Wild Horses (9 page)

He was fresh out of ideas as to how to locate her. Allison was at heart a vagabond, a beautiful windblown nomad, with no place on earth to which she would automatically retreat. Maybe that had been part of what he’d found so appealing about her — knowing that should he gamble wrong one day, he could lose her completely. She would disappear like a shadow on a cloudy day.

Throw in nearly three-quarters of a million, though, and it became an entirely unacceptable loss.

If only she hadn’t done so thorough a job on his computer. If he correctly interpreted her note, Allison had copied everything onto disks, to maneuver him into some sort of demeaning apology. He
was
missing several floppies from his stash, just hadn’t noticed at first in his haste to pack yesterday morning. Had she merely trashed his hard drive and left it at that, he could’ve minimized the damage. Reformatting didn’t necessarily mean the files were gone forever. A data forensics specialist still might’ve had a shot at recovering them. Maybe Wang Chung could have retrieved everything, although this was hypothetical now. Allison had seen to that too.

She’d taken one of his games, then copied it and recopied it until it had gobbled up every last megabyte of storage. All traces of that seven hundred grand were gone, but he could play Duke Nukem all he wanted.

Mingling with the tourists and Vegas flotsam, Boyd stopped at a cluster of newspaper vending machines. To one side stood a wire rack bristling with magazinelike flyers, most printed on cheap pulp stock. He had seen them plenty of times, flipped through them as well, if only to admire the displayed skin. Advertising for the regional sex industry — only in Nevada. Nothing but ads and maps showing the way out of Clark County and up to the legal brothels between Vegas and Reno. For local action, here where prostitution was still a theoretical crime, there were endless pictures and phone numbers, laced with innuendo — performers, dancers, live nude shows direct to your room, experience your wildest fantasies. All one big wink and a nudge.

By page seven, Boyd knew that if he did not get laid tonight, he was going to spontaneously combust. Must have been the idea of all that money. Money was an aphrodisiac, he believed, and having it just out of reach was an unconscionable tease.

He sprinted back to his motel, a couple of discreet blocks off the Strip, befitting his fugitive status. Up in his room he flopped on the bed and paged through this catalog of goddesses-on-demand.

Great lips. I’ll come to you anytime. Leann.
He kept going, found a picture of three girls with their pert bottoms thrust out.
How about OUR assets? We also do parties.
Three at once? Tempting, but as long as he was footing his own bill, there was a fine line between extravagance and overkill.
Hot blonde, 40-DD. Will climax!
Sure. Just like Jane Fonda in
Klute
, probably.
Call Jennifer — I can get so nasty I’ll make you blush.
Not likely, unless she showed up with Grandma Dobbins in tow.

Boyd knew the moment he saw her that Krystal was the one. He liked her name, and sure as poker tables were green did he love her picture. A glorious and petite sprite of a young woman, no stranger to the gym, on one knee with her other leg exquisitely pointed toe-down like a ballerina. A cascade of raven hair fell halfway down her back. Her smile was charming, sweet, inviting. Her eyes full of both enthusiasm and unsullied innocence.

I may live in Nevada,
read her ad’s clinch line,
but nudity is my natural state.
Clever, understated … this could well be the woman he’d waited for all his life. Boyd scrambled for the phone before some undeserving loser out there could beat him to her.

She was tapping at his door in forty-eight minutes, stripped in forty-nine. She stood five-one after kicking off her heels, as comfortable in her skin as Eve in Eden.

“You like what you see?” Krystal asked, refreshingly free of come-hither posturing, but why bother to ask in the first place? The answer was written all over him, from face to trousers.

“Obviously,” he said, dry-throated, “you believe in truth in advertising.”

She took him by the hand, steered him toward the bed. “Lies just come back to haunt. Bad karma, you know. That’s why the only lies I ever tell are to spare someone’s feelings. So…! How would you like it tonight, Brad?”

Krystal ran down the menu in tandem with his buttons and his zipper, and he wanted it all. By the time she’d stretched him out along the bed, the only fault he could possibly find with her was that she wasn’t twins.

“You’re just the sweetest guy!” she said, and took delighted pity on his indecision. “I hardly ever suggest this to a first-time client, because I’m afraid they might think I’m really weird, but, like, you seem really special, like you might be up for something, you know … different?”

“Connoisseur of the sexual smorgasbord,” he blurted. “Lay it on me.”

She pitched, he listened. She claimed — and rightly so, he imagined — to be the only call girl in Las Vegas who practiced techniques of the eastern sex masters. She told him that she could stimulate his chakras to give him an orgasm like none he had ever experienced. Which in itself sounded righteous … but chakras? Her terminology was spawned from some other planet than his own.

The chakras, she explained, were seven centers of energy, in a straight line down the center of the body. First discovered in the east, they had been known to esoterically wise men and women for thousands of years, long before western doctors were able to correlate them precisely with specific nerve centers. The more she explained, the more animated she grew.
This is no act,
he realized.
She really believes in this.

From her purse she produced a drawstring pouch and opened it, spilled onto the bed seven rosy pink gemstones. “Rhodochrosite,” she said. “It enhances blood circulation, and I think we both know how important that is for what we’re about to do.” She ran her velvet tongue along his body, planting kisses upon each strategic hot spot, then depositing a crystal. The first she nestled just under his scrotum, wedged between both cheeks.

“Hey.
Hey!
” he cried sharply.

“Relax,” she said. And that smile — how could he ever deny the magic of that smile? “Trust me, you silly.”

The next crystal went in his navel, the next she rested upon his solar plexus; another over his heart, one in the hollow of his throat. She handed him the last two. Told him, for the time being, to hold one just over the bridge of his nose and the other against the crown of his head. He obeyed, then scowled, not just because he had the feeling that this was some elaborate joke, that hidden cameras were rolling and somebody was watching through a two-way mirror, convulsed with hilarity.

“Do you wash these?” he asked. “Regularly?”

“Oh, sure. The energies have to be purified. Why?”

“Because on my face I’m holding a rock that at one time or another has probably been up some other guy’s ass, is why.”

“Oh, would you relax? It’s not like it’s the Blarney Stone,” she said, then dipped her head into his lap. She took him in her mouth, swallowed him whole, and with each bob of her head, Boyd’s misgivings and muscles loosened further. Solid to gel to liquid to particle vapor — this was his metamorphosis beneath her touch and her kiss, and she, bringer of miracles and stealer of breath.

Krystal knew the optimum moment to withdraw, then unfurl a condom onto him, then hop up to straddle his surging hips. She plunged him inside of her, all wet fire, her body like silk and steel as she rode him and rode him. Krystal leaned forward, small pomegranate breasts jiggling before his gaze as she reached out to hold the last two crystals in place, on forehead and crown, and freed his hands. She lay down atop him, pressing body to body, crystals trapped between as she set the rhythm, undulating like a dolphin through the sea. Maybe it was only the power of suggestion but he felt something astonishing about to happen, a delicious humming frequency that shot through him like golden lightning, as she rode him, rode him, until he felt himself explode, groin and belly, rib cage and skull, and she threw herself back off him and onto her knees with a delighted wail, and chunks of rhodochrosite went flying, to patter around them like hailstones.

All except the one up his ass.

For the first time in his life, orgasm hit Boyd so hard that he blacked out. Consciousness swam back in moments later — or maybe hours — counter to the slow spin of the room. He shook his head, blinked, saw her sitting on the side of the bed and smiling brightly at him. Her eyes were big and round, gray as sea foam, and under their spell he was lost, utterly lost.

“I could be wrong,” said Krystal, “but I think I see a brand-new convert lying here.”

“Sorceress!” Boyd cried. He sucked wind, rejuvenated and pure. “You’re a sorceress and I’m in love.”

Again, she told him he was sweet, and he lay there waiting for his land legs to return, watching as she gathered up her far-flung crystals. He told her this must be how the phrase “get your rocks off” originated, and she laughed, told him maybe, maybe so, that she’d never heard that one before. But from the look on her face he could tell that this was one of her diplomatic lies.

He struggled upright in desperation. Business and pleasure had both been transacted; after another couple of minutes she would be gone. How to keep her in this room, in his life? The blind date of all time, there had to be more left. When she opened her purse to drop the drawstring bag back in, he saw his chance.

“Hey. Cards,” he said, and pointed. “Can I see them?”

“It’s not the kind of deck you’d be used to seeing in this town.” She handed them over. “It’s a tarot deck. Sometimes I, you know, need a little extra help to figure things out.”

Boyd nodded sagely. “Don’t we all.”

He flipped through them, noting the different suits, nothing with which he was familiar. Cups and wands, swords and coins. Plus others that didn’t belong to any suit: the Hanged Man, Death, the Empress, others. The mother of his children, and she was immersed in the deeply goofy. A fine thing it was that love was so blind.

“I was a blackjack dealer, at the Ivory Coast,” he told her while shuffling. “There seven months, only, and already I was the top-requested dealer for private parties up in the luxury suites. You have any idea the kind of tips you can make then?”

Krystal, half dressed and fully captivated, watched the flash and dazzle of his hands. “What made you number one so quick?”

With the bed a mess and the dresser top too slick, he dropped naked to the carpet and had her kneel down with him.

“Most blackjack games are dealt out of a shoe,” he explained. “That’s what they call that boxy thing that holds four, five, six decks at once to give card counters a rougher time. And keeps the dealer from peeking at the hit cards, or dealing off the bottom. But places do still offer games from hand-held decks. That’s what they had me doing, and at a two-thousand-dollar-limit table, too. Because I was bringing to the table a little something different.

“Pretend you’re Catholic,” Boyd said, then whipped out five cards in a well-aligned row before her; whipped out five more, and there sat a quintet of crosses. “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

“That’s
so
cool! Except those are more like Eastern Orthodox crosses than Catholic.”

He shrugged. “Hey, if I was really good, I could’ve made this old comedian named Teitelbaum happy. He was always coming to my table telling me to make a Star of David.”

“Have you got any more?”

“Oh yeah, for sure, I’d do all kinds of tricks. Got the idea from Japanese chefs — you know, those guys behind the grills, they sling your food around, chop it up in midair? As long as you’re cooking, why not make it entertaining?” Boyd flipped another card aloft so that it spun perpendicular to the floor; fired another at it, and knocked down the first card as if shooting skeet. “Most of your hard-core gamblers, they couldn’t care less, they don’t want to see all this, they just want to get down to business. But your garden-variety gamblers and tourists, they eat it up. They’ll stay at the table twice as long because they’re getting a show. That’s the only reason the casino would let me do it in the first place, because otherwise, well, the security watchers pee their pants when they see anything deviating from the norm. But as long as it draws more money…”

“That was so amazingly cool! How do you do that?”

“Zen,” he said. “
Be
the card.”

Krystal gasped, awe spreading across her face like the break of dawn. Whispering, “I
knew
there was something special about you. I knew it the second I walked in here and saw your aura.”

He gave the cards back and asked her to draw one for him — a quick reading to tell his fortune, his future. Krystal shuffled, intent and focused, like no hooker he’d ever seen trolling the casinos, her small hands nearly as skilled as his own. She drew the top card and turned it over to reveal some long-haired cretin sniffing a flower as he blundered off a cliff.

“‘The Fool’?” he read, scowling. He knew there couldn’t be anything to this. “Somehow I’d expected better.”