Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

“Okay, what happened?” said Atkins. “Can’t you keep out of trouble for twenty-four hours?”

  “What?” she said. Annoyance cleared her head. “What the hell’s your problem, Scotty?”

  “I turn my back for one minute, and the next thing I know there’s commotion over by the bucking chutes, and then people saying some woman got kicked by a horse, and by the time I get over here, of course, I find you lying on a steel table. What are you, Calamity Jane?”

  “What are you, John Wayne? Give me a break, Scotty. I got squashed up against that fence, and the next thing I know, somebody gave me a shot from behind and I was on my way to La La Land.”

  Hawk took her by the shoulders. “Somebody gave you a shot?” he said through his teeth.

  “Ouch, quit squeezing. Yeah. Somebody shoved me. Hard. My head went right between the rails, right into kicking range of that fucking bucking bronco. I hate rodeo!” she fumed.

  “Can you tell me,” said Atkins, very evenly, “exactly what you remember? Details are important.”

  “Details? Okay—Hawk and I went over to the chutes. It was crowded back there, and by the time they got ready to ride, the crowd had gotten pretty packed. I got separated from Hawk and ended up next to Dwayne, right by the chute. He was explaining all about the cowboys’ rigging and all that, and the rider was having serious problems controlling that horse. But then again, I guess they breed ’em to be hard to handle, right? I mean, if the horses just came out all nice and trotted around the ring, who’d pay fifteen bucks to watch? Certainly not me! When it comes to watching guys ride horses, I want to see the riders nearly get killed every time! Or at least a good maiming, right? That’s my idea of a good time, yessirree . . .”

  “You said you wanted details,” Hawk told Atkins.

  “We’ll get ’em, eventually,” Atkins said impassively. “She seems a little upset at the moment.”

  Dickie put his face close to Sally’s but kept his voice warm and sweet. “Do you have any idea who might have pushed you?”

  “Jesus!” she said, flailing her arms to knock Hawk’s hands off her shoulders, pushing Dickie in the chest to get him out of her face, waving her hands to keep Scotty Atkins from coming any closer. “Don’t you think that if I knew who did it, I’d be telling you? Boy, I swear, you guys are some ace investigators. That’s the kind of police interrogation that usually requires rubber hoses, huh?”

  “Sally . . .” said Dickie, half warning, half pleading.

  Hawk put up a hand of his own. “That’s enough. She’s out of her mind. I’m going to take her home and feed her and put her to bed.”

  “I’ve already eaten,” Sally insisted. “We had a big salad for dinner, as you’ll recall.”

  “More details,” said Atkins to himself. “Great.”

  “Salad,” said Hawk, “isn’t dinner.”

  “Sure it is,” Sally shot back. “That salad had plenty of stuff in it. I could put a porterhouse steak in a salad, and you’d say it wasn’t dinner.”

  “The lettuce contaminates it,” said Hawk.

  “That’s a known fact,” Dickie agreed.

  “Much as I enjoy discussing nutrition,” said Atkins, “this is a waste of time. I want to ask you some questions, Sally. You’re not up for it now, but tomorrow for sure. After the service for Monette. You,” he said, pointing at Hawk, “see if you can keep an eye on her for one night. And you”—he rounded on Sally—“put me on your busy schedule.”

  “I think I can work you in,” she said, mustering her dignity.

  “I’ll bring the rubber hose,” he said with a scowl, and turned and walked away.

  Hawk was silent and thin-lipped as they drove home.

  “Salad,” he said at last, each syllable raspy with exasperation.

  Sally stared straight ahead until he pulled into the driveway and turned off the truck. Then, still not looking at him, she said, “You’re mad at me.”

  “No! I’m in a dazzling mood. I’m filled with joy and amusement. I love the life we’re living—rape, murder, some kind of deviant sex lingerie attack, now a real assault.” His voice rose. “What’s next, Sally? What’s tomorrow’s crime? Arson? Grand theft auto? Shit!” he said, smacking the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, hard. Whump. “Shit, shit, shit!” he repeated, whacking the wheel in time: whump, whump, whump. Seventeen times in all. She counted. He’d be lucky if he hadn’t broken a bone in his hand.

  Finally he slumped back against the seat, breathing hard, and said, “No. I am not mad at you. I’m out of my mind with worry and frustration and rage. I’d like to think I can protect you. I don’t think I can.”

  She turned to him, took his face in her hands, and turned his head until he was looking in her eyes. “Listen to me very carefully,” she said then. “I did not pass out because you weren’t protecting me, or because I had salad for dinner and went into a hypoglycemic swoon. I fainted because somebody pushed me into that fence, right next to a big, bucking piece of horsemeat, and horses scare the bloody hell out of me.”

  Hawk took her face in his own hands. “I know about the horses. In all the years we’ve been doing fun things together in cowboy country, you’ve never once mentioned the idea of horseback riding. You’ve never shown the least curiosity about farm animals. I’ve thought about planning trail ride treks now and then, and decided that you’d have brought it up if you had any interest in going.”

  “I admit it. I think horses are goddamn intimidating big beasts, I don’t like anything that has its eyes on the sides of its head, and I want nothing to do with them, now or ever.” She blew out a breath of her own. “I’m getting a little tired of being frightened. For three days I’ve been alternately terrified, disgusted, mortified and pissed off. I need a more satisfying emotional palette. And I don’t need to eat.”

  They were still holding each other’s faces, looking in each other’s eyes.

  “I’m tired of being scared too,” Hawk told her, moving closer, his mouth now slipping across hers. “And I don’t need to eat either.”

  He was kissing her sweet and gentle, and underneath, she could feel another kind of hunger. “Tell me what you want,” he whispered in her ear, a little breathless, fingers massaging the back of her neck. “You’ve been through a lot. I don’t want to push you.”

  She brought his mouth back to her own and tasted his lips, and traced them with her tongue. “I don’t know,” she said. “Having things go this crazy, I’m actually kind of flexible. Go ahead and push me.”

  By now they were lying down on the bench seat of the truck, kissing deep and starting to mess with each other’s clothes. “Are you flexible enough to fuck in my truck?” Hawk asked.

  They made an earnest effort, but between deciding not to put their feet out the window and arouse neighborhood curiosity, and bumping their heads and various extremities on the steering wheel, the gearshift, and the glove compartment latch, they opted for the bed.

  It was a good strategy. It had been hot and horny, banging around in the truck, but the necessity of rearranging their clothes, getting out into the night air, unlocking (sigh) the house, and going in started the fun all over again.

  “This might be an unhealthy idea,” she said, “but I could use a brandy.”

  They’d bought a bottle of Courvoisier the previous Christmas, and hadn’t opened it since.

  “Not a bad idea at all,” said Hawk, heading for the kitchen cupboards. “Since you didn’t have an actual head injury, I suppose it’s okay.”

  The bottle had come with two balloon glasses, and Hawk poured them each a temperate shot. His hands, Sally noticed, weren’t as rock-steady as usual. “Let’s take these in the bedroom,” he said, unnecessarily. She was already halfway there. He followed with the glasses.

  By the time he got there, she was sitting on the bed, trying to get her boots off. He put the glasses down on the bedside table. “Let me,” he said, sitting beside her, putting her leg in his lap, pulling the boot off by the heel, and s
lipping off her sock. He kneaded the arch of her foot, a bit of bliss. “Now if you want me to do the other one, better give me a sip of that stuff.” She held the glass for him while he sipped, then picked up her other leg and pulled the other boot free.

  “Now yours,” she said, putting his glass on the table. Sally pulled up a small needlepoint footstool, an incongruously delicate heirloom from the Venerable Grandmother Green, and sat down in front of Hawk. She ran her hands all the way up the sides of his leg and down before settling them around his heel, and dealing with the boot and sock. “I get a sip too,” she said, and he obliged her, but found he had to put his hands in her hair and kiss her for quite some time before she went to work on the other leg.

  The brandy and the kisses were warming her up nicely. He put her glass down and pulled her up onto the bed, and rolled over on top of her, their mouths fierce and open to each other. “Isn’t this a stroke of luck,” he said, raising his head and noticing the metal snaps that fastened her denim shirt, and ripping them open, then moving quickly to unsnap the front closure of her bra. “I have to admit, Mustang, I do admire the fact that you believe in efficiency in garment engineering.”

  “You’ve always said you thought underwear was overrated,” she observed.

  But he wasn’t saying anything, because his lips and tongue had gotten very busy.

  “Wait a minute there, son,” she gasped, her fingers numb, knowing that most of her available blood supply had risen to meet the explorations of Hawk’s accomplished mouth. “Don’t I get my turn?” She worked at the buttons of his shirt while he reached for the brandy, and had it mostly unbuttoned when he dipped his fingers in the glass and shook a few droplets on her breasts, then bent down to lick them off.

  He sighed and rolled on his back. “My woman tastes like fine French cognac. Must be a sign of maturity.”

  But now she was working on dragging his jeans off.

  “Two can play at that game,” she said.

  Much later: “Boy, these sheets have gotten pretty sticky.”

  “Just a part of the effort to keep you from going hypoglycemic.”

  “Smile when you call me that.”

  “I am.”

  Thursday

  Chapter 13

  Close Encounters

  Hawk woke Sally up in the middle of the night, his body hard and heavy on top of her. “I have to use you,” was all he said, and there was nothing tender or gentle about it, or about her response.

  And it scared her, that craving to be dragged over rough ground, to a jagged place. This kind of coupling wasn’t about warm sensuality, or about their respect and affection for each other, or about the depth of their mutual understanding. It wasn’t about having the ability to write true stories, or read maps, or conduct sparkling conversations regarding the events of the day. This pounding need clawed at her somewhere far beyond and below the brain or the heart. Not the kind of impulse Sally liked to own up to.

  But if she was honest, she’d known a long time that she liked to walk the edge of the dark side. Over the years she’d teetered over the brink a time or two and plunged in. The hot threat appealed to some pulse in her, like the mean-ass sandpaper twang of Steve Earle’s singing, or Eric Clapton’s guitar screaming when he was strung out on pain and God only knew what else.

  She had the luxury of waking up in the morning knowing that whatever went on between her and Hawk in the black night, she wanted as much as he did. If they used each other hard, the act was surrounded and cushioned by everything else they were to each other. But she hadn’t always been that noble, or that lucky. She’d had some bad close calls along the road. Mercifully, she had never paid too high a price for dallying with danger.

  Some women got way more than their share of misfortune. Tanya Nagy’s luck had been so excessively bad that she’d passed it on to her daughter.

  Hadn’t there once been a bestselling self-help book about smart women making stupid choices? But this wasn’t just a matter of stupidity. This was a wicked dive into the volcano.

  On some level, she thought as she went through her coffee-making ritual, you couldn’t get away from the fact that humans were animals. Animals with giant frontal lobes, whose survival depended on making complicated choices: tinker, tailor, soldier, spy? Baseball, football, or basketball? Caf or decaf? People were hardwired for wide-open possibility, and capable of pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for high-minded purposes. Cows and catfish, wasps and wombats didn’t know jack shit about sacred honor. But still the beast lurked.

  The espresso machine growled and hissed. Dark liquid dripped down. Hot steam shot into cold milk. Sally watched the white froth in the steel milk pitcher rise.

  The search for Monette’s killer had made it onto the Boomerang’s front page, a small story below the fold. The sheriff said the investigation was ongoing. According to the medical examiner’s preliminary report, it did indeed appear that the victim had been raped. The head of the Jubilee Days Committee told the paper that the crime was deplorable, but blessedly rare for Laramie, and thank the good Lord they didn’t live in New York City or Miami or someplace where such things happened all the time.

  That added a reassuring and typically xenophobic Laramie note. A plague of locusts could descend on Wyoming, and people would say that at least it wasn’t Chicago or San Francisco or someplace so overpopulated, they didn’t even have locusts.

  The locusts were swarming in her head today. Sally always counted on the first cup of coffee to focus her brain and energize her body. This morning she got the usual spark of physical ignition, but she couldn’t get her thoughts to fall in line. She barely registered the Boomerang police report notice of the “unlawful entry” at her address on Tuesday night. Hell, she was having enough trouble assimilating what had happened to her very own self the night before. She needed to face it, though.

  A hard tremor went through her. Too much for now. Follow Hawk’s example, she told herself. Keep on doing those normal things. He’d headed out early, as usual, for Thursday morning hoops with the annoyingly fascinating Scotty Atkins. She’d go for a jog. Just another dulcet summer day in the Gem City of the Plains. But as she laced up her running shoes, picked up her Walkman, and headed out the door, she felt as if she was steering into her street, her town, and her life, at an oblique angle, and all the things she took for granted had slid down to the bottom of the world. Everything was out of kilter, unfamiliar, and she was wafting in the fog.

  Even the music didn’t help. Looking to touch the wordless place where beauty lived, she’d foregone her usual assortment of rock ’n’ roll, folk, and country tunes, and picked out a tape of Mozart piano concertos. But even as she found her stride and tried to let the pianist’s remarkable fingers massage her mind, she was seriously creeped. Was somebody following her? Lying in wait? As she ran up Sheridan Avenue, headed for Washington Park, she found herself looking at every parked car, at every driver in every vehicle that passed by, and bracing for another attack.

  Ridiculous. Give it up. Turn up the concerto and get out of the funk. She was approaching the park band shell when she saw the Dodge pickup with the county twenty plates, parked at the curb. It took a moment for her brain to record the sight, and with her earphones on and her head still full of Mozart, she didn’t register the rapid footsteps coming out of the band shell, didn’t know a thing until he yanked her by the forearm and spun her around.

  “I wanna talk to you, Mustang,” Bone said. “Let’s get in the truck.”

  Sally rammed into him with her shoulder, throwing him off balance. But he held on to her arm, and they crashed, tangled up, onto the hard-packed dirt of the jogging track.

  In an instant he was sitting on top of her, his thighs straddling her legs, his hands pinning her arms to the ground, giving her a close-up view of the broken veins in his eyes and on his nose, and far too good an acquaintance with a set of teeth that might not have been that great to begin with, and had not been improve
d by years of tobacco chewing. He smelled like a man riding a hard binge, sweating stale beer and cheap whiskey. He coughed in her face and she nearly gagged, kicking her feet wildly, without effect.

  “Goddamn it to hell, stop struggling!” he hollered. “Or I’ll give you something to struggle about!”

  “Leave me alone!” Sally hollered back. “Help! Somebody, help!”

  “Shut up!” he hissed in her ear, lying flat on top of her to hold her down, and letting go of one arm to put his hand over her mouth. “I oughta beat the shit out of you, but that’s not why I’m here. Just shut up and listen a minute. I wanna talk to you.”

  “Talk?” she said against his hard, damp palm, thinking about whether she should try to bite his hand.

  “Yeah. Use your head, dumbass. Don’t you think if I really wanted to hurt you, I could?”

  He had a point. She nodded.

  “Now, I’m gonna let you up in a minute, and when I do, you’re gonna answer my questions, understand?”

  Disoriented by the unprecedented experience of being assaulted in a public park, Sally didn’t understand much of anything, but she nodded anyway.

  By the time he rolled off her, two elderly women in large straw walking hats, a young mother pushing a sleeping baby in a stroller, a muscle-bound male jogger, and a kid with a soccer ball had gathered to see what was wrong.

  “Just a friendly little tussle,” Bone told them, getting to his feet and slapping dust off his jeans. “Just showing my old pal Sally here a few wrestling holds.” He patted the kid on the head and kicked the soccer ball away, like he was the chief counselor at Camp Hell playing every game at the camp—wrestling, soccer, you name it.

  The kid ran after his ball. The walking ladies looked worried. The jogger looked suspicious. The baby kept sleeping. The mother pulled a cell phone out of her diaper bag and said to Sally, “Should I call nine-one-one?”

  The man was drunk, and maybe half crazy, but by now Sally was considering the encounter as a golden chance to ask Bone some questions of her own. “Nope. No problem, everything’s fine here. Old Bone is a great kidder, aren’t you, Bone?” She couldn’t resist jabbing him in the ribs with her elbow.