by Laura Crum
Reg St. Claire had been an avid horseman; Amber, so far as I could tell, had no particular liking for the equine species; she even seemed a little afraid of them. But she continued to breed Quarter Horses, employing a crew of at least half a dozen to do all the actual work, and she usually kept a couple of show horses in training. Currently with Steve Shaw. Rumor had it that she was angling to make him husband number four.
Banishing all traces of the oh-shit I felt as her footsteps approached, I schooled my face to a noncommittal expression of polite civility and glanced at Steve. His own face was as casually bland as mine, concealing what emotions I had no idea.
Amber walked into the stall with us as confidently as a queen making a royal entrance, preceded by a wave of perfume strong enough to overcome the rich, horsey smell of the barn. I felt like wrinkling my nose but refrained; it wouldn't have been politically smart. Amber was our single biggest account.
"Hi there." The smile she gave Steve was full wattage; she turned a much milder version on me. "Hello, Gail." Back to Steve immediately. "So, how is she?"
He explained what the mare had done, how he'd treated her and what I'd said; Amber listened with her head cocked to one side, drinking in every word that came from his mouth. Her expertly tinted auburn hair, worn in a smooth, shining wedge, somehow failed to clash with her vivid red lipstick and fingernails, or the suede coat the color of fallen leaves. There was no denying Amber had style, of a sort, though I thought she looked out of place in a box stall. I also thought the adoring gaze she fastened on Steve Shaw overdone, and a little too girlish on the face of a forty-something woman.
"Do you think she'll be okay?" she asked him anxiously, though I noticed she'd never once looked at the horse.
"Gail thinks so." Steve's eyes met mine briefly, and I caught the quick ironic sparkle before I looked away.
Amber seemed uninterested in my opinions, and laid a hand possessively on his arm. "Will we be able to show her at Salinas?"
"You bet." Steve looked down at her, his smile radiating blue-eyed charm.
Seeing that I clearly wasn't needed, I sketched a slight wave and said, "I'd better be going."
Amber ignored me; Steve smiled with his usual warmth."Come on over and watch me show Plumber this weekend if you have time, Gail. At the Salinas Rodeo Grounds. Saturday morning. You'd enjoy it."
I saw Amber frown, and a little devil nudged me. "I'd love to, Steve. See you there."
As I stepped out of the box stall and started down the aisle, I could hear her voice from behind me saying pettishly, "What did you invite her for?"
I grinned. Amber might like to think she owned Steve, but she clearly wasn't too confident of him. And I more than suspected old Steve had had a lot of practice evading matrimonial lures.
Still, Amber's brand new fire-engine red Mercedes convertible was parked outside the barn; maybe Steve could see his way clear to being a kept husband-Mercedes and all.
Spotting Bret sitting in my truck, I hurried over and got in before he could change his mind and jump out.
"Why'd you leave me in there?" Bret's voice was more than slightly slurred.
"I had. to look at the horse," I pointed out.
"Goddamn Steve." Bret shook his head as I drove up the hill. "Wants me to shoe his horses. I know what he does. I charge him thirty dollars and he charges his people sixty. Pockets the extra. That's why he's so rich."
"I doubt that." I forbore to point out that such ill-gotten gains would hardly provide Steve with a royal income.
"Sure he does." Bret brightened up at the thought of Steve's larceny and rattled on the rest of the way home about his imagined sexual preferences and his failures in the truck-driving category.
I tuned him out as much as I could. Bret was about twenty ahead of me at this point; Hemingway or no Hemingway, I was definitely daunted.
SIX
When we got back to my house, Bret staggered in and flopped on the couch. He looked around my tiny living room with slightly glazed eyes and said, "You aren't quite in the same class as Steve, old buddy."
"Take it or leave it, pal."
He stretched out on the couch, already half-asleep. "I'll take it, I'll take it," he muttered.
I smiled, walked into the kitchen and got some almond praline ice cream out of the freezer. Dishing it into a bowl, I looked at the clock. Nine-thirty. With any luck, I was home for the evening. The ice cream was cold and sweet and satisfying. Bad for my health and figure, but soothing to my tired brain. I settled myself at the kitchen table with a Dick Francis mystery.
I had been sitting at the table an hour, alternately reading and eating ice cream, when my pager went off. I looked at it in disgust. "Shit."
Picking up the phone, I called the answering service.
"There's an emergency in Bonny Doon," the woman said. "Some horse has a severe colic. He's down and thrashing." She repeated the words carefully.
"Who's the client?"
"He said his name was Mark Houseman. The address is Twenty-one twenty Pine Flat Road."
"How do I get there?" Both name and address were new to me, and I wasn't very familiar with the Bonny Doon area. I took down directions. Up the coast, right on Bonny Doon Road, right again on Pine Flat Road where the road forks at a bar called The Lost Weekend. Two miles, on the left, a metal gate painted yellow. The numbers were on a post by the gate.
"What's the phone number?"
"He said he doesn't have a phone. He was calling from the neighbor's house."
"Okay," I said resignedly. This sounded like another backyard horse case. Worse yet, a backyard horse back up in the wilds of the Santa Cruz Mountains. There were some pretty odd little places buried up there in the redwoods. With some even odder people living on them.
I left the house quietly so as not to wake Bret. It was a wasted effort, I was sure. Bret was snoring so loudly he would have wakened himself if he hadn't been so deeply under. Blue slept on the floor next to him, and I stepped carefully over the old dog, not waking him, either. In his younger days, I never could have sneaked by him like that, but old age had made him increasingly deaf.
Headed down Old San Jose Road once again, I ran my fingers through my bangs and thought longingly of bed. Nighttime emergencies were the rule, not the exception; horses, like people, seem prone to having their disasters in the dark. When I was on call I expected to have my evening interrupted at least once, if not more often; it was a rare night that I wasn't paged at all. I crossed my fingers that the calls wouldn't be too far away and that they'd be of an easily solved nature-which wasn't the case here. Bonny Doon was a good hour's drive, and colic was unpredictable. A generic term for any type of digestive disturbance in a horse, colic cases ran the gamut from horses with minor bouts of gas that would be fine when I got there to those with life threatening problems that would involve me in an all-night battle to save them. You could never tell.
Bonny Doon is north of Santa Cruz, an area of the mountains more than an actual town. In the daylight it's beautiful, full of redwoods and great open fields of grass with long vistas to the ocean in the distance. At night, the mountain roads curved and twisted secretively between the black shapes of silent trees, and I saw few cars, the scattered lights of an occasional dwelling.
I found The Lost Weekend without any difficulty but had to retrace my route a couple of times looking for the yellow gate. It was set back a little way from the road and the yellow paint was old and had mostly peeled and chipped off. Not an easy thing to spot on a dark night.
The gate was shut. I pulled in and got out of the truck. There was a chain with a lock, but it was hanging loose. There was also a faded sign that said, PLEASE CLOSE GATE. I opened it, drove in, and pushed it shut. Ahead of me, a set of faint tire tracks ran off across a field. I could only see about ten feet in the glare of the headlights; the fog had come in and swirled around the truck, cold and thick, blocking out the world.
I bumped slowly across the field, following a poor e
xcuse for a road. Eventually a mass of black loomed up in front of me, blacker than the foggy darkness. Trees, I judged, a big clump of trees. At the same time, the headlights showed another gate. This one was wooden, a sliding rail gate. I got out and slid the rails to one side, then drove through.
Fifty yards farther, a building showed up in the headlights. It was dark and silent-no lights on. I stopped the truck and cursed inwardly, hoping this wasn't going to be one of those real "mountain man" situations, where people were living without electricity on a whim of some kind. I got my flashlight out of the glove compartment and got out of the truck.
The small flashlight beam didn't show much. I walked up to the building, which proved to be a cabin; it had windows, anyway. Around the corner, I found a door. It was locked, but there was a note on it with an arrow that pointed away from the direction I'd come. It said, "Am out at the barn. Mark Houseman," in neat square printing.
At least I was at the right place. I held the flashlight up, trying to see where I was supposed to go. It looked as though I was underneath some big redwood trees. When I swung the beam from side to side, I could see a few huge trunks. Their earthy, bittersweet smell rose above the cold, wet, ocean smell of the fog.
Stepping forward into the night in the direction the arrow pointed, I went a hundred feet when another building bulked up in front of me. Again there were no lights and no noise. I stopped and stood still. This morning a routine call had turned into a murder case. Maybe it had upset me. All I knew was this silent, empty barnyard seemed odd.
I was used to midnight emergencies; I was accustomed to driving up to strangers' homes alone, to unknown faces filled with panic, to animals in life-or-death situations, their owners almost irrational with distress. My nerves were proof against all that, but something about the eerie stillness here was bothering me.
Eventually, I walked forward. The normal thing would have been to call out "Hello," or "This is the vet," but somehow I didn't want to do that. I walked quietly toward the dark building and felt myself straining to hear any sound in the night around me.
The barn was big and high-roofed, with a silo tower at one end of it. I could tell that much with my flashlight. There was a black hole in the middle-the doorway. Stepping inside, I swung the flashlight around. The beam picked out a couple of wooden pens, but they were falling apart. There was no sign of a horse or any human being, and the barn had a musty, long-dead smell. I didn't think there had been any animals in it for a while.
Staring at the empty pens, I felt annoyed and a little nervous. It wasn't a mistake. The note on the cabin door proved that. Somebody wanted me out here. But why, and where were they? I swung the flashlight around the barn again. I saw a few rusty pieces of old haying equipment, a few gaps in the board wall, a stack of firewood in the corner. A bright new nail glinted in the light at my feet. Automatically I bent to pick it up. Nails on the floor of a barn, even an apparently empty barn, went against my instincts; nails are horse cripplers.
That nail saved my life. As I bent over, the silent darkness was blown apart with a loud, angry boom. I dove for the door, not thinking, reacting on my nerves. Something told me that the gun and whoever held it were very close to me.
I landed scrambling, got to my feet, and ran into the night in the direction of my truck. There was another crashing boom behind me. I dodged to one side of a tree and ducked around a branch, trying desperately to see where I was going in the jerking beam of the flashlight.
Another shot cracked just as I saw the black bulk of the cabin ahead of me. I dove hard to get behind it and heard a crunch as my flashlight went out. "Shit," I gasped, struggling to my feet and running blindly toward where I thought my truck was. Where it had to be. Somewhere in the darkness.
I ran toward where I remembered it and it materialized out of the night. Thanking God it was a white truck and not a black one, I threw open the door which, mercifully, I hadn't locked, reached for the key which was still in the ignition, and threw the thing into gear as I started it.
I spun a wild circle in front of the cabin, the headlights cutting a crazy path through the dark. I thought I saw a human figure standing by the building in the fog, but I didn't hesitate to find out. I heard another crack and asked the engine for everything she had. I shot through the wooden gate with a roar and bounced across the field as fast as she would take it. I probably set the world's speed record for opening a gate and getting back into the truck.
When I was finally on the public road, doing a good brisk fifty miles an hour away from the deserted cabin, my heart started to slow down a little. Not much, but a little. I saw that my hands were trembling on the steering wheel. Shock, I noted clinically.
The Lost Weekend showed ahead of me in the headlights. What I need, I told myself, is a drink. I pulled into the parking lot and headed for the bar.
Inside it was warm and lighted and cozy. The five men sitting on the bar stools turned their heads to look at me. Giving them a wide smile entirely inappropriate for a strange woman entering a bar full of men, I parked myself on an empty bar stool. At this point, I was so glad to see some normal, civilized people that I would have been happy to get any kind of ridiculous come-on. I was beginning to be afraid Bonny Doon was populated entirely by fog, redwoods, and murderers, with maybe a few ghosts thrown in.
The bartender got up and limped in my direction. He had gray hair, a gray beard, a battered cowboy hat, and an old vest. He gave me a friendly smile. "What'll you have?"
"Jack Daniel's and soda in a tall glass," I said automatically.
He fixed the drink and brought it over. When I paid him, I asked, "Do you know a place about two miles down the road, metal gate painted yellow, twenty-one twenty Pine Flat Road?"
"Sure." He looked at me curiously. "Fred Johnson's place that was. He died a year ago."
"Anybody living there now name of Houseman?"
He shook his head. "Nope. It's shut up tight. Estate's in some kind of litigation. All his kids fighting over who gets it, I imagine. None of 'em were any damn good." His bright, curious eyes looked into mine. "Why?"
I sighed. "I'm a vet. Somebody called me out there for a sick horse. Nobody was there. Practical joke, I guess."
The old man shook his head again. "Gate locked?"
"No."
"Should have been."
We looked at each other. I already knew I was not going to tell the good old boys at The Lost Weekend about the shooting. Finishing my drink, I thanked the bartender for his help. He looked disappointed when I turned to go; he'd sensed something was up.
I got back in the truck and headed toward home, feeling confused and deeply tired. Someone had shot at me and I had no idea who or why. My story didn't make sense, even to me; what in the world would the cops think? In any case, exhaustion was rapidly growing to be the predominant feeling. Tomorrow, I decided, I'd deal with it tomorrow.
SEVEN
I stood in the fiat dirt parking lot behind the office at 8:00 A.M. the next morning and watched a sorrel gelding trot away from me. The strong ropy muscles in his hindquarters propelled him evenly and powerfully. All four white-socked legs hit the ground in a steady one-two one-two beat. He was sound as far as I could see. This was a shame because he was supposed to be lame in the left hind.
The owner, an older woman with a lined face, gave me a frustrated smile. "He's not showing it, is he? I swear he's been lame in that leg."
I smiled back. At least this wasn't one of those deals where I couldn't see a lameness that the owner could. A lot of my reputation as a decent horse vet rested on my ability to diagnose lameness. Accurately. Mistakes weren't tolerated very well by the clients.
I ran my hand down the gelding's left hind leg, and he jerked it up suddenly. Keeping my hand firmly on his fetlock, I talked to him soothingly: "Take it easy, you big baby; I'm not going to hurt you."
Horses might look like large, powerful creatures, aggressive and threatening, but inside themselves most are something s
mall and timid-a rabbit, maybe. This horse was being uncooperative because he was afraid of me, not because he wanted to hurt me.
When the gelding relaxed a little, I pulled his leg up and held it tightly flexed for the two minutes required for the spavin test, then told the owner to trot him away from me. He went off with a noticeably short step. We repeated the test a couple of times and got the same result. Bringing out the X-ray machine, I took pictures of his left hock, developed them, and told the woman her horse had bone spavin.
"Is it bad?" She looked at me anxiously.
"It's not that bad. It's like having arthritis. Do you have any bute?"
She shook her head. Handing her a bottle of the white tablets, I said, "Bute-phenylbutazone, really-is a painkiller we use with horses more or less the way people use aspirin on themselves. Grind two pills up and put them in his feed night and morning for a week, to get the pain and inflammation out, and then just give him two pills the night before and the morning of the day you want to use him. He'll probably do fine. This isn't a bad lameness to have if you've got to have a lameness. "
She smiled in relief. I talked to her a little longer, reassuring her, and then went back inside the office, looking for Jim.
He was sitting at his desk, phone cradled next to his ear, rooting through his papers with one hand. He glanced up when he saw me. "That was a bad deal about the Whitneys."
"Yeah, it was."
"I hear you're right in the middle of it," he added. He kept looking for whatever it was he was looking for as we talked. That was typical of him. Jim, in his mid-forties, was such a tireless, intense workaholic that he made me feel lazy no matter what I did. His short, stocky frame always reminded me of a compact dynamo, bristling with energy, and only the fact that he really was a virtual genius as a veterinarian made it possible for me to tolerate his complete disregard for me as a person. To Jim, a junior vet was part of his equipment, a necessary tool. His sole interest in me revolved around how well I got the job done. He paid me the lowest acceptable wage and worked me the highest possible number of hours, but he was generous with advice and knowledge, and I'd learned more in two years than I would ever have guessed was possible.
