Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

“And I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Lucky guy. What’s he got that I haven’t?”

  “I don’t know,” I said with a half smile. “I haven’t seen him in his underwear yet.”

  He spread his hands and grinned. “I have no secrets.”

  “You have no shame.”

  “No. But I always get the girl.”

  I shook my head. “Not this time, Ace.”

  “Is this character giving you a hard time, Elle?”

  I looked up to find Don Jade standing beside me with a martini in hand.

  “No, I’m afraid I’m giving him a hard time,” I said.

  “Or something,” Mr. Baseball said, bobbing his eyebrows. “You’re not waiting for this guy, are you?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Even after you’ve seen me in my underwear?”

  “I like surprises. What can I say?”

  “Say you’ll ditch him later,” he said, rising. “I’ll be at the end of the bar.”

  I watched him walk away, surprised at myself for enjoying the flirtation.

  “Don’t look so impressed,” Jade said, taking the empty seat. “He’s all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  He gave me a steady look that belied the drink in his hand. He was sober as a judge. “You’d be surprised at the things I know, Elle.”

  I sipped my tonic, wondering if he knew about me; wondering if Van Zandt had told him, or Trey, or if he had been left out of that loop on purpose.

  “No, I don’t think I would,” I said. “I’m sure there isn’t much that gets past you.”

  “Not much.”

  “Is that why you were with the detectives so long yesterday?” I asked. “Because you had so much to tell them?”

  “No, I’m afraid Jill’s murder is a subject I don’t know anything about at all. Do you?”

  “Me? Not a thing. Should we ask someone else? Van Zandt is coming later. Shall we ask him? I have a feeling he could tell us some stories to make our hair stand on end.”

  “It’s not difficult to get someone to tell you a story, Elle,” Jade said.

  “No. The hard part is getting them to tell the truth.”

  “And that’s what you’re looking for? The truth?”

  “You know what they say: the truth shall set you free.”

  He sipped his martini and looked away at nothing. “That all depends on who you are, doesn’t it?”

  T he girl was waiting under the back-door light. Her hair stood out around her head like a lion’s mane. She wore black tights that clung to her long legs, and a denim jacket, and her mouth was painted dark. She was smoking a cigarette.

  At least Van Zandt thought it was Avadon’s girl. They never looked the same, these girls, away from the stables.

  Van Zandt opened the car door and got out, wondering if he should simply lure her away from the building, shove her in the car, and go. But the threat of a possible witness coming out the back door of the bar was too big a risk. Even as he thought of it, the door opened and a large man stepped out under the light. He took a position there, feet apart, hands clasped in front of him. The girl glanced up at him, smiled bewitchingly, and said something in Russian.

  Halfway between the car and the building, a sense of apprehension crawled over Van Zandt’s skin. His step slowed. The big Russian had something in his hand. A gun perhaps.

  Behind him, car doors opened and shoe soles scuffed the cracked concrete.

  He’d made a terrible mistake, he thought. The girl was near enough that he could see she was looking at him and smiling wickedly. He turned to try to go back to the car. Three men stood in front of him, two built like plow horses standing on either side of a smaller man in a fine dark suit.

  “Are you thinking you should not have come, Mr. Van Zandt?” the small man said.

  Van Zandt looked down his nose. “Do I know you?”

  “No,” he said as his associates moved to take hold of Van Zandt, one on each arm. “But perhaps you know my name. Kulak. Alexi Kulak.

  D o you believe in karma, Elle?” Jade asked.

  “God, no.”

  Jade was still nursing his martini. I was on my second tonic and lime. A couple of cheap dates. We’d been sitting there fifteen minutes with no sign of Van Zandt.

  “Why would I want to believe in that?” I asked.

  “What goes around comes around.”

  “For everyone? For me? No, thank you.”

  “And what have you ever done that you’d have to pay for?”

  “I killed a man once,” I confessed calmly, just to see the look on his face. It was probably the first time in a decade he’d been surprised. “I’d rather not have that come back around on me.”

  “You killed a man?” he asked, trying not to look astonished. “Did he have it coming?”

  “No. It was an accident—if you believe in accidents. How about you? Are you waiting for your past deeds to ambush you? Or are you hoping someone else will have their markers called in?”

  He finished the martini as Susannah Atwood came in the room. “Here’s what I believe in, Elle,” he said. “I believe in me, I believe in now, I believe in careful planning.”

  I wanted to ask him if it had been in his plan for someone to murder Jill Morone and kidnap Erin Seabright. I wanted to ask him if it had been in his plan for Paris Montgomery to have an affair with Trey Hughes, but I had already lost his attention.

  “My dinner companion has arrived,” he said, rising. He looked at me and smiled with a cross between amusement and bemusement. “Thanks for the conversation, Elle. You’re a fascinating person.”

  “Good luck with your karma,” I said.

  “And you with yours.”

  As I watched him walk across the room, I wondered what had prompted his sudden philosophical turn. If he was an innocent man, was he thinking this sudden turn of twisted bad luck was payback for the things he’d gotten away with in his past? Or was he thinking what I was thinking? That there was no such thing as bad luck, that there are no accidents, no coincidences. If he was thinking someone was hanging a noose around his neck, who did he like for a candidate?

  From the corner of my eye I could see the baseball player homing in on the seat Jade had vacated. I got up and left the room, my patience for flirtation worn thin. I wanted Van Zandt to show up for no other reason than to rub Dugan’s and Armedgian’s noses in my obvious usefulness.

  I believed he would show. I believed he wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to sit in a public place, relaxed and pleased with himself, conversing with someone who believed he was a murderer and couldn’t do anything about it. The sense of power that would give him would be too intoxicating to pass up.

  I wondered what his business of the evening entailed, if it had anything to do with the kidnapping. I wondered if he was the man in black Landry had described viciously beating Erin Seabright with a riding whip. Sick bastard. It wasn’t hard to imagine him getting off on that kind of thing. Control was his game.

  As I stood outside the front doors of The Players, I pictured him in prison, suffering the ultimate lack of control, every minute of his life dictated to him.

  Karma. Maybe I wanted to believe in it after all.

  T he beating wasn’t the worst of it. The worst thing was knowing that when the beating was over, so too would be his life. Or perhaps the worst thing was knowing he had no control in the situation. All the power was held by Alexi Kulak, cousin of that Russian cunt who had now ruined his life.

  While the Russian stationed at the back door kept anyone from coming out to witness the act, Kulak had personally slapped a wide swatch of duct tape over Van Zandt’s mouth and taped his hands together behind his back. They shoved him into the backseat of Lorinda’s rental car, which they drove through an open gate onto the grounds of the auto salvage yard behind the bar. They then parked the car inside a cavernous, filthy garage and dragged him fro
m it.

  He tried to run, of course. Awkward with his arms behind him and panic running like water down his legs, it seemed the door grew no closer as he ran. The thugs caught him with rough hands and dragged him back onto a large black tarp laid out on the concrete floor. Tools had been lined up on the edge of the tarp like surgical instruments: a hammer, a crowbar, pliers. Tears flooded his eyes and his bladder let go in a warm, wet rush.

  “Break his legs,” Kulak instructed calmly. “So he cannot run like the coward he is.”

  The largest of the henchmen held him down while another picked up a sledgehammer. Van Zandt kicked and writhed. The Russian swung and missed, cursing loudly as the hammerhead connected with the floor. The second swing was on target, hitting the inside edge of his kneecap and shattering the bone like an eggshell.

  Van Zandt’s screams were trapped by the duct tape. The pain exploded in his brain like a white-hot nova. It ripped through his body like a tornado. His bowels released and the fetid stench made him gag. The third blow hit squarely on the shin below his other knee, the force splintering the bone, the head of the hammer driving through the soft tissue beneath.

  Someone ripped the tape from his mouth and he flopped onto his side and vomited convulsively, again and again.

  “Defiler of young girls,” Kulak said. “Murderer. Rapist. American justice is too good for you. This is great country, but too kind. Americans say please and thank you and let killers run free because of technicalities. Sasha is dead because of you. Now you murder a girl and the police cannot even put you in jail.”

  Van Zandt shook his head, wiping his face through the mess on the tarp. He was sobbing and panting. “No. No. No. I didn’t . . . accident . . . not my fault.” The words came out in gasps and bursts. Pain pulsed through him in searing, white-hot shocks.

  “You lying piece of shit,” Kulak snapped. “I know about the bloody shirt. I know you tried to rape this girl, like you raped Sasha.”

  Kulak cursed him in Russian and nodded to the thugs. He stood back and watched calmly while they beat Van Zandt with thin iron rods. One would strike him, then another, each picking his target methodically. Occasionally, Kulak gave instructions in English so Van Zandt could understand.

  They were not to hit him in the head. Kulak wanted him conscious, able to hear, able to feel the pain. They were not to kill him—he did not deserve a quick death.

  The blows were strategically placed.

  Van Zandt tried to speak, tried to beg, tried to explain, tried to lay the blame away from himself. It was not his fault Sasha had killed herself. It was not his fault Jill Morone had suffocated. He had never forced himself on a woman.

  Kulak came onto the tarp and kicked him in the mouth. Van Zandt choked on blood and teeth, coughed and wretched.

  “I’m sick of your excuses,” Kulak said. “In your world, you are not responsible for anything you do. In my world, a man pays for his sins.”

  Kulak smoked a cigarette and waited until Van Zandt’s mouth stopped bleeding, then wrapped the lower part of his head with the duct tape, covering his mouth with several layers. They taped his broken legs together and threw him in the trunk of Lorinda’s rented Chevy.

  The last thing he saw was Alexi Kulak leaning over to spit on him, then the trunk was closed. Tomas Van Zandt’s world went dark, and the awful waiting began.

  Chapter 39

  I watched the world come and go from The Players that night, but Tomas Van Zandt never showed. I heard a woman ask for him at the bar, and thought she might be Lorinda Carlton: the hard downside of forty with a low-rent Cher look about her. If it was her, then Van Zandt must have called her about meeting for drinks. But there was no sign of Van Zandt.

  I saw Irina come in with some girlfriends around eleven. Cinderellas on the town, just in time to blow five bucks on a drink and flirt with some polo players before their coaches turned into pumpkins and they had to go back to their rented rooms and stable apartments.

  Around midnight Mr. Baseball tried his luck again.

  “Last call for romance.” The winning smile, the eyebrows up.

  “What?” I asked, pretending amazement. “You’ve been here all evening and no sweet young thing on your arm?”

  “I was saving myself for you.”

  “You have all the lines.”

  “Do I need another one?” he asked.

  “You need to take a hike, spitball.” Landry stepped in close on him and flashed his shield.

  Mr. Baseball looked at me.

  I shrugged. “I told you I’m trouble.”

  “She’d eat you alive, pal,” Landry said, smiling like a shark. “And not in a good way.”

  Baseball gave a little salute of resignation and backed away.

  “What was that about?” Landry asked, looking perturbed as he settled into the other chair at the table.

  “A girl has to pass the time.”

  “Giving up on Van Zandt?”

  “I’d say I’m officially stood up. And I officially look like a fool. Did Dugan call off the dogs?”

  “Five minutes ago. He was betting on you. That’s something.”

  “Never bet on a dark horse,” I told him. “You’ll tear up the ticket nine times out of ten.”

  “But you can make it all back when one comes in,” he pointed out.

  “Dugan doesn’t strike me as a gambling man.”

  “What do you care what Dugan thinks? You don’t have to answer to him.”

  I didn’t want to admit that it mattered to me to gain back some of the respect I’d destroyed when my career ended. I didn’t want to say that I had wanted to show up Armedgian. I had the uncomfortable feeling I didn’t need to say it. Landry was watching me more closely than I cared for.

  “It was a gutsy move, calling Van Zandt the way you did,” he reminded me. “And it might have paid off. What’d he say when you asked him if he was free?”

  “He said he had some business to take care of. Probably dumping Erin’s body somewhere.”

  “I saw Lorinda Carlton,” Landry said. “I stopped her on her way out.”

  “Long braid with a feather in it?” I asked. “Stalled on the shoulder of the fashion highway?”

  He looked amused at the description. “Meow.”

  “Hey, any woman stupid enough to fall for Van Zandt’s act gets no respect from me.”

  “I’m with you there,” he said. “That one got an extra helping of stupid. A hundred bucks says she saw that bloody shirt, even helped Van Zandt get rid of it, and she still thinks he’s a prince.”

  “What did she have to say tonight?”

  He huffed. “She wouldn’t call nine-one-one if I was on fire. She thinks I’m evil. She had nothing to say. But I don’t think she came here trolling for men. Strikes me her idea of a good time would be burning incense and reading bad poetry aloud.”

  “She asked the bartender if he’d seen Van Zandt,” I said.

  “Then she came here expecting him to be here. See? You weren’t such a long shot after all.”

  The bar was closing down, wait staff putting chairs up and carrying glasses back to the bar. I stood up slowly, body aching and stiff from my adventures of the last few days. I dropped a ten on the table for the waitress.

  Landry arched a brow. “Generous.”

  I shrugged. “She’s got a shit job and I’ve got a trust fund.”

  We walked out together. The valets had already gone for the night. I could see Landry’s car sitting opposite mine in the lower parking lot.

  “I don’t know any cops with a trust fund,” he said.

  “Don’t make a big thing out of it, Landry. Besides, as you are so fond of reminding me, I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “You don’t have a badge,” he qualified.

  “Ah, do I flatter myself or was that a backhanded compliment?” I asked as we arrived at the cars.

  “Don’t make a big thing out of it, Estes,” he said with a slight smile.

  “Well, I’ll
be a lady and say thank you, anyway.”

  “Why’d you become a cop?” he asked. “You could have been anything, or done nothing.”

  I looked around as I thought about how to answer him. The night was almost sultry, the moonlight glowing white through the humidity. The scents of green plants and wet earth and exotic flowers perfumed the air.

  “A Freudian would yawn and tell you my choice was an obvious rebellion against my father.”