Free Wild Horses by Brian Hodge Page A

hands.
    “And now,” Boyd said, “we invoke the mystical powers of the third eye.”
    He coaxed Doug into holding the card by a lower corner and along his nose, so that its top edge lay against the spot centered just above his eyes. The third eye, Boyd explained, was the locus of inner vision, seeing all, intuiting all.
    “Eyes closed?” said Boyd. “It’s starting to come to me…”
    Doug huffed. “Can we get this over with?”
    “You bet,” and then Boyd drew back and punched the card dead center. Doug’s nose gave with a pop and his glasses backflipped over his head. He tottered sideways, then his legs buckled beneath him and he dumped butt-first onto the floor, where he sat goggle-eyed, clutching at a fistful of blood.
    The bent card had fluttered to the carpet, landing face-up.
    “King of clubs, I almost said that!” Boyd exclaimed. “Now … can we talk?”
     
    *
     
    Failure always seemed worse after sundown, and once the cold, remote eye of the moon had risen, the only thing that would make him feel better was walking the Strip. Breaking a tacky sheen of sweat in the warmth of night, burning under neon, exiling himself to the carnival midway atmosphere.
    A surgeon’s hands, when it came to the cards, and he’d risked one for nothing. Doug Powell had been worthless, maintaining that he knew nothing about where Allison had gone. The only thing he’d added, finally, was that she acted as if she never wanted to see Boyd again — not alive, anyway — and that now he could understand why. It had just gotten too sad, watching Doug blubber and bleed into his hand. Finally Boyd had found a washcloth, filled it with ice cubes and wet it with cold water, and given it to him with a pat on the shoulder.
    He was fresh out of ideas as to how to locate her. Allison was at heart a vagabond, a beautiful windblown nomad, with no place on earth to which she would automatically retreat. Maybe that had been part of what he’d found so appealing about her — knowing that should he gamble wrong one day, he could lose her completely. She would disappear like a shadow on a cloudy day.
    Throw in nearly three-quarters of a million, though, and it became an entirely unacceptable loss.
    If only she hadn’t done so thorough a job on his computer. If he correctly interpreted her note, Allison had copied everything onto disks, to maneuver him into some sort of demeaning apology. He was missing several floppies from his stash, just hadn’t noticed at first in his haste to pack yesterday morning. Had she merely trashed his hard drive and left it at that, he could’ve minimized the damage. Reformatting didn’t necessarily mean the files were gone forever. A data forensics specialist still might’ve had a shot at recovering them. Maybe Wang Chung could have retrieved everything, although this was hypothetical now. Allison had seen to that too.
    She’d taken one of his games, then copied it and recopied it until it had gobbled up every last megabyte of storage. All traces of that seven hundred grand were gone, but he could play Duke Nukem all he wanted.
    Mingling with the tourists and Vegas flotsam, Boyd stopped at a cluster of newspaper vending machines. To one side stood a wire rack bristling with magazinelike flyers, most printed on cheap pulp stock. He had seen them plenty of times, flipped through them as well, if only to admire the displayed skin. Advertising for the regional sex industry — only in Nevada. Nothing but ads and maps showing the way out of Clark County and up to the legal brothels between Vegas and Reno. For local action, here where prostitution was still a theoretical crime, there were endless pictures and phone numbers, laced with innuendo — performers, dancers, live nude shows direct to your room, experience your wildest fantasies. All one big wink and a nudge.
    By page seven, Boyd knew that if he did not get laid tonight, he was going to spontaneously combust. Must have been the idea of all that