by Lisa Preston
“You need an ambulance at Buddy Holmes’s place, bottom of Fly Hill. A gal came off a ladder while building the barn here and she’s hurt pretty bad.”
“What is the address?”
Oh.
My.
I know how to follow one road then another, motoring Ol’Blue from one client’s barn to the next. Reciting addresses? Not so much my strength. “It’s off the old Schmitt ranch road, you know, the cutoff from Fly Lake.” I turned, came face-to-face with a mounted deer head when all I wanted was to look out a window.
Bambi’s dad’s dead head—antlers used to hang ball caps with Cat diesel and John Deere logos—was mounted next to the kitchen window over the sink full of dirty dishes. Little curtain there and the phone cord was too short a leash. Above the dinette was a dirty window that let me see the half-framed barn, the ladder in the rain quickening my pulse as a reminder of the bloody-headed woman on the concrete below those open roof rafters.
The sounds of keyboards clattering and radios squelching burst in the background as the dispatcher went on. “Is she breathing?”
Twenty questions is not an enjoyable activity for me. “That’s something to check on, all right. You send help. I’m going back out there right now.”
I dropped the phone, but heard the dispatcher hollering at me to stay on the line. I ran back out Buddy’s busted front door, thrilled to hear the scream of distant sirens. We’d lucked out if first responders were already in the area. Normally, it could have been a quarter hour or twice that to get help.
The injured woman wasn’t moving a lick as I ran up. Couldn’t tell from there if she was still breathing.
At her shoulder, I dropped to my knees on the concrete slab. The pool of blood making a halo around her head seemed bigger. She was fully unconscious, but when I knelt with my ear over her chest—studying as hard as I would a hoof—the minimal rise and fall of her breathing showed.
All I could think to do was grab a horse blanket out of Ol’ Blue to cover her up.
Butte County Deputy Melinda Kellan beat the paramedics to the scene by a good couple of minutes and made me feel better with the way she swept to the injured gal’s side, checking her pulse and going over the head wound with a flashlight. She sent me exactly one quick, dark stink eye as she spoke codes into her radio so fast that I couldn’t understand the gibberish.
Melinda is my best friend—no, check that, Guy is my best friend, provided he’s still talking to me—but Mel is my best girlfriend.
“I wasn’t sure what to do for her,” I said.
Melinda swore a quick one, as she is wont to do and she missed the young ladies’ oath about not talking like a trucker, then added, “Lucky fire and rescue is close, too. We were all at a false alarm at the lake.”
Sure enough, an ambulance and fire engine pulled in together, lumbering like they’d started a race with Melinda, but she drove a racehorse of a sedan compared to the dually diesel draft horses of vehicles that paramedics and firefighters ride.
The fire captain pointed at Ol’ Blue, and one firefighter hopped in my truck, helping himself to backing it up a good fifty feet down the hill. I had a quick thought that Charley may bail out of the truck when a stranger jumped in—he and I had a little experience with that sort of thing not too long ago, and it was more than a little tricky to resolve when he took off.
I can’t stand losing someone I love.
One paramedic said something to the fire captain, who then pointed at a firefighter who didn’t look old enough to go in a bar, apparently assigning him to impersonate an IV pole. The kid was pretty good at the job, holding a plastic bag of intravenous fluid above his head, squeezing it as directed by the medic, who was shaking her braids, saying, “I don’t like it, head injury with significant hemorrhage. C-spine precautions and let’s roll.”
The captain and other firefighters hustled, fetching a backboard and neck collar from the ambulance. The IV-pole firefighter groaned as he watched them put the collar on the woman.
“Oh, man, it’s Ms. Pistorus. I had her for English, senior year.”
The other medic spoke between squeezes on a blood pressure cuff. “She the one who had the thing with that kid—”
“Let’s roll!” snapped the first paramedic.
While the medics sped through their paces—vitals and an injection in the IV, oxygen mask and a heart monitor that exposed the woman down to her bra as she lay there under the rain—Melinda reached into the gal’s pockets, pulled out a cell phone with a thin wallet attached from the gal’s right rear, and helped herself to a driver’s license, which she stuck in her gun belt. Then Melinda stomped over to a pile of lumber under a blue tarp, yanked the tarp free with one hand.
“Rainy, be tentpoles.” She spread her arms wide and snapped one long edge of the tarp like it was a sheet and she was making a bed. I grabbed the flapping edge and we formed a canopy over the medics and victim.
The paramedic at the unconscious woman’s head turned on his knees and grabbed Melinda’s leg with one latex-gloved hand, smearing blood on her uniform pants, making her drop one corner of the tarp as she leaned down to listen to him speak urgently into her ear.
She eyed him hard, then the victim, then spoke into her radio. The firefighters all stepped up with a gurney and helped load the patient. One got promoted to ambulance driver and the rig pulled away, lights and siren.
“We have to talk,” Melinda told me.
“Later. I have another client scheduled. I’m going to be late.”
“I’ll write you a note.”
“I don’t need your fu—flipping note. I need to get gone. Horses to shoe.”
“Statement to give,” she countered. “I have our detective en route.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Margo Pictorus didn’t crack her skull falling off the ladder, Rainy. She was shot.”
“…this exuberantly quirky series opener…will leave readers breathless and eagerly awaiting Rainy’s next adventure.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review
“A rousing novel. The mystery leaves plenty of open questions for the tough but needy heroine while immersing the reader in all things equine.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“A gritty tale with a complex mystery and an unusual heroine.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Rainy, a strong, down-home, likable sleuth, has just the right amount of attitude to give her some gumption.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
