Wild Horses Read Online Free PDF Page A

Kevin said with glee and no little relief. Gunther lowered his head to the bar, his prime moment dissolving into anticlimax while footsteps clicked toward him and Kevin swept away the shot glass and ate the lime himself.
    “The money stays,” Gunther said, but Kevin would have none of it, so Gunther had to raise his head and give him the look, the look he’d long ago cultivated for deadbeats who didn’t pay their debts. The look that promised pain and disfigurement, all those troubles that could be avoided if one was reasonable enough to see things the way they really were: Gunther’s way.
    Men like Kevin forgot sometimes — men who remembered what it was like to hurt another man, but just barely. For them it was all in the past, the only blood they saw now from the scraped knees of their kids. Families softened a man, but all it took to remind them of primordial reality was one annihilating glare.
    “Interference,” Kevin said, quieter now. “Nobody’s fault.”
    Gunther nodded. “Play over.”
    “Not this routine again. Oh, would you just grow up one day.” Madeline limped over and slid onto the next barstool. Limping? This should be good. “Honestly — cut you open and a five-year-old would crawl out.”
    He scowled. “Your timing’s for shit today. I was on a roll.”
    “Oh yeah? If that were the worst of our problems right now, well then, this world would be such a happy place I don’t think I could stand it.”
    “Something’s wrong?”
    Madeline gazed at the pack of Virginia Slims pulled from her purse. “Something’s wrong, he asks.” She gave him a sideways look, reeking of low tolerance. “Once again that keen brain of yours has grasped the obvious.”
    She lit her own cigarette. Only once had he made the mistake of trying to light one for her, ten minutes after they’d first met when she had dropped by Two-Eyed Jacks to scout table talent.
    The downtown grind joint had been built more than twenty years ago on a loan from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund and had been laundering money ever since for the two generations of loan-sharking Guidos who were its silent partners: Toby Costas and his father before him. Gunther worked collections, employed aboveboard by Two-Eyed Jacks as security, meaning he came in whenever he pleased, and sat around watching the dancers while waiting to eject a rowdy, or to be unleashed to terrify a suspected card counter away from the blackjack tables.
    The day Madeline walked in, she couldn’t help but catch his eye. After three numb hours of staring at shimmying silicone and saline implants, he had found her the most real and finely seasoned thing in the room.
    He had earnestly believed lighting her cigarette to be the gentlemanly thing to do. Instead she’d tried to burn his hand with her lighter, and he’d drawn his fist back to his chest, crinkling his nose at the stink of flash-fried hair. Nothing was worse than that smell. His hormones made an instant leap from lust to love.
    “Shouldn’t you be at the Coast now?” he asked.
    “Yep.” Plumes of smoke went gusting up through the sprig of coppery bangs that brushed her forehead. “He blew town today.”
    “Who did?” Gunther realized then that there was only one he in the world at this point that mattered. “Not Boyd, don’t you go telling me it’s that numbnuts Boyd…”
    “Looks like the big jackpot for you , Gunther.”
    He tried to see the bright side. “So you stop skimming his table now, we’re still seven hundred grand ahead.”
    “It gets worse. I didn’t find it until today, but yesterday when he was at my place, he trashed my hard copies of the deposit records, all the statements. He closed out the local account that we were routing through into the Caymans. You and I, we can’t get to that money. Only he can now.”
    Gunther gawped with dull horror. For a day that had begun with as much promise as any day, it really was turning to guano, one thing after another before