Wild Horses (17 page)

By the look of things in that parking lot just now, Allison hadn’t wasted any time charming the pants off the entire town.

“I don’t see why we can’t walk right in and reason with her, now that we’ve found her,” Krystal said.

“We didn’t exactly part under the best of terms, and for sure after that fight she’s not gonna be all that mondo jovial seeing me now.” He shook his head. “Good karma stretches only so far.”

“So what are we doing here, then?”

“I figure we bide our time. Find out where she’s staying and maybe take a peek through her things first chance we get. There’s no need for any unnecessary ugliness.”

“So we won’t be getting back to Vegas for another whole day?”

“At least.”

Krystal flipped open her cell phone and leaned toward the window.

“We’ve found her already. Why keep checking for messages?”

“I’ve still got a career, you silly.” She leaned over to peck him on the cheek. To think where those divine lips would be were they in Vegas right now was agonizing. “It’s the weekend, I might have some regulars wondering what’s happened to me. I can’t just stand them up without any explanation.”

It never ended. Of all the call girls he could’ve fallen for, he had to pick the one possessing a conscientious work ethic.

“I can’t listen to this,” he said, and left the car, toting one of the bottles of water they’d been relying on to stave off dehydration out here in Eastwood country. Boyd strolled quickly at first, then slowing after her voice had drifted away to nothing, quickstepping again when her flighty peal of laughter reached him.

What a godforsaken little dump this place was, suffocating beneath a blanket of low, dark clouds. They turned the sky bleak, claustrophobically devoid of stars, with barely a hint of the moon seeping through. No wonder people beat on each other here — the town itself drove them to it.

He looked back at Dickory Doc’s, at the glow of neon in the windows, remembering a concept he’d heard another dealer at the Ivory Coast expound on during a break. Theory had it that there existed parallel universes, an infinite number, and each time you made a major decision you created another one where still lived the path your life would’ve taken had you decided the other way.

Odd as it was, he couldn’t help wondering what he and Allison were doing tonight in the parallel universe where he’d said no to Madeline’s scheme to skim from his table. Or in the universe where Allison had never become suspicious and gone snooping after him.

Of course, in those universes he’d never have met Krystal, which hardly seemed fair, so he wondered if there shouldn’t be one where you got to have it all — one measly parallel universe in the cosmic crapshoot where you broke the house bank. Surely there had to be a way of tapping into this system. By the time he got back to the car to find Krystal off the phone, he could imagine zapping between universes as easily as channel-surfing by remote control.

“Hey sweet thing,” Krystal said, “what’d you get up to out there?”

“I’ve just been thinking about probability theory and quantum mechanics.” Boyd realized then that there had to be a universe in which Krystal hadn’t become a hooker at all. “I have some exciting new ideas to share with you.”

“Oh, cool.” She waved a scrap of paper with a number written on it. “But listen, first, something weird has come up from that poster. Someone really wants to talk to us, he’s called four times since I checked this morning. The last couple times, he told the service to be sure and tell us Allison left a package with him.”

“Package?” His heart skipped a beat. “What kind of package?”

“It’s just an answering service, they don’t go into that much detail.”

Boyd looked at the paper, saw that there was no name. “This is a Vegas number. Oh man, if we’ve come all the way down to the pimple of the universe for nothing…”

When he returned the call, it was answered on the fifth ring by some cautious, neutral voice. Boyd explained who he was.

“Right, right! Howdy! Thought you’d never call. Howdy!” The guy sounded suddenly overjoyed, although his accent was definitely no howdy accent. East Coast, more like. Las Vegas again — it could rewire a person from the gender out. “So I ran into your runaway girl, the one on the poster, and … you still there?”

Boyd could feel a heat headache coming on, exacerbated by the threat of idiocy. “Still here.”

“Howdy! Right! Like I’m saying, she comes into my place of business and checks this package behind the counter, and tells me she’ll be by for it sometime later, or send someone else for it. Says she’s heard I sometimes store items in transit, for a small fee, if you catch my drift. Now, never mind I’m thinking I don’t know this girl. I see your flyer, and I’m thinking if she dies, maybe I’m in the middle of something and don’t know exactly what I’m in the middle of, and that’s not such a good place to be in this town. So are you the next of kin, or what?”

“The next pea in the pod. Have you opened up that package?”

“What are you saying? Are you accusing me of something?”

“No no no no no!” cried Boyd. “I’m just asking. For all I know right now, we could be talking about two different women.”

“What are you saying about my eyesight? Are you accusing me of blindness? Are you saying I got no memory for faces?”

“Would you calm down? Just chill out a minute.” Fifty to one this was a hustler on the scam. “When did she bring this in?”

“Two, three days ago, maybe, like that?”

Which did not sync with the timetable that put her here. “No, that doesn’t fit with the other information I’ve got. It had to be somebody else you saw.”

“Hey, pisspot, if my help in this isn’t appreciated, I don’t need this disrespect. I got two good eyes, and I’m telling you I talked to this girl two, three days ago.”

“Good for you, asswipe.” Scam artist for sure. Krystal was looking quizzically at him, and he winked — everything’s under control. “I just saw her myself, less than an hour ago, not fifty yards from where I’m sitting right this instant.”

“Oh yeah? Just where is that, cock-knocker?”

“Coyote Ridge, Arizona. You’re not even in the right state anymore, shithead. She hasn’t been in Nevada for a week.”

The man seemed to relent. “Well? Hmmm. Maybe you’re right.” He started to laugh. “One thing, though. I don’t know if it means anything to you, but when she was checking this package with me, she starts tee-heeing, says whatever I do, if he should come in after her, don’t give the thing to some short numbnuts with a stiff shoulder, because she’d whacked him with a cactus.”

Boyd moaned and went weak, letting his head fall against the steering wheel. The horn bleated once.

“Umm … about some of those things I just said…”

“Oh, so that meant something after all. I guess that’d make you numbnuts, then. Who’s the shithead now, smart guy?”

“You’re talking to him.” Boyd laughed anemically. Clearly, he was going to have to get a handle on this diplomacy thing. “Look, some angles on this end just aren’t squaring. Let me get them figured out first, and I’ll get back to you tomorrow. I’ll make it worth your time, I promise.”

“You do that.” He began to turn more sympathetic. “Seemed like a nice girl, this runaway of yours. I don’t know what she’s into, but me, I’d hate to see her run into any truculence, you know. Well! Tomorrow! Let’s count on it.”

The line went dead, and Boyd stared at the phone.

“What was that all about?” Krystal asked.

“I don’t have a clue.” Truer words he’d never spoken. “But I think maybe the parallel universes are starting to converge.”

CHAPTER 10

Gunther hung up his phone a moment before he heard Madeline hang up the other extension, then met her in the hallway. His grin broadened, Gunther waiting for her to admit who exactly had put them back in the running for the seven-hundred-thousand-dollar sweepstakes.

“Okay,” she finally said. “You played that fairly well.”

“Fairly well. You loved it, you’re not fooling me one bit.” He grabbed her wrist as she jabbed his chest with rigid fingers, the nails like maroon daggers dimpling his shirt and the skin beneath. “Only thing you do worse than take a compliment is give one, anybody ever tell you that?”

She was laughing in his face then, but not cruelly. He could smell the last few cigarettes on her breath, felt her fingers curve into sickles as she dragged the points down his chest.

“You’re a savant in your own way, I’ll admit that,” she said. “If you need a pat on that hairy back of yours, then I
did
enjoy the way you got Boyd so agitated he blurted out where he is.”

“Yeah. You make a man think he’s arguing with an idiot, he’ll tell you anything.”

Gunther went on sudden attack, seizing a double handful of Madeline’s breasts and burying his face in the smoky copper of her hair. She whooped and thumped a fist against his back, and he grabbed her around the waist, twirled and dipped her, both of them laughing as he spun her upright again.

“Come on, let’s go get you packed, we’re back on the road tonight.” He started to pull away, but she drew him up short with one hand clamped around his arm. In his face a second later, her kisses like bites — carnivorous, more teeth than lips.

Departures would have to wait, it looked like.

They dragged one another to his bedroom, tearing off clothes along the way. On the bed they grappled for supremacy, and when his touch glided from her ribs to the looser skin sagging from her belly, Madeline slapped his hand away, slapped his face, and he had to grab both wrists and flip her over, then bite the back of her neck until she stopped kicking. After she promised not to slap anymore, she lunged for the bedside table, the tube of lubricant that sat there curled halfway up from the bottom like toothpaste.

Madeline preferred it anally half the time, and tonight was no exception, starting out on knees and elbows and gradually letting him drive her farther and farther down, until she lay flat out, at one with the mattress. Her right arm would begin to flail, lashing back with a fist that she battered into the side of his hip. Mornings, he would be black and blue beneath the pale olive of his skin. Pain for her was give as well as take, and essential. Sometimes Gunther wondered what it would be like to look her in the face during sex, but the closest he ever got was catching her profile in a death’s-head snarl as she wrenched out her climactic feral grunts. They were eerily low, like a man’s, and sometimes the connection was made: This is what it would be like in prison.

After it was over they lay atop tangled sheets, and Madeline was all drying sweat and curling cigarette smoke and willful calm in the night. She always caught her breath before he did.

“So are we off to get you packed, or what?” he said.

“Yeah, in a minute.” Dragging on her cigarette, a dim outline in the darkness. “You know as well as I do there’s not a lot we can do before it’s daylight and places start opening up again.”

Gunther watched as she crushed out her half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray, its Two-Eyed Jacks logo clotted over with ash. In the gloom her hand trailed slowly from her mouth, down between her breasts, lingering over her stomach before she tucked her entire arm across it in such a way as to cover as much as possible. Her hand curled into a secret fist, clenching, unclenching.

“When we catch up with him, after we get whatever we need, I want you to promise me something,” Madeline said. “If anybody else gets in the way, fine, you do what you need to do. But I want you to let me be the one to kill Boyd. I want that for myself.”

“Sure,” he said, but didn’t know why she was even bothering to ask. “It’s all brains on the wall to me, anyway.”

*

For the past week they’d had to confine the hunt for Boyd Dobbins to their free hours, still having to maintain normal appearances with their regular gigs. Back at the Ivory Coast after a feigned pair of sick days, Madeline went through the motions of firing Boyd in absentia for failing to report for his shifts.

Gunther continued to work out of Two-Eyed Jacks, as though he had nothing better to do than collecting that weekly ten-percent vig for Toby Costas. On his own time he circulated from one no-tell motel to the next, guessing that if Boyd was still in town, he’d be keeping as low a profile as possible, which eliminated the high-visibility glitz of the hotels along the Strip and downtown. For days Gunther flashed a picture of Boyd that Maddy had pulled from a casino file, greasing the occasional desk clerk’s palm, finally running across a fellow who recognized the photo: Lose the mustache and that’s him, a one-nighter who’d not been back. After further prompting, the Iranian clerk remembered Boyd leaving with what appeared to be a fine-looking working girl.

It was the closest Gunther could get. After two more days of dead ends, Madeline claimed some vacation time, and they had set out for Mississippi yesterday afternoon to see if they couldn’t shake things up from the other end. Boyd had shown up at his old apartment looking for Allison, which had to be significant, but he apparently didn’t have their advantage of her forwarding address.

Approaching Kingman, on U.S. 93 in Arizona, Madeline had him wheel the Cadillac over to a convenience store so she could stock up on cigarettes and Tab. At first, Gunther had thought she was standing there daydreaming in front of the plate-glass windows.