Dusty opened his arms and started for me.
I grabbed the .38 from the coffee table. “Touch me and you’re a dead man.” He had no way of knowing that I’d sooner shoot myself than him.
But he stopped anyway. “Please….Talk to me.”
I pointed the gun toward the corner chair. “Sit.”
Dusty sat. So did I. On the sofa. About eight feet away.
“You can put the gun down now, baby.”
“Stop calling me ‘baby.’” But I returned the gun to the coffee table. “Is that something you picked up from your cheap redhead?”
He smiled. “She wasn’t all that cheap.”
“Good. I hope she took you for everything you’ve got.” Which wouldn’t have been much. Dude ranch cowboys like Dusty seldom owned more than a horse and saddle.
“Just my pride. And my girl.”
“You better not mean me, cowboy. I’m nobody’s baby and I’m nobody’s girl.”
“You’re so tough.” Still that heartbreaking smile.
“Tough enough for me not to put up with crap from you.”
“You won’t have to, ba…Lena. I’ve learned my lesson.”
Isn’t that what they all say? Still, there were so many things I needed to know, so I took a deep breath and sat back. “All right, Dusty. Start talking.”
***
He talked well into the night. He told me about the Vegas trip, the redhead—an advertising agency account executive from Manhattan—then the rehab center he checked himself into when he returned to Arizona.
“Working on a dude ranch may not pay much, but the group insurance is solid,” he finished up. “I stayed in rehab for six weeks, and after the first few days, it wasn’t too bad. Considering.”
“Considering?”
He looked down at the floor. Shuffled his boots. Then looked back up, his eyes sadder than I’d ever seen them. “There’s no point in boring you with the details, other than to say that I’ve been going on these benders since I was a teenager. But this is the first time I ever let one interfere with our relationship.”
“Are you telling me that all those times you neglected to call me for weeks didn’t interfere with our relationship?” The moment the words left my mouth I regretted them. Dusty’s disappearances had served my purposes, too. They kept us from getting too close.
He must have read my mind. “You never seemed to care all that much. Every time I came back you’d pretend nothing had happened.”
“Yeah. I guess I did.” Was this the time for me to say I would change? Want more? Give more?
Silence filled the room, filled only by a dripping tap in the kitchen and the sound of an idling car. Probably one of Main Street’s fussbudget art dealers had returned to straighten a painting.
“Ain’t neither of us perfect, ba…honey.”
I was wondering why “honey” didn’t bother me when the redhead came through the door I’d forgotten to lock behind Dusty. Her gun was a lot bigger than mine.
Before I could compliment her on her gold-toned, .50 caliber Desert Eagle, I heard a sound like an artillery explosion and the drywall over my sofa exploded into white mist. Dusty and I dove for the floor, overturning the coffee table in the process. Unfortunately, my .38 went tumbling across the carpet, out of reach.
Dusty threw his body across mine, not that it would do any good. I’d counted five shots already, but I knew the Desert Eagle was good for seven. Each round packed enough fire power to cut through both of us and into my office below, if she ever managed to bring the gun under control.
Time to pray.
The redhead was screaming something, but the ringing in my head distorted her words. So I kept mumbling one of the only two prayers I knew, something about sheep. Then, as I reached the “He leadeth me” part, I decided I’d rather die fighting, not praying.
Shoving Dusty off me, I scrambled to my feet and charged across the room. Before the redhead could react, I grabbed her wrist, then wrapped my leg around her knees. We fell together in a tangle of arms, legs, and hair. As soon as I chomped my teeth down on her wrist, she released her hold on the heavy Desert Eagle and it fell to the floor with a clank that I, even in my sound-blasted condition, could still hear.
“Stupid bitch!” I yelled at the woman over the ringing in my ears. “Next time, get a gun you can handle!”
“He’s mine! He’s mine!” she screamed, snot and tears running down her face.
“Dusty, get the gun!” I yelled. I was too busy holding her down to do much of anything else.
Dusty scrambled forward, picked up the Desert Eagle with a look of loathing, and clicked on the safety. He then slid the thing under the sofa. Unlike most Arizonans, he didn’t like guns.
But now he came into his own. The killing machine out of sight, he ripped the television set’s extension cord from the wall, and, within seconds, had the redhead roped and tied like a recalcitrant calf.
I fished the Desert Eagle back out from under the sofa—the damn thing must have weighed twenty pounds—and took it to my bedroom, where I stashed it under a pile of dirty laundry. I returned to the living room in time to see Dusty picking up the phone.
“Put that down,” I said. It was late, so late that all the art galleries on Main Street had long since closed, and the tourists were tucked safely back into their overpriced hotel rooms. With luck, no one had heard anything.
Dusty didn’t get it. “We have to call the police, Lena. Joanne’s nuts, and she might pull something like this again.”
Joanne. So the Devil had a name. I didn’t doubt that she might “pull something like this” again, but Dusty knew nothing about my own recent legal problems and court-ordered therapy. The last thing I needed was for my old buddies at the cop shop to show up at my apartment and put my name on yet another police report. Because of the glare of increased media coverage, the days when cops could cover each other’s butts were long gone.
I placed my hand on Dusty’s and guided the receiver back down. “No.”
“You women.” But he walked away from the phone.
A quick look at the wall above my sofa demonstrated why a woman should always choose the right gun for the job. The bullet tracks started about three feet above where our heads had been, climbed up sharply to the ceiling (I now could see dark sky) then trailed downward again at the corner. The redhead, who had probably seen too many Dirty Harry movies, had hardly been able to lift the Desert Eagle, let alone aim it.
I went back to the redhead and showed her my own .38, a comparatively delicate little thing that was easy to hold, aim, and even shoot to kill at close quarters.
“You have some interesting choices to make now, Joanne. Choice Number One, you can lie there for the rest of the night and listen to me tell you what a jackass you are. Or Choice Number Two, you can get the hell out of my apartment.”
She ignored me and addressed Dusty instead. “You said you loved me.”
I wanted to kick her. Then Dusty.
“Joanne?” I pressed the barrel of the .38 against her temple hard enough to hurt. But I didn’t pull the hammer back.
She began to cry.
Dusty paced back and forth, muttering “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
How like a man. They went through life raising hell, lying to this woman and that, humping anything that would lie still long enough, then disappearing into the sunset when they got bored. But let a woman cry and they fell to pieces.
“Oh, shut up, Dusty, and let the woman think!” I snapped.
“Jesus. Jesus, Jesus.” But at least he stopped wearing out my carpet.
I let Joanne cry off the adrenalin for a few more minutes, then fetched some tissue out of the bathroom. I even wiped her nose for her.
“Now, if it were me, Joanne, I’d get the hell out of here,” I told her. “Then I’d drive down to Sky Harbor Airport and hop the next plane back to Manhattan where they don’t have two-timing cowboys and big guns aren’t so easy to buy.”
Her face sagged in resignation. “All right. Let me up and I’ll leave.”
“Good. Then I won’t have to shoot you.” I backed up but kept my .38 at the ready. “Dusty. You do the honors.”
“Lena, I think.…”
“That’s a refreshing change. Go ahead and untie her, okay? Then usher her out the door. You can leave, too.”
“But, Lena.…”
I swung the .38 toward him. “I’m not feeling romantic right now.”
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
He did as he was told and shortly thereafter, I was left alone staring glumly at my ruined wall and cursing my therapist. I wanted my paranoia back. At least paranoids kept their doors locked, even while their no-good boyfriends were visiting.