Wild Horses (24 page)

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Gunther said, and hung up, knowing that as soon as he tried any such thing, that would be the last anyone heard of Thickhead, ever again.

Get picked up on this murder charge, and he would be a huge liability to Toby Costas. Liabilities were dealt with under a zero-tolerance policy, by people you thought you could trust. Blame the police, the FBI. They just loved to get a man in this position and start squeezing nuts. Then they’d dangle before him a chance to wipe the slate clean by turning state’s evidence on however many of his former associates whose names they could properly spell on the indictments. The feds might even have enough clout to keep him from standing local charges on that situation with the deputy.

Not that he really wanted to see it come to that.

Madeline had strayed over to a bench during the phone call, sipping her fruit juice while glaring at the fax paper. Someday, sitting pretty with all that cash, they would look back on this day and laugh.

“I got something to tell you,” Gunther began, and she gave him a look that could have split atoms. “But there’s one thing I need to know first: What are your feelings on Mexico?”

CHAPTER 14

By Phoenix, Thomas St. John had grown accustomed to Allison’s watchful silence. Strangers they may have been, but it felt as though they’d settled into a comfortable respect for one another’s distances, the isolated corners in each of them around which the other had no right to look.

He made two stops in Phoenix — one a motorcycle dealership, the other a leather store. Out of the way, she watched him unload boxes as he bypassed his wholesalers. She came in out of the heat to browse while he renewed acquaintance with those who worked here, who came through the doors. Those made itchy by thoughts of an open road, any road. Most of them pursuer as well as pursued, whether they realized it or not, chased by demons of varied breeds as they rushed toward some confrontation that waited around the next bend, or the next.

He watched Allison from the back as she lost herself in racks and daydreams — the boots, the faded shorts, the tied-off blouse, the wheat-blond hair blown about her shoulders. And the lingering way she sidestepped along those racks … one step firm to anchor her to some new spot, the other long leg gliding in more slowly, with an ethereal grace. How unbruised she appeared from behind.

They left Phoenix and were dropping down to Tucson before she seemed to unlock herself, tucking one leg beneath her and turning toward him rather than the window. The van was still too warm from sitting locked, its air thick with the soft rich smell of leather.

“After I met you on the parking lot last night,” she said, “I got to feeling almost afraid of whatever could’ve brought you all the way from Florida to that godforsaken urinal of a town.”

“Now you know.”

“You wouldn’t think a place like Coyote Ridge would be able to support a Harley dealership like that.”

“Local support doesn’t always have everything to do with it. It’s how far away you can draw your buyers in from, and keep them. A place like Coyote Ridge, you’ve definitely got lower overhead in your favor. Teddy Serafino — he owns Coyote’s Paw Harley — he tells me he’s had repeat buyers from as far away as Denver.”

“And you stock the leather racks. I never would’ve figured you for something like that.”

He grinned. “Yeah? What were you figuring?”

“Well, look at you. Black jeans, leather vest, extremely watchful eyes, van all loaded down … maybe a drug runner.”

“But you came along for the ride anyway.”

“That’s how much I wanted out of Coyote Ridge.” A cockeyed smile worked around the puffier spots on her mouth. “An actual craftsman. You don’t see many of those around anymore.”

Sad but true. Sometimes he felt he belonged to a species no longer heralded and going quietly extinct. More and more the world resisted those whose hands were made to shape livings from its fruits and fibers. This newer world would shear away their rough excess in its prefab molds, turn them into cogs to fit machines, make them easy to replace when they wore out.

Money could get tight at times, but freedom was compensation enough — in charge of his day, lackey to no boss. He found reward in taking a swatch of leather and shaping it to fit an ideal, or better yet, discovering the notion sunk into the leather already, like Michelangelo, who claimed he never carved statues, only freed them from the blocks of marble. Leather was alive — it breathed and aged, it flexed under pressure, it took on the unique stamp of its owner. Seeing what he could make from it felt as though he’d taken something dormant and made it vital again.

Poor consolation, however, for the sad-eyed noble cows.

Tom groped on the floor behind his seat. He came up with a folder and gave it to Allison, and she flipped through the pages, sketches made over the past few months — new designs, variations on old. He’d usually show them wherever he stopped with a delivery, seeing what met with the best reception.

“Any of those do anything for you?” he asked Allison.

Some did, some didn’t. She slid one from the stack and held it up, her eyebrow cocked. The sketched vest had been born of dual inspiration — half biker, half bondage. “Seriously?” she said.

He shrugged. “Some people like a lot of straps.”

“Some people
need
a lot of straps.”

After their late-afternoon stop in Tucson he turned due east, and grew bold enough to ask how she’d come to be stuck in Coyote Ridge. It took a few more miles of desert and carrion, greasewood and sage, before the story began to emerge. The name Boyd came up several times, spoken as if synonymous with siring by jackals. Tom nodded, getting the idea that Allison knew how to nurse a grudge.

“So I started hitching out of Vegas, got as far as the Ridge before I decided I didn’t want to chance some of the risks. So my priority became saving up for a bus ticket home to Mississippi.”

“Your family couldn’t have sent you ticket money?”

“I only said it was home. Who said anything about a family?”

You did. It’s written all over your face,
he thought, but pressed no further. Blood or not, family wasn’t always necessarily something to be proud of.

They weren’t far into New Mexico when he pulled off to pass the night. Tom got a motel room with twin beds. Allison had made no move to rent her own, and doubtless could not afford it anyway, so surely twin beds would suit both their needs. He didn’t learn how wrong he was until after they had gone out for a platter of fajitas for dinner. Back at the motel, Allison informed him she would sleep in the van.

“There’s no reason for that. Look, it’s not a handout. I’d’ve had to get a room whether you came along or not.”

She planted herself on the parking lot, those bare, booted legs steady as pillars, arms folded across her chest. “I’ve slept in worse places. The van should be plenty comfy.”

Tom argued, but she held her ground, so stubborn he felt sure that if thrown from an airplane, she’d fall upward out of spite. He gave up.

He went inside, then stepped back out to bring her a pillow and blanket, and caught a completely different look in her eyes. Gone was the woman of moments before, with whom no bargain could be struck. Allison was staring beyond him with a basic mistrust of four walls and a door that she’d been unable to conceal quickly enough. Fourteen hours, two states, and 350 miles hadn’t quite done the trick: He’d not yet proved himself.

“If you change your mind,” he told her, “just knock.”

But the knock never came, as he knew it wouldn’t, and while he waited to fall asleep Tom wondered if she’d refused to come in because she smelled death on him and didn’t consciously recognize it. Or maybe she had, but was too polite to say so.

*

Holly St. John — a name on a tombstone now, but not always. A face in pictures stored in the bottom of a trunk, at the back of a closet, but a face that could never be evicted from dreams.

The marriage seemed even more fragile and fleeting than it already was when he considered that it lasted 843 days. The number looked too finite, the span too easy to grasp: a beginning, a long middle, a bloody and unanticipated end. He could conceive of it as a whole, almost hold it in cupped hands.

Auburn-haired and obsidian-eyed, Holly had a look about her that Tom never failed to find arresting, graceful and imposing and streamlined all at once. She was like a falcon that could never be fooled into thinking a tether still connected it to the falconer’s wrist, even though he had probably tried.

Most of his first year out of the Marine Corps had been spent astride a motorcycle. He’d not had a haircut since his discharge, and his thirtieth birthday was far enough ahead that it merited no thought. Responsibilities were for those who’d already mapped out their lives. After four years of discipline, he now preferred whim and chance.

One day’s detour to a crafts festival outside Estes Park, Colorado, and there she was. A potter. She’d been a potter. Tom found himself drawn again and again to her hourly demonstrations, as each time she treadled the wheel with one foot and shaped an inanimate gray lump into something that looked as though it had existed since the dawn of time. The contradictions of her hands fascinated him, their power and finesse and control. After the fifth pot he’d watched her make, in as many hours, Holly made it easy on him — told him to either talk to her or she would call security. He showed her the jacket he had made, nearly a year before, although the weathering it’d seen since had aged it. She told him he should be behind a worktable in his own booth, but by now he was beginning to feel it was finally time to go home again.

He’d wondered ever since if it had been the shift in climate that had wreaked subtle havoc on her, on hormones and neurons. The wet heat of the Gulf Coast wasn’t for everyone; its contrast with mountain air would be doubly harsh. But whenever he looked to the climate for blame, Tom knew he was hunting for simplicity in a pattern where there was none. You could live with someone for a lifetime and still never know the innermost workings of her mind.

Holly smelled women on him when there had been none. Stayed up for days on end, while on others she could scarcely budge from bed. More than once he’d heard one-sided conversations held behind closed doors in otherwise empty rooms, and these frightened him the most, even more than her talk of suicide. These threats, while unsettling, were made without conviction and in a lackluster daze. The conversations, though, had never been intended for him to hear in the first place, which made them all the worse. Just Holly and an empty room, her low, erratic voice like something from another world.

They’d told him later it would wear anyone down — the coping, trying to talk sanity when in fact he had begun to doubt his own. Family and friends told him it was not his fault. As if family and friends could know everything that had been said, done, thought.

On the 843rd day, Tom found her huddling in the bathtub after he’d spent an hour at his workbench, using a razored utility knife to slice strips of leather.

“I’m going to do it,” she told him from the bath. “Tonight’s the night. I know that now.”

It was the same thing he’d been hearing every few weeks for at least a year, more tiresome than alarming by now. Trying to reason with her, tell her how much she was loved and needed — these never seemed to work. Maybe she needed instead to be shocked.

He still remembered the sound of his voice, a cold disgusted ricochet off blue tiles. Even now he sometimes dreamed of pulling his hand back before he set the utility knife on the rim of the tub, beside the dry bar of soap.

“So what the hell are you waiting for?” he said, and left her alone, shutting the door on her dementia and listening, waiting for the voices to begin. Fooling himself for a time into thinking that the silence was good for a change.

*

He rose in the middle of the night to check on Allison, a task neither asked for nor required, so perhaps it was curiosity more than anything. He stepped to the rear-door windows of the van and peered between the gap in the curtains.

This made the second night in a row he’d seen her curled on her side, and while this time Allison appeared serene, it didn’t come free. In her makeshift nest of pillow and blanket, surrounded by a protective rampart of luggage and cargo, she slept with her hand upon a snub-nosed revolver. Its nickel plating shone with a gleam of moonlight, and she touched it the way she might’ve touched a teddy bear twenty-five years ago.

He wondered about the peace it brought her, why that was what it took. No one started out this way; people were hounded to it, all the trust gnawed out of their bones after they were brought down struggling and in shock.

And it was much too late at night for something like this, for all the conflicting aches and confusing impulses. The core of Allison’s story might be true, but he was certain that many of its nuances had been pruned away. He tried telling himself that the sooner she was out of his life, the better for them both.

Then he went back inside to sleep through as much of the night as would have him.

*

After his shower Tom offered to go for breakfast in a bag while Allison took her own shower. As she agreed, their eyes held, unspoken understanding that they both knew he was making himself scarce for her benefit.