Wild Horses (3 page)

The groper wobbled in his chair, eyes watering, and after he massaged the bridge of his nose he stared at his fingertips. “I’m … bleeding,” he said in a frightened slur.

Boyd apologized again, sparing a discreet wink for her, then assured him it wasn’t bad. Allison stared with vindication at the thin tributaries trickling like red tears down either side of the man’s nose.

“Don’t unnerstand. I’m — I’m a — I’m a—” groping the table now instead of her ass ”—hemophiliac!”

Towels and ice compresses were rushed to the table, and there was more than one doctor in the house, plus a besotted priest who hovered nearby in case he was needed for last rites.

Allison was able to hold it off until she made it into the ladies’ room: a spell of trembling so bad it verged on convulsion. And she hated what she saw in the mirror. That red-lipped whore’s face, not even her own idea, made up for someone else’s amusement. Just like very old times.

She could so easily have killed that man. Hemophilia aside, she might still have killed him — hit him with the bottle, then hit him again with what remained, then gone after him with the jagged stump. He would bleed and bleed and bleed, and the worst of it…?

It would not really have been him she was killing.

Did Boyd have any idea what he was preventing, or had he only gotten lucky? She left the bathroom knowing it didn’t matter, and that he at least deserved a thank-you.

Back outside, the crowd at Boyd’s table had quadrupled in size, and she was told that her services were no longer required for the night. For having done nothing? After realizing that he wouldn’t bleed to death her groper had turned vindictive; had done some talking, some finger-pointing. Already making pretzel twists out of the truth, let’s blame that low-class woman and her trailer-park morals. It was sound strategy.

Boyd had received a similar dismissal, and the two of them left at the same time. Allison found herself feeling much younger than thirty-one; younger and ashamed. Back there? It was
her
fault, all of it, the blame deep as marrow. She carried guilt as she might carry an ugly, malignant child conceived by rape: hating it, knowing nevertheless that it was hers and always would be. It had suckled from her for too long to be given up now.

It was early winter in Seattle, the city blanketed with fog and clinging mists. Corkscrews of wind whipped around corners. She couldn’t hold her coat tightly enough about her. The wind carried on it the basso drone of a ship’s horn, from another world a few blocks away, a deep and mournful sound that conjured spirits of departure, with farewells made obsolete. Sometimes you just wanted to go, and answer to no one.

“I have this suspicion that career opportunities here just got really limited for me,” Boyd said. “But there’s always my contingency plan.” The cards were in his grip; he shuffled them with one hand. “Vive Las Vegas.”

Before leaving, he’d taken paper towels to his scalp, scrubbing away a slick of grease and leaving wet clumps in its wake. His hair looked like roadkill in the rain.

He lamented further: “That good old boy network, you’re not in the loop, screw up once with one of them and they’ll ream you for sure. I might as well grab my ankles right now.”

“Don’t you think you’re exaggerating? He
will
live.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem. I don’t know, maybe I should follow politics a little closer,” Boyd Dobbins sighed. “How was I supposed to know that fat chucklehead was a state senator?”

*

Hours after their relationship’s cactus-strewn finale, she drank sweet, syrupy Southern Comfort, alone in the apartment. Boyd at the casino, or maybe having his shoulder tended by a nurturing side of Madeline DeCarlo unglimpsed earlier. Allison held a glazed stare on the TV, some old movie hypnotic only for its presence.

When Boyd came home after midnight she was still awake, if in bed and pretending otherwise. When he stepped into the darkened bedroom, the only sound his quiet breath, something sad rode upon it, sad and heavy and final. Then he turned away.

She was still awake hours later when the deep breaths of his slumber reached her from the sofa, and she followed them into the living room. Anger began to surge all over again, fueled by the bourbon, while her blurry gaze settled on the dining table and the laptop computer he’d been toting around earlier. She’d completely forgotten about that.

Havoc for havoc — just how much did she plan to wreak on his life? Did it stop at car and shoulder? Not by a long shot. A moment later the bourbon had her flipping up the computer screen, turning the machine on. She browsed file names to learn what he might’ve been up to lately, but made little headway. His games, his e-mail, even leftover software from his days of pushing pools as part of the American Dream. There was more here than she cared to sort through at the moment.

It was an evil temptation, too powerful to resist. While Boyd slept she fetched a carton of floppy disks, then launched the data backup program and copied in compressed bulk the laptop’s entire inventory of files. For the coup de grâce, she opened a disk utility and tracked the pointer up to pull down the menu of commands and selected the most ominous:
Reformat
.

The screen confronted her with a bold, boxed-in warning, last chance to back out:
Erase the Hard Drive?

“Damn right,” she murmured, and keyed
Yes
.

While Boyd’s computer embarked upon its internal slash and burn, she hunted for a notepad and a pen.

*

Morning came down hard, later than usual, Allison clueless in hungover sleep until the phone rang: her boss. Admittedly her work ethic wasn’t what it should be this morning. She begged a sick day, and only when she hung up, too warm in a flood of late-morning sun, did she notice what was missing. Little things, and not so little: most of the CDs, hers as well, except the ones that Boyd detested; the stereo, TV, and VCR; all of his clothes; more, a full carload’s worth.

But she had awakened to worse days than this, and it helped to realize that her heart still beat as strong as ever, and that while Las Vegas lay beyond the windows it wasn’t going anywhere. It would not follow. She could leave it behind like a prison cell.

When the agitated knocking tattooed her door late in the afternoon, the last person Allison expected to see was Madeline DeCarlo. Red hair gathered smartly back, she wore the familiar tailored blazer from the Ivory Coast.

“All right, where
is
the son of a bitch?” Madeline snapped.

Allison began to laugh, wondering if Boyd had been stringing along the both of them. If there’d been a third woman, or if he’d simply chosen to begin again, wherever, alone.

“You’re too late,” Allison told her. “And he took the TV, so it must be permanent.” She pointed toward the empty stand.

Madeline fumbled with a cigarette that took six flicks of her lighter. Turning to go, she glared, then couldn’t resist one last attempt at inflicting a wound.

“What that weasel was doing to you nights for the last nine months?” she said. “Looks like he just did it to me for over seven hundred thousand dollars.”

Allison tried to mask her bewilderment at how Boyd could be involved with this kind of money. “I knew it had to be something like that.” Looking Madeline up and down with dour appraisal. “But just between you and me? I think he probably deserved more.”

Then she slammed the door.

CHAPTER 2

“Imported beers, definitely. Drink American, piss American, that’s my motto,” said the bartender. Then he hunkered grinning across the bar. “Especially all that dark German shit. You can lose that in the ocean for all I care.”

“Hey,” said Gunther, “don’t you start up with the heritage, you mutt, even if it is just the top half. All right, my turn. Okay. Lithium. Never worked on me. I could eat lithium by the fistful and not feel a thing. Somebody told me it doesn’t work on the sociopathic personality. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve taken that as an insult, you think?”

“I think you should’ve whacked the whole passel of ‘em,” the bartender said. “All right: Garth Brooks. I don’t see the appeal. Now, George Jones, now
there’s
you a great country singer, him and Hank Williams. Steve Earle, if I got to pick someone from today.”

Gunther waved a dismissive hand. “You’re talking Greek to me now, Kevin. What, I look like a guy spends his time listening to country-western?”

Gunther Manzetti expected no answer, nor got one. One look at him was enough to dispel the slightest notion that he understood anything of steel guitars and truck stops. Lowdown women possibly, and broken hearts, but no one had the market cornered on these.

A German mother and Italian father, they’d each left such an indelible imprint on him that it couldn’t have been worse had they painted Gunther the colors of their respective flags. Madeline had once said he looked like an experiment gone wrong. Ten years after defeat, World War II’s European losers get together and pool their eugenic resources to breed a hybrid soldier, the seed of some future revenge. Then when they see what it looks like, the way the chromosomes are apportioned, they abandon the entire project.

Gunther Manzetti stood Aryan-tall, with a blue-eyed, sharply chiseled skull, and his blond hair clipped in a stiff brush cut. And? And: olive skin, plus a dark, lush Mediterranean vineyard of body hair. His pubic hair began, Madeline teased, just above his Teutonically cruel upper lip.

No lover of country-western, Gunther suffered deafness to nearly every other tone across the musical spectrum, as well. Rock and roll grated on his nerves, and blues he couldn’t relate to at all. Jazz confused him because it sounded as though no one could figure out what they really wanted to play, or
if
. And classical and opera just plain bored the ass off him.

About the only thing he liked on occasion was movie music, music that made him feel as though something interesting was about to happen: a punch about to be thrown, a bone about to shatter, a car about to crash. He loved “The Peter Gunn Theme,” heard that ominous rolling bass riff and thick nasty brass in his head nearly everywhere he went.

Just like now, drifting in the background, and nothing more going on than simple conversation. He and Kevin discussing the most highly overrated things they’d ever come across.

“Teflon-jacketed bullets,” Gunther said. “Yeah, they’ll punch through a Kevlar vest you hit it with a good clean shot — why they call them cop-killers. But whatever happened to skill, is what I want to know. Don’t need Teflon with a good clean headshot.”

“Right. Fresh body bag is all,” Kevin agreed. “Tiramisu.”

Gunther blanked, everything going Greek again.

“Ah, this chichi dessert, my wife hears about it, it’s like her mission in life, you know, just has to
experience
it” — drawing the word out — ”gotta
experience
it with me. I take one bite and it puts me in a diabetic coma, just about. Like there’s something the matter with plain old pound cake?”

Gunther took a pull off his margarita, smacked salt from his lips, and then he had it, the winner, the single most overrated commodity in all the world.

“Teenage pussy,” he said.

“Get the fuck out of here!” Kevin cried, drawing looks from the six other drinkers. Too early in the afternoon for this dive to be drawing better than skeletal clientele. It was the sort of place that repelled normal tourists. “Teenage pussy overrated! You ever think maybe that lithium made a dent after all?”

Gunther held his ground, asking when was the last time Kevin had had any — any since he was nineteen, twenty? Kevin turned quiet on him, shuffling behind the bar and cracking scarred knuckles.

“I’ll tell you what you’re doing,” said Gunther. “You’re working from memory, and how old’s that memory now, how long’s it been? Twenty-five years since that teenage pussy, is it?”

“Twenty-two,” Kevin scowled.

“Teenage girls, nice tight bodies and everything, tits that defy gravity, but it’s mostly all show and no seasoning yet. Once the clothes come off and it’s time to get down to the serious grind, they don’t know how to
move
with a man. Like they got this idea all they got to do’s just lay there, about as much life in them as a rug, and somehow they’re supposed to be God’s gift.”

“I don’t know, Gunther. I can think of, like, three billion other guys who’d be happy to disagree with you.”

“What it is you’re all in love with isn’t teenage pussy. It’s the
idea
of teenage pussy. It’s that
Star Trek
thing that’s giving all of you those hard-ons. Going boldly where no man has gone before.”

“Or just one or two others. I wouldn’t, myself, be that particular. Virgins, you know…”

“Overrated,” Gunther declared.

“Well, it’s that risk of crying, and I really hate it when a babe cries in bed. But still, that teenage thing? You’ll have to go a long way to convince me and any other swinging dick comes through that door over there.”