Christmas Countdown

by Jan Hambright

  “Dammit.” He watched Karif’s ugly face enlarge in the monitor just before the screen went black. “It’s too dangerous now to reinstall it. Maybe it’s time to consider plan B.”

  Frustrated, he turned and headed for the front seat of the van and his secure cell connection to the director of the National Security Agency in Maryland.

  MAC PRESSED THE BUTTON on the stopwatch as the colt breezed past his spot on the rail and thundered down the front stretch.

  “Good news,” Emma said from next to him. “Doc Remington says Navigator’s bute number is down to twenty-three percent and that was from the blood taken on Friday. He’s going to be clean before the Holiday Classic.”

  Mac reached out and put his arm around her, pulling her up next to him in the crisp chill of the morning after.

  “That’s great.” He watched the colt lay into the first turn. “I’ve got my own good news.”

  “Oh, yeah? Spill it.”

  “The tow-truck driver and a mechanic will be here at noon to rescue the John Deere and get it fixed. And the cleanup company is getting started on the barn this morning. They said it should take them about four days to restore it, less if we clean all of the tack ourselves.”

  “That’s the best news. Only four more days in the stud barn.”

  He felt her shudder and took his eyes off the colt moving down the backstretch. “You feeling it, too?”

  “Like sand in my teeth.”

  “They were watching every move I made this morning getting the colt ready to run. I also found a camera in the loft of the stud barn last night.”

  She looked over at him. “Same kind as you found in our barn?”

  “Yeah.”

  Navigator galloped into the clubhouse turn and barreled down the homestretch, blitzing in front of him. He stopped the clock and turned to Emma.

  “I want you to steer clear of the stud barn. If you do need to go in there, don’t go alone. Find me first.”

  “I’m not helpless, Mac. I wield a mean pitchfork.”

  Caution congealed in his veins. He reached down and raised her face to his. “Something is going on in that barn, and I’m worried about your safety. Someone in that crew may have tampered with the tractor. Which means they could try again. Promise me you’ll do what I’m asking.” He pinned her with his stare, hoping she’d accept his warning and stay clear until he could get more answers.

  “Yeah. Okay. If you feel that strongly about it, I won’t venture over there without you.”

  A measure of relief looped around his nerves. He leaned in and kissed her, feeling a wave of desire rush through his body.

  Every exquisite detail of making love to her last night was forever seared in his brain. “Did you talk to your father?”

  “Yes, this morning. It took some doing, but I convinced him you weren’t here to destroy Firehill Farm by Paul Calliway proxy.”

  He chuckled, even though it was gratitude grinding around inside his head and not humor.

  “We’ll cool the colt and get started on the mash. By Friday we should be able to go back to regular feed.”

  “Thank goodness.” She snagged the lead rope. “I’m tired of smelling like cabbage. If I had any free-range chickens, they’d have pecked me to death by now.” Grinning, she walked out onto the track to where Grady Stevens stopped Navigator and bailed off the sweaty colt.

  Taking a hard look to his right, Mac spotted Karif and two other men from Dago’s crew, watching them from farther down the rail.

  Caution churned in his gut and melded to every nerve ending in his body. He didn’t trust them, he didn’t want them anywhere near Emma and he planned to give his concerns full rein until he got answers.

  He glanced back at her standing next to Grady, a smile on her sweet lips as she sucked up the details of the morning’s gallop and Navigator’s progress.

  His heart squeezed in his chest. For the first time in his life, he’d made a real emotional connection.

  EMMA WORKED ON THE NEW makeshift cutting board she and Mac had erected on some hay bales in front of the bunkhouse. The feed barrel was half-full now, and she put down the butcher knife to give her hand a break.

  Mac put his down too and wiped his hands on a towel lying on the board. “I’ll make us some fresh coffee. Come in and get warmed up.”

  She met his sultry stare with one of her own. He’d either read her mind, or he was as revved up as she was right now.

  “Sounds like a plan. My hands are freezing.” She looked up at the sky, noting the thin veil of flat, white clouds that had settled over the bluegrass. She could see her breath in the cold air and she hoped like crazy it didn’t snow, at least not until after the running of the Holiday Classic.

  Following Mac, she stepped inside the warm bunkhouse and closed the door on the world outside.

  Together they slipped off their coats and she trailed him into the kitchen. Leaning against the counter, she watched him pour water into the hopper on the coffeemaker, measure a couple scoops of grounds into the filter and turn it on.

  She moved up behind him, wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face to his back, feeling his body heat warm her frozen cheek. “Oh, you feel good.”

  Mac rubbed his hand across hers where they crisscrossed his chest. Heat fired through his body. He turned in her arms and locked his around her, picking her up off of the floor.

  She wrapped her legs around him as he found her lips and carried her to the edge of the bed. Slowly he lowered her onto the quilt and eased his body in between her legs. “Are you warm yet?”

  “Blazing,” she whispered, her lips inches from his right ear. She shivered beneath him as he moved the lip-assault down the side of her neck in incremental degrees, each one more heated than the last. She moved against him, and he reached for the button on her jeans, popped it out of its loop and slid the zipper down.

  Ecstasy was two minutes away.

  EMMA COULD STILL FEEL the heat in her cheeks an hour later. She finished chopping the last bag of carrots, scraped them off into a bucket and dumped them into the barrel Mac was mixing.

  The crunch of gravel under tires brought her gaze up to the driveway, and she saw Sheriff Wilkes jockey his patrol car into a parking spot and kill the engine.

  “I hope he’s got news about Victor,” Mac said, continuing to work the carrots into the mix with his bare hands. “The longer the unanswered questions persist, the less likely we’ll know what really happened.”

  An unsettled sensation glided over her nerves. She tried to make something out of Mac’s reasoning, but she couldn’t. If it turned out Victor had been murdered, and not by a horse, then his killer was still at large.

  “Sheriff.” Mac nodded. “Any news on Victor?”

  “I’ll tell you, it’s the damndest thing. I contacted the coroner’s office this morning to put in a request that an autopsy be conducted and they claimed his body was picked up almost before it arrived at the morgue.”

  “A family member?” Vibes of caution shot into his brain.

  “Not if last names have to match. The clerk on staff says he was claimed by a man who signed the name R. Donahue. Don’t know who he is, but I’m sending a deputy over there now to investigate. If we can’t find him, any physical evidence goes out the window.”

  “Any luck locating his next of kin?”

  “Dead end all the way around, and the phony trainer’s license doesn’t give us a paper trail to follow. His driver’s license was a fake, too. I’m here to ask a few more questions of his crew.”

  “If Arabic isn’t your second language, you’ll have to wait until Rahul gets back tonight. He’s in Front Royal and he’s the only one who speaks good English.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Mac went back to stirring the mash.

  “I’ll keep you posted.” Wilkes tipped his hat to Emma and headed for his car.

  “That’s too weird.” Emma watched Wilkes drive away. She
turned to Mac and put her hands on her hips. “Bodies don’t just take off, unless someone doesn’t want anyone to know anything about Victor Dago. Which reminds me, Rahul, the new kingpin of the stable, wants a decision tonight, and he’s bringing in more horses?”

  “Yeah. Two.”

  “I think I’m going to give him two weeks’ notice to vacate the stud barn. That will give them time to run Dragon’s Soul in the Holiday Classic before they have to clear out.”

  She stared at Mac, who appeared to be daydreaming or something. “Mac, did you hear me?”

  “Yes. I heard you. Sounds like a good idea, but these guys are cagey. Will you let me handle Rahul?”

  “He’s all yours. I’m going to go in and get washed up, then fix something to eat. Wanna come?”

  “You go ahead, I’ll clean up out here, give the colt his three-o’clock feeding and see you in half an hour.”

  Emma headed for the house. No cabbage today; instead, she smelled like carrot.

  MAC WIPED THE MASH off his hand and arm and pulled his cell phone out of his coat pocket with sticky fingers. Em was right, bodies didn’t just walk off with mysterious strangers. Maybe the key to all the clandestine activity on the farm was somehow tied to Victor Dago—dead or alive he was still causing a stir.

  He punched in Doug Cahill’s number at the FBI. It rang four times before rolling over to voice mail. “Hey, Doug, it’s Mac. Can you do me a favor and recheck that name in the California racing commission’s database? Mr. Dago has relatives out there and they may have a record on his background check. Thanks.”

  Closing his phone, he dropped it into his pocket and glanced across the paddock.

  The sooner Rahul and his crew cleared out of the stud barn the better. The restoration company was making progress on the main barn, and by week’s end they could move the colt back into his old stall. Things would return to normal.

  Snagging the feed bucket by the handle, he walked to the barrel and scooped it full of mash.

  When he spotted two men, one on either side of the barn doorway, tension diced the muscles across his shoulder blades into confetti, but he gritted his teeth and walked across the paddock.

  Caution bristled the hairs on the back of his neck as he approached the entrance, sizing up the level of resistance he could see in the set of their shoulders, in the way they tracked his every movement with cold black stares and simultaneously stepped together in front of him to block the entrance. From inside the stable, Karif hollered a string of Arabic at them and they stepped aside.

  He walked between them and into the breezeway. It was intimidation, pure and simple. Another reason for Emma to steer clear of the stud barn.

  Deep in the corridor he spotted Karif with a pencil and notepad in hand. Karif glanced up at Mac, then went back to whatever he was doing.

  Mac reached the colt’s stall, turned the latch, slid the door and stepped inside. He closed it part of the way while he hung the feed bucket and stroked the horse’s neck, listening to the rhythmatic sound of a voice coming from one of the stalls. “Thah-mahn-ee-ah…thah-lath-ah…sit-ah…sub-ah…wa-Had…ar-bah.”

  Counting?

  He didn’t know a word of Arabic, but he knew counting when he heard it.

  Mac patted the colt’s shoulder, slipped out of the door, rolled it closed and moved down the breezeway, pausing only long enough to get a good look at what was going on before he walked out of the barn past the sentries, and headed for the house.

  Karif was writing down a series of numbers in neat little rows on the paper, numbers Javas was reading off from the inside lip of each horse in the stable.

  It wasn’t unusual to find a number tattooed there; every Thoroughbred had one for identification purposes.

  But not every horse in their stable was a Thoroughbred, so why did they need a tattoo at all?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Emma saw the truck’s lights through the picture window as the vehicle turned into the driveway and pulled down into Firehill. It broke right onto the road leading to the stud barn. “Looks like Rahul is back from Front Royal with their horses.”

  Mac rolled his glass between his palms and sat forward on the sofa. “I’ll head down there right now.”

  “You could do it in the morning.”

  “And miss getting a look at their new additions? Has it struck you as unusual that three of the horses in their stable aren’t even Thoroughbreds?”

  “Yes. But I just assumed they were companion animals for the other horses, there to keep them calm.”

  “I saw Karif writing down numbers that Javas was reading from inside the horses’ lower lips. All of them.”

  “Now that’s weird.” She stared across at him and watched a muscle flex along his jaw. “Maybe two weeks is too long.”

  He met her gaze. “Maybe. But it’s fair.”

  “Can I see you later?” she asked, stepping closer to him, feeling the first measure of awakening spread over her body.

  “Sooner if you’d like.” He flashed her a seductive smile, touched her cheek, handed her his empty glass and left.

  MAC PULLED HIS COAT OFF a peg by the back door, and stepped out into the night, sensing the dropping temperature as the air hit his face. Every light in the stud barn was on and the squeak of horse-trailer gates and the crunching of hooves on gravel piqued his interest. He knew something was transpiring in the stable, but he didn’t know what. Drug trafficking, maybe? The thugs dressed in black could be DEA, ATF or FBI.

  Walking across the yard, he toyed with any additional acronyms he could think of, but in the end he was certain the goings-on couldn’t be good for Firehill, and they had the potential to devastate Emma.

  He would never let that happen. He’d developed a fondness for the farm and the farmer’s daughter.

  Pushing through the hedge, he stepped out into the open and walked the fifty feet to the barn.

  His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He stopped next to the entrance to answer it.

  “Hello.”

  “Mac. Doug here. Sorry to just be getting back to you, but I’ve had a hell of a time tracking down that information and hanging on to it.”

  “What have you got?”

  “I found Victor Dago in the California database.”

  Mac patted his pocket, trying to find his pen and pad. “Let me get something to write the information on.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about that. Victor Dago is dead.”

  “I know he’s dead. He died the day before yesterday.”

  Silence reached across the line for what seemed longer than necessary. “Doug?”

  “According to the California records, Victor Dago died two years ago, Mac.”

  Caution worked through him. “You said something about trying to hang on to the information?”

  “Yeah. I’d no more than accessed it when someone wiped the file. Watch yourself. This has government op written all over it.”

  “Thanks, I’ll do that. Take care.” He closed his phone and shoved it in his pocket, staring into the heart of the stable, where Rahul led a rangy-looking horse into the stall next to Navigator and slid the door shut.

  Whatever they were hiding could be behind the southeast gate on the farm. Drugs, guns or any other contraband that could be smuggled into the country. Maybe the racehorse business was just a front for their operation. And if the real and the fictitious Victor Dago were both dead, then who was the man he’d tried to save?

  Rahul looked up about the time Mac stepped into the barn. He immediately headed toward him, and met him midcorridor. “Mr. Titus, I see your horse is still in our stable, and I hope you’re here with Miss Clareborn’s answer.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. The main barn is being restored right now and we’ll move the colt out of here on Thursday or Friday.”

  Rahul nodded. “Good. Then she has agreed to our terms?”

  “Miss Clareborn has authorized me to give you and your employer two weeks’ notic
e. You can vacate the barn immediately after the Holiday Classic.”

  He studied Rahul for his reaction, half expecting anger, but a smug smile developed on the man’s mouth for an instant before his features changed up, and his brows pulled together. “I understand. Please tell her we will comply with her wishes, but I’m afraid there won’t be any stables left in two weeks’ time.”

  “Sounds like a business problem for you and your employer to solve. Maybe you’ll have to purchase your own farm. Good night.” Mac turned around and headed for the exit, taking a quick look at the colt before he left the stud barn.

  Granted, they were going to have a difficult time finding a stable willing to lease to them with their reputation in the bluegrass, but two weeks from now Rahul and his crew wouldn’t be Emma or Firehill Farm’s problem anymore.

  He sucked in a deep breath, trying to reconcile the foreboding looping around in his head as he crossed the open area and headed for the bunkhouse with Rahul’s last words stuck on rewind.

  No stables left in two weeks’ time? What the hell did that mean? Someone would let them in.

  EMMA PULLED BACK THE covers and slipped into bed next to Mac. She spooned herself against his naked backside, letting the skin-on-skin connection infuse her with his body heat.

  “Um, you’re cold,” he said.

  “I won’t be for long.” She brushed her hand over his hip-bone, and reached into dangerous territory, feeling his growing need in the palm of her hand.

  He growled and rolled over, pulling her on top of him. “You’re a bad girl, Miss Clareborn, sneaking out of the house after dark for a secret rendezvous.”

  “Sneaking out is easy. I used to do it all the time as a teenager when my dad would forbid me from galloping a rank horse in daylight. It may as well have been an open challenge to mount up and take the horse around the track in the dark instead.”

  “This ride is different, Em.” He reached up and smoothed her hair behind her ears, sending a tingle through her body that resonated down to her toes.