Wild Horses Read Online Free PDF Page B

tell it, when a mood was upon her, if he was covered with poison ivy he wouldn’t understand scratching.
    “I’ll tell you what I do understand.” He killed off the whiskey and motioned to Kevin for a replay on the shot of tequila. “Boyd Dobbins has planted himself on the receiving end of some serious truculence.”
    Madeline’s glass froze halfway to her lips. She looked at him sideways, almost a frown, nearly a laugh, close to worry. Just the oddest expression.
    “Truculence?”
    “Yeah.” He nodded grimly. Skimmed a hand through his hair so that it stood on electric end, watching Kevin fill the shot glass. “Means terror, pain … you know … horrible things.”
    “Yeah, but truculence ?” Madeline was scrunching up her face. “That’s a stupid-sounding word. Especially coming from you.”
    “You got some problem with it?” His itchy feeling returned when he saw Kevin’s knife split the green peel of the lime. “Let me tell you something. You don’t know this, but last week, when you called me a maladroit humanoid, I went out and bought myself a dictionary. Yeah, I looked it up. And what I been doing since is, every day I learn a new word. So: truculence! I like that word a lot, so maybe you should just get used to hearing it.”
    “Oh, Gunther.” She leaned in closer to him, curling one slim hand around his croquet-ball biceps and giving it a squeeze. “You’re so cute when you try to prove you have an intellect.”
    He grinned and looped an arm around her shoulders, then waved her back away from the bar, as Kevin once again set before him the accouterments of wager. Rituals were repeated, from the cracking of knuckles to the tapping of salt, to Kevin’s bark of warning to all who watched:
    “Take cover!”
    Gunther licked the salt away, dropped the shot of Cuervo down his throat in one gulp. Smacked the glass to the bar and gave it a smooth flick to his left, down the runway like a draft beer in a western movie. He slid backward off his stool, pivoting clockwise on one heel and drawing his Glock while on the spin. His right arm was whipped up and out by the time he braked at a three-quarters turn and snapped a bead on the skittering glass. He squeezed the trigger, nothing to rely on but instinct. Chips of wood flew from a gouge across the bar, and a bottle against the wall burst with a thick nut-brown splatter.
    Then the final insult: the sound of the shot glass clattering onto the floor.
    “Shit!” he screamed.
    “Nice going, Gunther,” said Kevin. “You nailed the Bailey’s Irish this time. That’s a first.”
    “That was mine!” came a voice from across the room. Some guy crawling from beneath a table with a forty-watt grin. “I had the Bailey’s. I’ll take that in twenties, if you please.”
    Gunther went chasing after the obstinate glass as it bounced across the floor. He trapped it against the wall and kicked at it until it cracked apart, and he was still trying to stomp it into a fine powder when Madeline slipped both hands around his arm and drew him away, told him to stop, that he looked like a psychotic groom at a Jewish wedding.
    He put the gun away, took a few deep breaths of smoky air to calm his nerves, and only then did it register what was going on at the bar: Kevin paying off someone else.
    “What am I seeing here, brief me on this,” said Gunther. “You got a betting pool going on whatever I might hit instead?”
    “I thought you knew.” Kevin shrugged. “You want to play Quick Draw McGraw, fine, but I’m the one incurring the expenses. Forget the Bailey’s — you been pricing spackle and paint lately?”
    Gunther sighed, let Madeline guide him out the door and onto the parking lot, a dusty slab of baked asphalt with a low-rent strip club and an X-rated-video outlet for neighbors. Daylight was on the wane now and shadows were long; neon pulsed, and the heat of late summer wrapped around them like a suffocating cocoon.
    “I think I’m drunk, Maddy.”