Wild Horses (41 page)

He’d cut himself through in fifteen or more places; done it between increasingly brief look-overs from their captors. Once his right arm was free, he’d been able to reach anywhere across his body, and each loose end he had tucked beneath the slack coils so that everything looked the same.

“Wow. Oh, wow,” Krystal had whispered when he’d begun. “That is so amazingly resourceful.”

“Got our two-week anniversary tomorrow,” he’d whispered back. “You think I want to spend it here?”

Now she watched him, watched out
for
him, being his eyes in case Gunther looked his way. Her focus was starting to draw the curiosity of the others. Krystal gave her head a furious shake.

Don’t watch him,
she mouthed.
Don’t … watch … him.

He wanted to laugh. When a captured animal chewed its way out of a trap, ordinarily its teeth were still in its head.

Madeline’s voice from the hall: “They’re not here.”

“What do you mean they’re not here?” Gunther said. “
She’s
here, that’s her stuff, how hard can it be?”

“What didn’t you comprehend? I’d let you look through these bags for yourself but I’m afraid you’d get caught in a zipper, so just take my word for it:
They’re not here.
”

When he slammed his hand against the wall, the entire room shuddered. “Drano,” he declared, stalking off toward the bathroom, then back in, shaking the can. “You assholes are putting me in a Drano mood like I never been in before. Now, who wants their baby blues looking like a couple of runny eggs?”

Boyd held the tooth immobile in cramping fingers, had only wanted more time to cut through a few more coils.

Gunther set the shotgun aside and wrapped one arm around the nearest head, and St. John’s face purpled as he thrashed against the enclosing arm. Chair legs shuddered on the floor, St. John like a hooked fish whipping whole-bodied against the force drawing him in, eyes crushed shut. He snapped, sank his teeth into the meat of Gunther’s biceps, snarling through jacket and shirtsleeve, fierce as a cornered wolverine, and Gunther yelled and began to flail with the can until he dented it on the crown of St. John’s head, tearing free with a grimace.

“So everybody’s wanting to play this the hard way,” Gunther said, “is that where we stand here?”

“And what’s it change if we don’t?” Allison asked.

Madeline plunged her hand in one of Gunther’s jacket pockets and came out with a straight razor. “Well, you might help avoid the worst for whichever of those two brats at the other end of the hall I get my hands on first. Quit rubbing your arm, Gunther, he didn’t even break the skin. Now
I’m
going to finish this up before we waste any more of the day.”

Razor in hand, she left the room and the shouting behind her. The truth about the disks, if she was even listening. Boyd knew that she would do it. Never knew she was anywhere near this vicious, but Madeline did not bluff.

And Gunther went after her.

“Stop,” he said. “You stop right there! That’s not the way it’s done, you
don’t
go after kids! You hear me, Maddy? You leave them out of this!”

The hallway went abruptly silent.

“You go right ahead, Maddy. You take your best shot with that thing, and I’ll break your fucking nose.” Gunther’s voice lowered with disgust. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? Kids? This shit’s not done that way, I never hurt one kid in my life.”

Her laughter was abrasive. “That’s why you always would’ve been a bag man, Gunther.”

Carrying the razor now, he marched her back into the room and pointed at Allison. “You. I heard you shout loudest a minute ago. So talk.”

She took a deep breath. “I said I’d shipped the disks ahead. To here. I was never traveling with them in the first place.”

“See how easy that was?” Gunther pointed next to Constance. “You. You were shouting too, but your cousin’s got just a little bit bigger mouth than you.”

“Two boxes, they came about a week ago. We put them in the garage, along the back wall, so Randy wouldn’t get to tearing into them. Randy, he sees a box, he thinks it must be for him.”

“Just take the disks and go,” Boyd said. He felt an immense sorrow, then the strange solace of abandoning hope. “If you need to kill somebody, then kill me, but leave the rest of them out of it.” He shook his head. “Can’t believe I’m saying this.” Sighing. “I’m the only one here who knows where those deposit records point to, offshore. So there’s no advantage to killing anybody else.”

They all stared at him in awkward silence.

“Now I know you hit him too hard,” Madeline told Gunther.

“I’ll check the garage,” he said. “Don’t go all screwy. Can I trust you five minutes alone up here?”

She blew him a kiss, then slouched in the doorway with her pistol and hooded reptilian eyes.

“I can’t believe you’d’ve done that to my kids,” Constance said. “After last night? You showed me those pictures. Told me you had a daughter of your own. I thought you had a heart somewhere in you.”

“If my man hadn’t stopped me, oh, I’d’ve done it, all right. And you know why? Because of you.” When she lit a cigarette, she let the lighter burn and stared into the flame. Let the flame die, then nodded at Allison. “At least
she
left here. At least she tried. What did you ever do? Stayed behind and behaved. You risked nothing, you gambled nothing. In the end you gained nothing that couldn’t be taken away from you in one day.” Madeline sucked a scorching drag off the cigarette, then with jittery fingers dropped the unsmoked length of it to the hallway runner, to stub it out. “And as little as that is, you still ended up with a lot more than I did.”

She scarcely looked at them now, while clocks ticked and verdicts were awaited. Boyd did what he could with the tooth in the little time he had left to do it. Footsteps sounded down the hall, and for once they telegraphed no rage.

When Gunther crossed the threshold, Madeline slapped him on the rump, and he grinned, raising one hand and waving a stack of black plastic squares. In his other hand, a rubber-gripped pair of heavy-gauge wire cutters that might have come from a pegboard of tools on the garage wall.

The disks he set aside, then slipped a deck of cards from one pocket. Ran them under his nose and sniffed.

“I know you were just talking trash to me the other morning,” he told Boyd, “but I been thinking on it ever since. Maybe you’re right, my image does need a little more flash. Maybe I could still push this Vegas thing a little harder.”

Gunther tested the fit of his own pinkie in the juncture of the beveled shears, nodded with satisfaction when he got a solid grip, then slipped his finger free.

“So as long as we got some time to kill, now I’m thinking the other morning wasn’t a total loss after all.”

He looked about the circle and clicked the cutters together.

“Anybody feeling lucky?”

CHAPTER 25

While he walked among them with the cards, loose-shuffling from one hand into the other, Allison summoned the horses as she’d learned to call many years before, to carry her beyond the hurting.

“Simple high-low cut,” Gunther was saying. “All of you got those loose hands I left you, so you get to draw your own, just so nobody can bitch I cheated them. Draw low card, it’s your own damn fault when you lose a pinkie.”

The stillness was shattered moments ago, Madeline turning on the stereo downstairs, loud, for the benefit of any neighbors who might otherwise notice cries of pain and pain to come.

“And since this Mr. Las Vegas routine was your idea,” Gunther told Boyd, “you go first.”

Gunther pried Boyd’s little finger from the sweaty fist he’d made, notching it into the V of the blades. Allison held her breath, knowing how still he must be trying to hold himself, that he could risk no movement that might dislodge those severed ropes.

“Ten of spades for me,” said Gunther, then pushed the rest of the deck to Boyd’s fingertips. Over the music, droning organ and sinewy guitar, she could hear the chattering of his teeth.

Jack of diamonds.

“Got a little luck left after all, don’t you?” said Gunther. He moved on to the next hand, Constance giving him her finger freely, even boldly. When he showed the seven of hearts, she took a deep breath, then beat him with a queen.

Allison looked into her eyes as she was next, Connie forcing part of her spirit through the air between. Allison felt the cold metal bite over gristle and bird bone, Constance refusing to let her go, nodding calmly to her—

“Eight of diamonds for me,” said Gunther.

—and when the horses were no longer there, her cousin was. Connie’s eyes her world now, Allison refused to look down even to see the card she’d drawn, then the pressure lifted from her icy hand and she remained intact.

Tom next, then Krystal, back to Boyd, and around the circle again, and Gunther could not win. When he drew low they drew high, when he drew high they drew higher. When once he drew an ace, Krystal tied him, then beat him in the redraw.

“This isn’t possible!” he screamed. “Nobody can lose this many times in a row! Nobody!
Nobody!
”

“Except you,” Madeline said from the doorway. “So snip one anyway and get it out of your system, I won’t tell.”

“That’s not the point! The point is style. The point is, they let themselves down by their own low cards. I go cheating on the rules I set up, that defeats the whole purpose of the game!”

They bickered and they swore, and finally Gunther dashed the wire cutters to the floor and flung the deck of cards at Madeline. She ducked the blizzard they made, still laughing.

Allison noticed Boyd’s face, the love and amazement it yet managed to convey … and not for her. He was watching Krystal as if some secret triumph had passed between them, in which he’d had no prior faith. As if she’d carried them all through on her narrow shoulders. Allison couldn’t fathom why Boyd should think such a thing, yet she knew his eyes, knew his heart … knew that he was.

“We’ll be fine,” Krystal whispered to him, and Allison wanted desperately to believe her.

For anyone could see that the game was about to change.

Madeline had taken the large Magnum revolver from Gunther and swung its cylinder open to eject the six bullets into her hand.

“Only chump losers cut cards in Vegas, Gunther,” she said. “Roulette, on the other hand…”

She chambered one and pocketed the rest. Gunther told her to wait a minute, disappearing downstairs, returning with a handful of heavy plastic supermarket bags.

“You see the way those two cousins were looking at each other earlier?” he said. “They got some kind of funny vibe going. That one, she’s
spooky
. What she said about haunting me? Threw off my game, I think is what happened.”

One by one, he yanked the bags over their heads like hoods before an execution. Allison was there for Tom when the bag came down, as Constance had been there for her. His brown eyes filled with yearning, then he was taken from her — the shoulders that strained at their ropes could have belonged to many men.

Her turn came next, and the bag descended, a veil of white, leaving her blind and alone with the smell of plastic.

She could only hear the rest — the crinkle of bags, Gunther’s heavy tread, and Madeline’s lighter steps. Her own timpani heart.

“You want a game, Gunther, I’ll give you the real thing,” she said. From out in the void came the spinning of the cylinder, the hard slap of it back into the revolver’s frame.

So your life didn’t turn out the way you wanted, and that’s your excuse?
she wanted to say to Madeline.
Yeah — so whose does?

Madeline’s footsteps, the whirring, the crisp clicks of the hammer drawing back. Allison flinched each time it snapped on an empty chamber. The inside of her bag grew thick with moist heat, her breathing loud, trapped close to her ears.

The grooved cylinder was pressed to her fingers, then yanked up and away — tricked into spinning for herself. She couldn’t breathe, knowing the gun was aimed at her head, even knowing which spot, a crawling at her scalp like the touch of a ghost’s finger.

Daddy, I am so sorry for yesterday, so sorry, because we were no better than this—

Another dead snap. Every muscle loosened.

On it went, while Allison tried to follow. She lost track, lungs recycling her own stuffy air, then grew light-headed, only to plummet sickly when the shot resounded like a crack of thunder.

And nothing and no one moved.

“It wasn’t hard,” Madeline said moments later, as if it had taken her awhile to realize what she’d done. “Not a bit hard.”

“Okay. So you did somebody, finally. Now you know,” Gunther said. “Is that what you been trying to prove all along?”

“I don’t know. How … how can I tell from only one?”