was to watch her walk in. Nearly as bad as seeing her at the end of the gun was the look she gave him — not of accusation, rather, at first she didn’t even know him. Recognizing him only because of Krystal.

“Oh, Boyd,” Allison said, with such pity that only now did he grasp how bad it must truly be, if it made her overlook what he’d put her through. “You never could leave well enough alone.”

“You know me.” He felt the cracking of skin stretched to its limit. “Always looking for an easier way.”

Krystal gave him a smile filled with her peculiar faith that the worst was behind them. How could it be that she hadn’t once averted her eyes, still seeing something within him worth smiling at? Never in any lifetime had he deserved this.

After Constance brought up more chairs from below, Gunther made a circle of them and took over with his supply of rope. He tied St. John first, then Allison.

“Look at you people. Have you really seen yourselves?” said Constance. “Y’all were covered in cuts and bruises even before you got here … except for you.” She pointed at Krystal. “You’ve been beating each other up from one side of the country clear across to the other?”

After the luggage was dumped into the hall, from its other end came the sound of an opening door and a small voice — Lainie, the five-year-old — crying out that she wanted to go outside, she didn’t want to play this game anymore. By one arm, Gunther pulled Constance from the chair she was about to be tied into.

“You quiet her down,” he said in a low voice. “One minute I’m giving you. You quiet her down and you keep those two in that room even if you got to strap them to the bed.”

He sent her down the hall, and Boyd didn’t know but that each of them in their chairs began counting privately, praying for a hush of silence before the count of sixty.

And with no one’s attention on him, he continued to work with the broken tooth.

When Constance returned, she halted and looked up at Gunther, nearly backing him off a step with the unexpected hatred in it.

“I saw a ghost once, on an old plantation estate,” she told him. “Saw it just as plain as day, same as you’re looking at me now, and I think if I hadn’t been so shook up, we could’ve carried ourselves on a nice conversation, him in his Confederate uniform. They say there’s ghosts all over the south.”

Gunther’s eyebrow cocked. “Am I missing the point to this?”

“I can’t hurt you,” she said, “and I know you probably will kill me. So before you do, I just want to let you know: I’m going to haunt you. Every day of your life I’m going to scream in your ear till you jam one of those guns of yours in it and decide you’d rather hear that, instead. I just want to let you know right now who that’s going to be.”

Gunther blinked with hesitation, then pushed her toward her chair and tied her. When he drew back his hands, he rubbed them on his shirt, as though she’d already leached past his skin. Then he watched as Madeline, in the hall, began searching the luggage.

Only Krystal knew what Boyd was up to, as he sawed discreetly at one more section of rope, using the broken edge of the tooth Constance had pulled. Three hours now, since he’d spat it and a puddle of stringy blood into his one free hand. A first molar, it looked like, minus one crooked shard still left behind. Most of the root was attached, the rest shattered at an angle, its edge serrated and flintlike.