Wild Horses (28 page)

He swept the sleeve of his jacket across the top of the sink, to fling a small glittering storm of glass. As St. John recoiled, Gunther took the chance to wipe his hands on his shirt and get one on the pistol. A low blur — the edge of St. John’s boot hacked into Gunther’s knee. Unhinged and off balance, he went crashing against the stall wall. Wood cracked. Paint chips flew. A roll of toilet paper unspooled across the floor.

Gunther racked the pistol slide to chamber a bullet. He grinned, despite the awful throbbing of his jaw, then peripherally saw what was coming for him next. Round, the color of a brick, it slapped onto the side of his face like a wet, rubbery mouth.

A plunger.

Gasping for wind, St. John drove him back, leaning one-handed on the plunger, his free hand seizing Gunther’s wrist to keep him from aiming. Gunther felt himself wedged into the corner of the rest room and stall walls, neck bulging with veins as he strained against the press of slimy rubber.

Gunther squinted over the lip of the plunger and glared. Saw the unblinking fury in St. John’s eyes. Couldn’t breathe, running on fumes, and still the man meant grim business. St. John gave his gun hand a knock against the wall. Gunther’s finger twitched; a gunshot cracked. Plaster dust sifted down the wall.

Another inch to the right, and the plunger would have cut off Gunther’s wind entirely. It squashed his nose to one side, sealing it off, but he managed to suck a breath through the corner of his mouth, stretched just beyond the red rubber bell. The fresh-drawn air tasted of bowl deodorizer, and a sour tang he’d always associated with subways.

St. John was good, but even he couldn’t outlast his oxygen-starved muscles. Gunther felt him start to give, and cracked his knee up into St. John’s face as he buckled; his head snapped back with a cut cheek.

Gunther ripped the plunger from his face and lurched forward, his knee painfully mushy beneath him as he backhanded St. John, got behind him in a chokehold. He raised the Browning’s muzzle to the bleeding cheekbone and swung around to face a fractured arc of mirror still clinging to the wall. It reflected the two of them sectioned into a mismatched jumble of pieces, but St. John saw, thought better of struggling in the crook of Gunther’s locked arm.

Gunther took a deep breath, then bulldozed St. John toward the rest room door. “Get that, would you,” he said. “Me, I’m fresh out of hands.”

*

“What do you think
you’re
hiding from?” Allison called across the gravel and settling dust.

Madeline DeCarlo drew haughtily upright behind the wheel of a boatlike gray Cadillac. Its paint job was a shoddy one, leprous blisters starting to bubble across the hood and roof and trunk.

“Nobody’s trying to hide.” Madeline now stared boldly at her, across the width of the front seat and out the passenger window. “I just knew if you saw me here, you couldn’t resist coming over and exaggerating your own self-importance.” A barbed pause. “I see you’ve proved my point already.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be back in Las Vegas trying to remember how to count to twenty-one?”

One corner of Madeline’s mouth ticked. “You’re the whiz kid, let’s hear
you
get close without taking off both boots and your bra.”

“I’m not wearing one today,” Allison told her. “Mine still stand up on their own.”

“I guess there’s not much there for gravity to grab hold of, is there? Now, that big ass of yours, that’s another story.”

“Better watch the sun, Madeline. Tan a few more layers, and nobody’ll know you from an alligator bag.”

Allison held her ground, still smarting.
That
one had hurt. Madeline hadn’t picked up on her bottom all on her own, had she? Boyd. Boyd must have let it slip at some point.

“You never answered the question.” Allison stepped toward the Cadillac. “What are you doing here?”

Madeline cocked an elbow on the steering wheel as she fished a cigarette from her pack, lit it at her leisure. Blew a plume of smoke. Her sneer held contempt for everything in its range.

She’s everything I never wanted to be,
Allison thought,
and almost everything I might, if I’m not careful.
Some people knew no better than to spend years swallowing every bitter drop that life forced on them, until their souls were boiled alive. To look at Madeline was to look into one possible future, and be galvanized by the knowledge that she had to avoid it.

“What the hell are you
doing
here, Madeline?”

“Not that you’ll ever know what it’s like, but back in Vegas, I’ve got a fifty-four-thousand-dollar-a-year career. People with fifty-four-thousand-dollar-a-year careers get paid vacation time. We get to use it however we want, and I have a sister in Louisiana I’m wanting to see. Any more bright questions?”

Allison smelled lies. There was no reason for this woman to suddenly begin explaining herself. And why would anyone with her salary
drive
such a trip? They weren’t even on a main route.

First, Boyd turning up in Coyote Ridge after having screwed Madeline out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now Madeline herself. These were too many coincidences.

They want something from me,
Allison thought,
and whatever it is, I’ll be damned if I let anyone just take it.

Dangling from one shoulder, her purse seemed to gain weight. How had she managed to live this long without the solemn promises of the gun?

“I don’t know what scheme you’re working, or what you had cooking with Boyd,” Allison said. “I don’t want to know. But if you show up in my life again, ever, you—”

She was denied her finish by the soft pop of a gunshot from the café. Madeline showed little surprise, road-bleary blue eyes too immediately knowing.

Tom,
thought Allison, her fear for him surprisingly strong.

Madeline began twisting toward the backseat. Whatever was there, Allison could not see, drawing the revolver from her purse regardless. She rushed the last steps to the Cadillac, thrust her arm through the open passenger window, and fired a warning into the seat. The loud report was contained by the interior, like a firecracker in a can, and Madeline jumped with the shock of it.

This was the first time Allison had fired the revolver. Her hand felt warm, tingling pleasantly with the recoil, some luscious new intimacy developing between palm and grip, finger and trigger.

“Get out,” she ordered. “Get out on my side, not yours.”

Madeline gawped at her. She rubbed both ears with her middle fingertips, then stretched her mouth wide, as though fighting the air pressure of a descending jet.

“Get out of the car!” Like trying to communicate with an elderly aunt.
“Get … out of … the car!”

She motioned until Madeline, disoriented, got the idea and scooted across the front seat to the passenger side. When she put her hand on the door handle, Allison smacked the revolver against the windshield.

“No. Through the window!” said Allison. It earned her a look of confusion. She jabbed a finger at Madeline, then circled the windowframe and jerked her thumb to say “Get moving.” Incensed, Madeline responded with a middle finger.

Allison waited until she had squirmed halfway out the window before whipping the revolver down behind Madeline’s ear. One arm gave a halfhearted swipe at her, then thumped against blistered sheet metal. She hung across the door, fingertips brushing gravel.

When she looked at the café Allison realized how calm she was, supposing she could thank her father for that. For teaching her long ago that no pain was so great it couldn’t be switched off like a light, and that sudden death wasn’t anywhere near as bad as lying back and taking it slow.

*

Tom’s vision wasn’t fully clear until the gunman had stumbled them both out of the rest room. Whatever he’d said just before shoving them toward the door, Tom hadn’t understood, the guy’s jaw apparently numb after nearly being popped out of joint.

Tom had no choice but to move with him. Physically, the man was in excellent condition; the bulge of his biceps pressed into Tom’s throat hard as a rock. Much more pressure on his carotid arteries and likely he would black out.

A steady forearm and pistol thrust into Tom’s field of view, sweeping over everyone in the café. Meals interrupted, they held silverware halfway to their mouths, or set it back onto their plates with a quiet clink.

“I
told
you that was a shot back there,” the waitress said to the gnarled old cook behind the counter and grill.

They halted beside the table where Tom and Allison had eaten, deserted now except for dirty dishes. Tom could feel the gunman shifting behind him, just as surprised to find Allison missing.

“Bear tuh helltit zhee ko?” the guy muttered in his ear. Tom translated, most likely:
Where the hell did she go?

“How am I supposed to know?” Tom rasped. “I was back there with you.”

The gunman barked a command evidently intended for the entire café, but it emerged as an incomprehensible garble of mush. No one moved, until a nervous few dared to glance at each other with confusion. He squealed with frustration.

“Pots a batter?” he cried. “Hugh atolls tone peek inklidge?” Tom made sense of this one:
What’s the matter? You assholes don’t speak English?

Spatula in hand, the aproned grillmaster stepped up to the counter, a hairnet webbed over his grizzled skull.

“Son, I’m sorry, but nobody can understand a damn word you’re saying,” he explained. “Now, if you was to write it down—”

The gunman’s patience snapped. The pistol crossed in front of Tom’s face, inches away, the thick trigger finger curling. Tom squeezed his eyes shut, face on fire with the first shot, peppered with hot dust and blasts of burning gas. His eardrums felt as though they were folding in on themselves, muffling the crash of the old cook into his kitchenware, then the jangle of what might have been the telephone being blown apart on the wall. Five shots, six. The gun went silent again, and Tom’s lungs felt seared by the reeking cloud lingering about his face.

Coughing, he cracked open powder-burned eyelids. They felt scalded and grainy, as did both cheeks. The waitress and remaining diners were cowering beneath the line of fire, a couple begging, or praying. The waitress began to cry, and the gunman swung around to sight in on her next. Tom clenched both hands on the encircling arm, dug his bootheels into the floor, and twisted. Weak-kneed, the man spun off balance and held the shot. Tom gritted his teeth when he felt the muzzle snuggling hot against the side of his head.

“Nobody else,” Tom croaked. “Let’s just take it outside.”

“Tyut ub!” he shouted in Tom’s ear.
Shut up.
“Dut tyut ub!”

Tom looked askance, extreme right, through the front windows, saw Allison coming toward the door. Surely she’d heard the shots, knew better than to walk in. Wait — her revolver hung from one hand and she was dragging a limp woman by the wrist, face obscured by a tangle of unnatural red hair. A weaving snake trail in the gravel and dust led back to a gray Cadillac.

All that kept the gunman from noticing was angle. With two eyes he couldn’t have missed them, but his bandage plunged the entire front of the café into a blind spot. Tom strained against his arm, began a pivot to stop him from turning the wrong way.

“I won’t give you any trouble,” he said. Now Allison was nowhere to be seen. “Go on, drag me out of here, nobody’ll try to stop you, and I’ll be the biggest kiss-ass hostage you ever saw, just don’t shoot anyone else.”

Fused from hips to shoulders, they backed through the tables. Tom’s eyes met those of a grimy roustabout who averted his own in shame. Tom smelled sweat; a moment later, urine.

That voice in his ear again. Either he was getting better at deciphering, or the feeling was returning to the gunman’s jaw. And it was the first glimmer Tom had gotten that this was no case of wrong place, wrong time, wrong lunatic. For some reason, the man had already made an effort to find out who he was.

“You better have your keys, leather boy,” it sounded like he said. “We’re taking your van.”

*

Allison hadn’t gone back for Madeline until she’d heard more gunfire. No idea what was going on inside the café, sure only that this bitch was responsible.

Through the window, Allison saw him from the side: improbably blond and bandaged, backing toward the door with a gun that swept from the innocent to Tom’s head and back again. She didn’t hate him, didn’t fear him. Bullets. Only bullets. She’d had far worse inside her, and lived to never tell the tale. Not all of it.

She planted herself to the right of the doorway, to keep on the man’s blind side. Madeline was starting to rouse, drooping onto both knees in front of her, slung from the crook of Allison’s arm. Allison tapped her on the side of the head with the .38’s barrel, shook it before her focusing eyes.