I fiddled with the laminated list of 150 beers from around the world, wondering if the waitress would really bring me a Fredericksburg brew called Not So Dumb Blonde. Today I felt like Pretty Dumb Blonde, and the “pretty” didn’t refer to my looks.
Being this close to Hudson Byrd again, depending on him, was dangerous. He’d almost killed a man because of me. While I lay in a hospital bed with broken bones, he found the rodeo official who had substituted Black Diablo in the lineup at the last minute, a bull unofficially banned on the circuit that year for wicked moves that had nearly killed two other female riders. I was simply unlucky enough to get him in the draw.
Hudson didn’t blame the bull. The bull was a first-class athlete doing his job, almost a thousand pounds of muscle who could leap six feet in the air and spin at a freakish hundred miles an hour.
No, Hudson blamed the human being who put me on that bull. I couldn’t face Hudson after finding out what he did when he found the man at a bar in the Stockyards.
Or so I told myself. The truth was, I couldn’t face my own future. The bull had shattered more than my arm. I was in pieces, devastated, no longer sure what was left of me. We had one more date, an awkward one, and then he stopped calling. Sometimes I think that if one of us had made the slightest move, uttered one more sentence, we might be married and divorced by now, burned out by our passion and tempers.
The relationship was all heat, nothing more, I told Sadie at the time, a lie. We fought too much, the truth. It took six months of healing for me to realize that I loved Hudson, and eight years for us to connect again, unexpectedly, at a New Year’s Eve party in Dallas thrown by an ex-rider we used to hang with. Hudson was flying to Iraq the next day. I gave him a send-off kiss at midnight, which I’d do for any guy going to war, or so I convinced myself.
“How’s the horsey psychology biz?” Hudson asked, tipping his beer, bringing me back to the present. I wanted him to hit the pause button on the charm.
“Technically, I’m a licensed equine therapist,” I answered. “It’s going fine.” I shook my head. “Actually, I love it. Horses are amazing teachers. There’s no bullshit with them. No human emotion to get in the way. The horses don’t feel sorry for kids, don’t care about their baggage. Treat the horse with respect and control or he won’t cooperate. But, of course, you know this.”
He grinned. “I was trained by a stallion named Wicked when I was six. Some would say he could have done a better job.”
The waitress, walking past, slid a cardboard container of fried jalapeños stuffed with cream cheese onto the table, her fingers brushing Hudson’s on purpose as she picked up an empty glass. It ticked me off, a ridiculous, involuntary response.
“I’m running a program with juvenile delinquents, mostly boys who’ve shown aggressive behavior,” I said, trying to keep the conversation neutral. “They train our wild mustangs. It is a beautiful thing to watch. One rebellious spirit against another.” I bit into a pepper, catching the cheese dripping down my chin. “But what about you? How’s Afghanistan?”
“A disaster in every way,” he replied grimly.
His lips curved into a slow smile. “You’ve still got the softest, sexiest drawl on the planet. You used to drive all those rodeo boys crazy. They said you had the guts of a tiger and the face of an angel.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. He was piling it on and the liquor was doing its job. I felt like I was rafting on a warm river.
“What, you don’t think cowboys can be poetic?” He leaned in, tucking a stray piece of hair behind my ear. Stop it, I pleaded silently. “You were hard to resist then and near impossible to resist now.”
I could feel the blood surging in my face, a tingling where his finger had grazed my cheek. It had just been two of the worst days of my life. I wasn’t ready for a full-on advance from Hudson, especially if it didn’t mean anything to him.
“Are you scared?” he asked gently, his voice low.
“Of you? Or Anthony Marchetti? The answer is yes on both counts.”
“You don’t have to meet with Marchetti. There are other ways.”
“I need to do this,” I insisted stiffly. “I appreciate your help. I’ll owe you a favor.”
“That might be one more reason this is a bad idea.” His finger trickled over the back of my hand. “I usually collect.” He leaned back. “You understand you only have ten minutes? Outside the bars of his cage? With Rafael standing right beside you? You understand that now I know about this, I’m in all the way. I will be a wart on your very nice ass. You accept these conditions?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I do.”
“I’m committed to a job out of town for a few days. So don’t do anything stupid until I get back. Just the Meet and Greet.”
I heard him, but my mind was on something else.
“Are you going back?” I pulled it out of the air, but he knew that I was talking about the desert, where I’d been afraid he’d vanish into the sand.
“No,” he said. “Never.”
The next morning, in the pre-dawn, air-conditioned cool of my bedroom, I pulled on old Wranglers, my hair still wet from the shower. I refused to dress up for my meeting with Anthony Marchetti. I stared at my extra-pale complexion in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, sorry that I’d let Hudson talk me into joining him for a couple of shots of tequila.
Then I bent over the toilet and threw up.
Last night, I’d done a little drunk Googling, unearthing a portrait of Anthony Marchetti worthy of a bad Hollywood script.
I found it on a website run by Horace Finkel, a native Chicagoan and twenty-four-hour plumber, who declared himself the “leading historical blogger of Chicago’s top ten crime lords.”
Marchetti’s primary racket before the slaughter of the Bennett family was flooding Chicago’s South Side with heroin. The blog casually linked him to ten gangland slayings and thirteen individual hits in the seventies, but nothing the cops (or Horace) could prove.
Horace painted Anthony Marchetti as a romantic figure known for striding down Rush Street in a black designer trench coat with a red scarf whipped around his neck and a seven-foot bodyguard at his side. Marchetti considered the red scarf to be a lucky charm because he was wearing it during a failed assassination attempt. Later he used a symbolic red scarf to strangle people who betrayed him.
It really didn’t matter if any of it was true. What mattered was that Anthony Marchetti was a man about whom it could be true.
I cleaned my face with a cold washcloth and scrubbed my teeth for five minutes to wash the taste of bile out of my mouth. I brushed mascara around green, slightly bloodshot eyes, applied a little base to smooth out the sunburn. It didn’t help.
I pushed away a brief recollection of Hudson and me tightly wrapped, dancing slow on the boot-scuffed floor to bad Santa’s off-key karaoke rendition of Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places.” We’d left the bar around eleven-thirty and, when I refused to follow him to the Dallas hotel where he was holed up, Hudson ordered a large cup of thick black coffee to go and walked me back to Daddy’s pickup parked in an open city lot near the courthouse. He watched me drink half of it before letting me drive off. No kiss. A good thing, I told myself.
My hair was already beginning to dry and I combed it and left it straight. I kicked aside last night’s clothes, tossed carelessly on the creaky wood floor, and made my way to the five-foot-tall dresser in the bedroom. The two top drawers had always been Sadie’s, the other three mine.