Winner Take All

CHAPTER 1 Tourists meandered down the brick walk, laughing in the way of people who had spent too much money not to have a good time. Dale Steadman licked his lips and searched the close Carolina night. Across the street beckoned the last remaining bar from Wilmington's bad old days, a Barbary Coast dive whose music thumped in time to his own lurching heart. Gas lamps flickered and mocked him with shadows that threatened to reveal Erin coming from both directions at the same time. When she finally appeared, dancing across the bricks and waving excitedly, Dale could not even raise his arm in response. He watched heads turn up and down the street, some because of her poise and beauty, others because they recognized the newly arrived celebrity. Dale accepted her kiss of greeting, followed her into the restaurant, and knew a strong man's terror at watching the world slip utterly out of control. The Wilmington harbor area had known its share of hard times. Two decades earlier, the streets fronting the Cape Fear River had been home to some of the raunchiest dives this side of Trinidad. Back then, even sailors off the rusting bulk carriers had walked in pairs. Eight Front Street was a product of recent renovation, with French cuisine served in a pre-Revolutionary War warehouse. The waiters liked to thrill the tourists with tales of former nude bar dancers and the three Hudson Bay outlaws who had carved each other up with bone-handled scimitars. But tonight the candles and the gas wall lamps glowed like ghosts of the here and now, and Dale found scant room for bygone days. Across from him, Erin showed a vulnerable enchantment that was all her own, a waif in Hermes silks. As the waiter took their orders, Dale wondered anew why this world-renowned opera diva had ever come to marry him. Or how he had ever let her go. They talked of her recent roles at La Scala and Vienna's famed opera house. Candles brushed her features with featherstrokes of youth, as though she were forever seventeen. Erin had been born in Germany and raised in Belgium. That night her accent was an erotic purr. They talked of his recent appointment as chairman of the New Horizons board. They cast those special looks across the table. They pretended she had never abandoned him, leaving for a role in Paris and never coming back. At least, she pretended it had not happened, and he pretended to let it go. Erin was an odd mixture of softness and edges. Her nose was far too strong, a single line drawn from forehead to tip. At a certain angle she hearkened back to a distant age of hunter-gatherers, which was perhaps the source of her ruthless intent. Whatever she needed to dispatch, she did so without a solitary hint of remorse. She ate what she killed. And she murdered with grace and song. Erin carried a childlike zest about her. She ate with a gusto that was her trademark in everything and brought the burning to his gut once more. She responded with the rounding of her dark eyes, still open to his signals and reading them before they were ever fully formed. After ten and a half months of hellish pain, an hour back in her company was enough to chain him once more. She drank sparingly, but encouraged Dale to go the distance. She had always professed to love his drinking and his cigars and his hunting, calling them manly traits in an emasculated world. He was a winner and a giant among pygmies, she had often said, compliments he had always loved to hear from her lips, for the words had usually triggered nights of astonishing passion. Erin had been the first ever to release him from the prison of restraint. The one and only. The first difficult moment came as they were finishing the main course. She tossed out the question with a casual glance at other tables, little more than an aside. "Who is keeping you company these days?" He was saved by what in earlier times had been a constant barb, but now was a wBunn, T. Davis is the author of 'Winner Take All', published 2003 under ISBN 9780385503709 and ISBN 0385503709.