Wild Horses (32 page)

But tonight was different.

The first soft knock he dismissed as his imagination. The second was bolder, not to be ignored. Allison came in and sat upon the end of the bed, giving no sign of wanting the lights on.

“This is … what it is,” she said. “It can’t be anything more. But it isn’t anything less, either. It’s what it is.”

He took her outstretched hand in his own, palm to palm, their fingers interlocking.

He didn’t suppose a man and a woman could spend nearly every waking hour of four days together without each entertaining the question of what the other must be like to love, if only for a night. The wounded and the wrongly imprisoned were no different, and maybe even needed that question answered more. Needed so badly to believe that the world wasn’t one huge conspiracy; that there really could be a place of justice and grace for them after all. That two could find it more easily than one.

If only for a night.

They each trembled at the touch of the other, her skin hot and his own cool, fire and ice that clung together in urgency and desperation. They made of love all those things that were most needed in the dead of night — a hope for tomorrow, a bid to bury the ghosts of all the yesterdays. A month from now, or a week, would they recall each other’s names? Would they even want to?

They made love and made of it what they could, as good as they knew how, the best parts still locked inside their bodies and their hearts. Because it was what it was.

If only for a night.

“Why is it,” he asked later, “you talk like I’ll never see you after tomorrow, or the day after?”

Allison seemed to mourn as she sat on the bed, ankles crossed and arms wrapped around her drawn-up legs. The healing cigarette burns on her bare shoulder looked dark as pitch, holes punched clear through to her soul.

“What I told you earlier,” she said, “don’t act like you didn’t hear me say that. Live with the rules, Tom.”

“To hell with the rules, there are no rules.” She stared at him through the gloom, not budging, and he wanted so badly to know everything. “Who are you, Allison? Who are you really? What am I taking you back to?”

She dodged this, instead pointing to his middle, where a thick, knotty scar bisected muscle and curled around his left side, over the hipbone. Before tonight she would have had no way of knowing it was even there, and had taken it well. He had seen people looking a lot more appalled by it than Allison was.

“How’d you get that?” she asked. “It looks like someone tried to cut you in half.”

“That? My Good Samaritan badge of honor?” Tom laughed without mirth. “A few years ago I got between two guys, trying to stop a fight. In a bar. Father and son. Carpenters, the both of them. I didn’t even know them. I found out later that they’d come from a job, putting down new flooring. That’s why the one still had his linoleum knife.”

He remembered the blade, dull silver, its wicked curve like a stubby scimitar. Remembered the cold, searing tug at his side; the slippery loop of gut that slid free before he could get his hands over the gaping wound. How unreal it had looked. A rubber joke.

“If you didn’t know them,” she said, “why would you care in the first place?”

“It was just hard to watch. What they were doing to each other. Saying. Like if they kept at it, one of them was going to throw something away that he wouldn’t be able to get back. Something I never had.”

“That’s just the way some families are, Tom. If they’re both adults and it’s their own business, why
should
you care?”

He thought this over a moment. Why indeed. “Do you know how the military trains you to kill? I don’t mean the individual methods. I mean the psychology of it. You know how they do it?”

She shook her head no.

“Repetition. They ingrain it in you so deep that when the time comes, your body can just take over and do it automatically. It’s in your muscles. In your bones. All the moves are programmed right there, because you’ve made them so many times in practice you don’t have to think about it. You just do it. By then they’ve had you taking out dummies and people-shaped targets for so long you’ve got no problem reducing a live human being to just another shape. After I was discharged, I decided I really didn’t want to be that guy. That wasn’t how I wanted my eyes to see. So I tried to deprogram myself. Force myself to
look
. And that day? Those two guys? They weren’t looking at each other like father and son, Allison. They were looking at each other like shapes. Maybe I was a fool but I couldn’t stand there and just watch it happen.”

Allison turned away. “Your life seems to have this habit of entwining itself with others that can only hurt you.”

“Are you trying to tell me you’re no different?”

She bowed her head, yellowed bruises veiled behind a curtain of blond. There was his answer right there.

“Tell me what I’m taking you back home to. I think you owe me that much.”

“Why, because you did me the great favor of sleeping with me? Your magic sperm is a healing balm, is that the way you see it?”

“No, that’s not the way I see it!” he said, too loudly. “It’s because you didn’t kick in dime one on gas all day yesterday, and I wasn’t going to mention it!”

She blinked at him, then they sputtered with laughter, the kind of laughter that tolerates few secrets, fewer lies. And when the truth came, Tom wasn’t surprised.

“I’m going to kill him. I’m going to put a bullet in him and see if that doesn’t unlock this door I’ve been trying to rattle open for years. Because I just can’t live anymore like I’m only half a human being.”

“Your father,” said Tom, and she nodded. “You figure that’ll be the answer for you.”

“I’ve tried everything, Tom. Good and bad. This is all that’s left, the last thing I know to try. And the reason it feels right is because it’s the one thing he most deserves.”

His first impulse was to try talking her out of it, but the big problem was that it was night out, when ghosts are strongest. There could be no talking redemption into someone in the dark. You could only stay beside her, hoping the light wasn’t too far away.

Allison found the small, flat box resting on a table; opened it and took out the books it contained. She ran her hand along covers that showed worlds where children rode dinosaurs, where gentle old men lived better lives blessed by old cats, where sweet-faced animals would never harm a soul.

“When I was a little girl,” she told him, “I had a book like this that my aunt gave me. About a girl and her horse. I thought if I read the book enough, and said my prayers, then one day I’d wake up and the horse would be waiting for me outside. I must’ve run downstairs every morning for four solid months before…”

Allison stopped, pulling herself back to now; the awful now.

“It’s never like the books say it is, is it? If only, just once…” She couldn’t finish, or hadn’t the words for it, but still he knew exactly what she meant. She held the books to her breast, tightly, while Tom held her to his own.

And although he knew that everyone had to grow up and learn the truth someday, he wondered why some were forced to learn so much sooner than the rest, and from the very ones who were supposed to protect them from it.

CHAPTER 19

So this was where Allison had grown up. This was Yazoo City. The population sign on the edge of this drowsy, oak-choked little burg read in the very low five digits. Boyd gave it all an impartial going-over while he and Krystal rolled through downtown for a second pass, and concluded that if Allison had grown up here, she probably hadn’t lacked for nap time. Clearly, Las Vegas had left him a spoiled man.

“Is it possible to yawn to death?” he wondered aloud.

“That’s not very nice,” said Krystal. She clung happily to the steering wheel, soaking in every sleepy nuance as Tuesday evening fell. “I think it’s charming. I think we should come back someday for vacation. Maybe a nice little bed-and-breakfast?”

“Sure. Why not.” When she hopped on another planet like this, he found it best simply to humor her. “Why don’t we just move here permanently, parlay our respective trades, and open up a gambling parlor and whorehouse.”

“Good idea, sweetie.” Krystal patted his thigh. “I think we’d have trouble getting the loan, though.”

He found this as depressing as it was true. Just too many laws on the books. “No victim, no crime” — as common sense, this had much to commend it. Maybe even “Petty victim, no crime,” if one was left wiser by the experience; education wasn’t free. But no, these days you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting somebody whining about being a victim, and somebody else itching to sue you on behalf of the cat. Sadly, they were living in unnatural times.

“We’re about a hundred and thirty years too late coming down here, I think,” Boyd said. “We missed the golden age. I would’ve made an A-number-one carpetbagger.”

“Maybe you were in another life.”

“That would explain a lot.”

“As soon as all this is over we really need to have that past life regression done on you, and see who you were before. I’m just dying to know when and where we were connected. Because for such an immediate bond to develop like it did, and the way it did, with that tarot card? Wow. Oh wow. I’m
this
close to being sure we’ve been lovers throughout history. Oh look — a phone booth.”

Krystal wheeled the car over and he hopped out, grabbed the phone book chained inside. He flipped through until he found the local map and street index, tore them out, then went skimming the white pages. The forwarding address on Allison that he’d found in Gunther’s wallet was in care of Constance Wainright; off to one edge of the note the word
cousin
had been jotted and circled. He saw no listings under her name, although a Jefferson Wainright was listed at the same address. Boyd ripped the page and jumped back in the Mazda, studying the map and orienting their position to it.

“Okay, we’re in business,” he said, and pointed. “Let’s go see if we won the race or not.”

*

It had taken them four days and nearly sixteen hundred miles to get here from Saturday’s tumult in Coyote Ridge. All things considered — and ignoring the possibility of again meeting up with a dementoid who wanted to put drain cleaner in his eyes — Boyd was having the time of his life. There was no breath of freedom so fresh as that drawn on the open road, and Krystal sweetened the air wherever she was. The bottles of Dom Pérignon took care of themselves.

It was mind-boggling, her acceptance of him. Allison had on Saturday shown him in the worst possible light, yet it rolled off Krystal like water off a swan’s back. She almost had him believing he really had drawn that Lovers card from the tarot deck. Nothing could alter her belief that they were karmically destined for one more lifetime together. All in all, a sweet deal for him.

He supposed he could learn to live with the call-girl thing, if she dug in her heels. She was bound to get it out of her system one day. As far as the rest of forever, he was wondering how he could lay his hands on a picture of her mother, see what kind of genetic window into the future it provided. If he’d still have his swan in the long term, or if he had a real ugly-duckling-reversion time bomb on his hands.

Late Sunday morning she’d begun to pester him again about why Madeline and Gunther had been gunning for him, where this money had come from. Krystal had already seen and heard too much for him to contrive any significant deviation from base facts that would hold together, and so, worn down and still sore-headed from the pistol-whipping, he’d told her the truth: He and Madeline had been falsifying the fill slips for the chip rack of his blackjack table and skimming the proceeds away for several months.

“You stole it,” Krystal clarified. “You mean you stole it.”

“We didn’t
steal
a penny.” Boyd firmly shook his head. “We, ourselves,
gambled
on our skills versus standard casino security procedures, and we happened to win. Remember what you and I talked about the other day? About the house advantage, the way a casino stacks the odds and the payoffs in its favor?”

She said she did, but—

“Remember the way we decided that anytime some casino loses big, it’s karma coming back around to bite that casino in the ass? Remember the way you said you were going to cheer for the next big winners you saw?” He put his head to hers and tilted down the rearview mirror to catch their reflection. “Well … rah rah.”

Krystal had to pull over to the side of the road and let him take the wheel, then made him suffer through nearly one hundred miles of silence while she got all the karma sorted out. Finally deciding that in a case such as this, perhaps his actions could be sanctioned. The money, after all, was coming from one corporation in a vast industry that existed only to suck dry the bank accounts of tourists, the idle rich, and obsessive-compulsives.

“You weren’t planning on redistributing any of it, were you?”

“Like Robin Hood? That’s a novel thought,” he said, “but no.”

“And Madeline’s share? By rights, half of it is hers.”