Wild Horses (2 page)

The Ivory Coast came and went. Boyd cruised past the wedding-cake castle of the Excalibur, then the phony Sphinx and glass pyramid of the Luxor, and the Strip was behind them. Eventually he turned west, led her to some condominiums, a dozen buildings competing for the shade of half as many trees. While he parked in the shadow of a building overlooking the pool, Allison darted to another stretch of the lot and waited. She heard the chirp of his reactivated car alarm, then Boyd was stepping light and easy, the laptop under his arm.

And look at him. Just look. Walking up there like it was prom night and he was taller. Pressed white shirt. Gelled hair, shiny black. She knew when she got home she’d find the bathroom sink sprinkled with trimmings from his cheesy little mustache.

He ascended an outside stairway and stepped off at the second-floor deck. At the first door, Boyd ignored the doorbell in favor of jauntily banging knuckles.

Allison soaked in every detail: the door opening inward, Boyd blocking her view of the other woman as they kissed, but she could see a shoulder-length sweep of hair, red,
too
red, the face unseen and her arm worming around Boyd’s waist, hand dropping to squeeze his tight ass as though checking a melon. And the idiot, he nearly dropped the computer. He rushed at the woman with encircling arms while kicking the door shut behind them.

Allison left the Toyota and detoured into the tiled pool area, an oasis reeking of chlorine and lotions. Bodies lay inert and scattered, a few energetic ones stroking through the water. Her gaze settled on a fiftyish man lying regal atop his chaise longue. Skin like cured leather. From baked forehead to shriveled toes he gleamed a deep mahogany.

“You look like you’re out here a lot,” she said.

He eyed her over lavender aviator shades, his flat response weary of well-intended warnings: “And…?”

“And you look like you probably notice who comes and goes.”

He softened. “It helps pass the time.”

She thrust before him a picture, peeled from her billfold’s flip folio. “This guy? He just went up those stairs a few minutes ago. Have you seen him here before?”

Mr. Mahogany gave the picture a neutral glance. “And what’s my answer worth?”

She moved her thumb to reveal herself at Boyd’s side, one sunny afternoon at Fisherman’s Wharf, the two of them laughing as they watched merchants sling fresh catch of the day. Arms looped around one another’s shoulders, eyes bright with adoration and toothpaste-ad grins. A moment they’d coerced a stranger into immortalizing; evidence they could have been happy, there had been potential.

“It might be worth a good fireworks show.”

Mr. Mahogany nodded. “Let me put it like this: He knows his way up those stairs by now. Capeesh?”

Allison thanked him, then traced Boyd’s footsteps, wondering how often he’d come home with the dust of this place on his shoes. A glance up at the door gave her the number, unit 230, and a pause by the mailbox most of a name: DeCARLO, M.

The name was hazily familiar. On first coming to Vegas, Boyd had been unable to get work along the Strip, where the competition was downright Darwinian. Instead he’d hired on at a lowly grind joint downtown called Cactus Dirk’s. Hadn’t even been there four weeks when the flash and dazzle of his dealing caught the eye of someone out scouting table talent, and so he’d been lured away to the Ivory Coast. Something about that stroke of luck recalled the name DeCarlo.

Up on the deck Allison found that DeCarlo, M., was quite the horticulturist. A mobile garden up here, with hanging baskets and laden plant stands. What kind of person grew cactus, anyway?

Allison tried the knob — locked. No satisfaction would be had from knocking or ringing the bell. They would most likely ignore it. So she appropriated the largest clay pot from its stand. The fronds of a fern tickled her arm as she stalked to the edge of the balcony and hoisted the pot overhead. She heaved it and watched it plummet toward Boyd’s car, then fracture egglike at the front of the roof, with a thick ceramic crunch and the tortured buckling of sheet metal. Black soil showered over red lacquer while a jagged lightning strike of cracks speared down through the windshield, the fern resting limp in the center, like a fallen flag. The alarm blared shrilly.

She waited, arms crossed over her breasts, while down at the pool a grinning Mr. Mahogany shot her a thumbs-up salute. Allison turned at the fresh commotion at door 230. The door banged open and out he flew, Boyd shirtless and breathless, trying to stumble his way into black slacks and having an ungainly time of it. He’d forsaken underwear for speed.

When he saw her, he put on the brakes, skidding on the wooden planks, backpedaling in bare feet, wide-eyed and confused while he held his pants closed with both fists: Boyd, caught. Despite the moustache, he looked very boyish, but it was more than his lack of stature. It was the total dearth of lines creasing his forehead. Of course not. Boyd worried about nothing.

“Oh, uhhh,” he quavered, and she could see him tossing every conceivable alibi into the air like a box of puzzle pieces in hopes they might land in a cogent pattern. “This is a bitch, this is a bitch” — with fierce shakes of his head, as if this could
not
be happening — ”this is a bitch…”

Allison glanced at the open door, feeling a sluice of chilly central air. “This isn’t what it looks like, right, Boyd?”

His face tensed with hope.

Through clenched teeth: “You can explain
every
thing, can’t you?”

“Well babe, you
know
I can, if you’ll just give me a chance.”

Her hands raised in the air, summoning thunderstorms. “You know how bad this looks, but there’s something I’m missing, isn’t there? I have to be mistaking this for something else, don’t I?”

“Well now, Allie, you know you’ve got this tendency to jump to conclusions.” His composure leached back with a sly smirk, and why hadn’t she seen what a worm he was before now? “There’s a bigger picture, you know … in the grand scheme? I don’t blame you one bit, but…” He was on the move, shuffling to the edge of the deck, drawn by the piercing wail from below. “Now if you’ll just put down that cactus, I’m sure—”

He froze at the railing, staring down at his car, his mouth unhinging with a silent scream, and then the real thing: “Allie?
Allie?
Allie! Oh, Allie!” Her name yelped over and over.

Movement drew her eye to the open doorway, where the redhead came out in a shorty kimono that hit her at midthigh. DeCarlo, M., this must be, showgirl-leggy and showgirl-long, but obviously a showgirl retired, Boyd’s senior by ten years minimum and taller by an inch. Mean-eyed now, her face was rouged flint, sharply angled and interrupted too soon to have been rejuvenated by the flushed dewy glow of sex. Her dyed hair was a bundle of stressed copper.

“Can’t you shut that fucking thing off?” she shouted, pressed both palms over her ears.

“What’s your problem?” Allison shouted back. “You can’t hear yourself age?”

The woman flinched with a genuine terror of years. Her mouth downturned into a vicious snarl; a finger pointed in warning.

“You put my cactus down, you hear me? You put it down right where you found it—” Switching targets in an eyeblink, “Boyd? Boyd! What are you screaming about?”

“My car,
look at my car
, Madeline!” he cried. “It looks like she hit it with a wrecking ball!”

Madeline went striding across the deck in a waft of Chantilly Lace and Virginia Slims, fuming under her breath. She clutched the wooden railing. “My
fern
!”

Madeline DeCarlo went on the attack, the kimono flapping to expose a pocked jiggle of slack-muscled tummy that contrasted with her toned legs. Allison slashed in self-defense with the cactus, but it had no heft, the pot plastic and spewing clumps of sand. She missed, Madeline leaping aside with dancer’s grace, a hard and embattled elegance about her.

Allison’s next swing tagged Boyd on the right shoulder and brought a howl of anguish, and still he was begging for a chance to explain; they never learned. She hurled the pot to the deck, grabbed the others as quickly as she could, and flung them down as well at the irresistible targets made by those four bare feet.

And then she darted between them, her fury spent, moving with impunity because she was the only one with shoes. She walked as tall and straight as she could, beneath that brutal sun, crossing the lot to applause from the swimming pool.

*

She’d met Boyd nine months ago at a charity fund-raiser for a children’s hospital — Casino Night, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser with Seattle’s philanthropic finest bellying up to the tables to buy bankrolls of play money. The first thing they lost was perspective. Winning was still everything, even if their wagers weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.

Allison had gone as a representative of the day care center where she worked, its donation to conscripted labor. Chosen for what — legs? figure? experience handling unruly children? — then sent forth in garters and fishnet stockings, short skirt and push-up bra. Most of her hair was gathered back, the rest falling in wheat-blond twists past her neck. Her oval face tarted up with more makeup than she’d ordinarily wear in a month. She humored the tight-vested pack of coronaries-in-the-making while they puffed cigars and played high rollers, delivering their drinks like a harried pro.

Boyd, on the other hand, stood behind his blackjack table with an unassailable authority. His black slacks were sharply creased, his shirt was white as an angel’s robe, and his bow tie was not a clip-on. A lacy garter, dark bordello red, was cinched around each biceps, and he’d waxed the tips of his mustache, their angles jaunty, devil-may-care.

If she hadn’t known better she’d’ve guessed that a steamboat had delivered him directly to the wharves, straight out of 1880.

He had a knack, had Boyd, plus a crowd around his table to testify to his skills. Boyd Dobbins possessed a near-telekinetic command over each card that he dealt. When he gave them a flick of his wrist, the cards didn’t merely skitter across green felt — they glided. They seemed to hover, then settle wherever he wanted with a precision defying natural law. He could deal a quick round of blackjack, five hands, and align each second card perfectly atop the first. He would ask who was Catholic, then deal their hands in the shape of a cross. Even the losers were applauding the show.

“Wherever did you pick that up?” Allison asked, genuinely curious, during a rare lull in the action.

“Zen,” deadpanned this dealer savant. “
Be
the card.” Then an amiable shrug, and his shoulders flexed nicely beneath his shirt. While he could stand to be taller, it was no dealbreaker; although if she found out he slicked his hair down the middle in real life, it would be a severe setback.

He elaborated: “You’ve heard how all the great jazz and blues greats are supposed to’ve slept with their instruments?”

She arched an eyebrow. “You sleep with a deck of cards?”

“It’s a … a spiritual thing.”

“And from a distance,” she said, jousting, “you looked like a grown-up.”

“So you’ve never once, as an adult, slept with your childhood teddy bear.”

He had her there. “It was a floppy dog named Roscoe. And he was a lot more cuddly than any deck of cards.”

“Oh, I’m sure he was. Then again, nobody ever tipped you because you were good with Roscoe, did they?” Smug as an indicted politician, he produced a green bill that he’d wrapped tightly around his finger. His middle finger. “Deal a few winning hands for play money, and get the real thing. Not bad, huh?”

Allison told him how lucky it was that he had cards to sleep with, for obviously without them he’d be sleeping alone. Wondering why, moments later, when going back to reload her drink tray, she had bothered to check his ring finger…

Unencumbered.

Yet he proved oddly chivalrous later. Allison doing her duty, delivering frequent gin-and-tonics to a man with a face like florid dough and a habit of dropping a humid hand to skim over her rump. Patting firmly, oh so avuncular; thank
you
, little girl. Lecher. She let it pass the first time. He was drunk, after all. She fought against impulse the second time, a kill-urge uncoiling within, a dragon awakening in its cave. She could taste the fire on her breath. Could anticipate his lecher’s scalp peeling away from his skull with one brutal swipe of her hand.

The third time he groped her, Allison’s breath locked in her throat, the world constricting to the point of this moment. Her hand gripped a bottle from her tray. He’d never know what hit him.

Before she could lift for the windup, she saw Boyd’s hand flash, a single card leaving his thumb and fingers as a martial arts throwing star might leave a ninja’s hand. The card’s edge cracked across the bridge of the man’s nose, the sound sharper than she would’ve imagined, and her own hand was stayed.

“Oh, now would you look at what I’ve done?” Boyd gushed with apologies while the rest of the deck went spilling from his hand across the green felt table. “Sir, I’m
so
sorry, I’m on medication for the seizures, but sometimes one sneaks up on me.”