by Tami Hoag
The voice came from behind me on a beam of light that spilled around my shoulders. I kept the Maglite in my hand, but held my arms away from my body.
“I heard a commotion,” I said, turning slightly. “Someone was in here opening stall doors.”
“Yeah, right,” he said sarcastically. “Guess who. Drop the flashlight.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said, turning a little more. “I tried to stop them. I’ve got the bruises to prove it.”
“I’m not gonna tell you again, lady. Drop the flashlight.”
“I want to see who you are. How do I know you’re not the person who did this?”
“I’m with security.”
I didn’t find that reassuring. Security for the show grounds was contracted out to a private company that lowballed the bid for the job. The staff was probably as reliable and well trained as the people who let lunatics get on commercial airliners with guns and knives. For all I knew, half of them were convicted felons. With my back to him, I couldn’t be sure he was even wearing the uniform.
“Let me see you.”
He huffed an impatient sigh. Before he could say no, I turned around and hit him full in the face with the beam from the Maglite.
I noted his clothes second. I noted his gun first.
“Is that part of the uniform?” I asked.
“It’s part of my uniform.” He made a motion with it. “Enough with the questions. Cut the light and give it to me. Let’s go.”
I did as instructed, more than willing to get out in the open where I knew there were other people around. I considered and rejected the idea of making a break for it. I didn’t want people looking for me, my description and sketch on the front page of the newspaper. Nor did I want to get shot in the back. Playing along for the moment could offer an opportunity to learn something.
Outside, people were calling, horses were whinnying. I could hear hoofbeats on the hard-packed road. The guard herded me to a golf cart parked on the side of tent nineteen—Jade’s barn.
I wondered how long the cart had been parked there. I wondered how easy it would be to buy a guy like this to open some stall doors. Working nights for peanuts guarding horses worth more than the average man would make in a lifetime might alter a person’s perspective of right and wrong.
I slid onto the passenger’s side of the bench seat, the seat wet and slippery as the rain came harder. The guard kept his gun in his left hand as he started the cart and backed it around. I shifted positions, turning slightly toward him, and surreptitiously touched the Glock, still secure in the back of my jeans, beneath my jacket and turtleneck.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer. A walkie-talkie crackled on his belt. Other guards radioing about the loose horses. He didn’t get on the air to tell anyone he’d apprehended me. I didn’t like that. We started down the road toward the main part of the show grounds, a ghost town at two in the morning.
“I’ll want to speak to your supervisor,” I said with authority. “And someone will need to call Detective James Landry with the Sheriff’s Office.”
That turned his head.
“Why?”
I took my turn not answering. Let him wonder. We passed other guards, other people running through the rain to join in the fun of trying to catch half a dozen hot-blooded horses drunk on freedom.
We drove through the maze of tents and down a row of deserted retail shops. The rain came now in sheets. We drove farther and farther away from any source of help. My heart rate increased a beat. Adrenaline was like a narcotic in my bloodstream, the prospect of danger intoxicating and exciting. I stared at the security guard and wondered what he would think if he knew that. Most people would find it disturbing.
He pulled the golf cart alongside one of the big trailers that housed the various show grounds management offices and cut the engine. We clattered up the metal stairs and the guard ushered me inside. A heavyset man stood beside a metal desk, listening to the noise coming over a walkie-talkie the size of a brick. He had a throat like a bullfrog: a sack of flesh wider than his head, spilling over the collar of his shirt. He wore the blue security uniform too, with a couple of extra pins on the chest. Decorated for meritorious ass-sitting and delegating above and beyond the call, I guessed. He scowled at me as I stood dripping water all over the floor.
“She’s the one,” the guard said. “I caught her opening stall doors.”
I looked him in the face and said with just enough point to make my meaning crystal clear: “Any more little surprises like that in your pocket?”
He had stuffed the gun. I could see him struggle with the notion that he’d blown it showing me the thing. I had something to use against him. He wasn’t supposed to be carrying on the job. He probably didn’t have a permit for it either. If that was true and I reported him to the police, there was a good chance he’d lose his job at the very least. I could see on his face all these things were just now occurring to him.
If he’d been overly bright he wouldn’t have been working dog watch in a rent-a-cop uniform.
“You caught me standing in a barn with a flashlight,” I said. “I was trying to help. Same as you.”
“You got something against Michael Berne?” the bullfrog asked. He had the thick drawl of a panhandle Floridian, where the Sunshine State and the Deep South rub loins, as it were.
“I’ve never met Michael Berne, though I did see him having a loud, threatening argument with Don Jade this morning. You might want to find out where Mr. Jade is right now.”
The supervisor stared at me. “Berne is on his way,” he said. “And a couple of deputies. Have a seat, Miss . . . ?”
I didn’t answer and I didn’t sit, though my back was aching like a son of a bitch from the beating I’d taken.
“You’ll need to tell the deputies to treat that stall area as a crime scene,” I said. “In addition to letting the horses loose, your perp assaulted me when I tried to run him off. They’ll find a pitchfork or a broom—something with a long handle—that may have his prints on it. I’ll want to press charges. And I’ll want to go to the emergency room for an examination, and to have them take photographs of my bruises. I may sue. What kind of management does this place have if they can’t keep people or animals safe?”
Bullfrog looked at me as if he’d never seen one of my kind before. “Who are you?”
“I’m not telling you my name.”
“I need your name, miss. I have to make a report.”
“That’s a problem then, because I’m not telling you,” I said. “I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re not an officer of the court or of the government, and therefore you have no right to demand information of me.”
“Deputies are on the way,” he said by way of a threat.
“That’s fine. I’ll be happy to go with them, though they have no grounds to arrest me. Standing in a barn aisle is not a crime that I’m aware of.”
“Bud says you let them horses loose.”
“I think you should ask Bud again what he saw.”
He looked at Bud. “Was she letting them loose or not?”
Bud looked constipated, unable to tell the lie he wanted to tell either to cover his own ass or to grab a little glory with his boss. “She was right there.”
“So were you,” I pointed out. “How do we know you didn’t open those doors?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Bullfrog said. “Why would he do something like that?”
“I could only speculate. Money. Maliciousness. Mental illness.”
“Maybe those motives all apply to you.”
“Not in this particular instance.”
“You have horses here on the grounds, Miss—?”
“I’m through speaking with you now,” I announced. “May I use your phone to call my attorney?”
He squinted at me. “No!”
I sat then in a straight chair beside the desk. Bullfrog’s radio crackled. The gate guard announcing the arrival of the
sheriff’s deputies. A stroke of luck. I didn’t want to meet Michael Berne in these circumstances. Bullfrog instructed the gate guard to send the radio car to the security office.
“Letting them horses loose is a serious crime,” he said to me. “You could do time for that.”
“No, I couldn’t, because I didn’t let the horses loose. The perpetrator might be charged with malicious mischief, which is a misdemeanor. There would be a fine and maybe community service. It’s nothing compared to, say, illegally carrying a concealed weapon,” I said, looking at the scowling Bud.
“I thought you said you were through talking,” he said.
I smoothed my wet hair back with my hands and stood up as a car door slammed outside the trailer. The deputy came in looking like he’d been awakened from a sound sleep to answer the call.
“What’s up, Marsh? Somebody let some nags loose? This her?”
“She was in the vicinity,” Bullfrog said. “She may have information about the crime.”
The deputy looked at me, unimpressed. “Do you, ma’am?”
“I’ll speak directly to Detective Landry,” I said.
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
I moved past him, going to the door, checking out his name tag as I passed. “We’ll talk in the car, Deputy Saunders. Let’s get going.”
He looked at Bullfrog, who shook his head and said, “Good luck with that, son. She’s a pistol.”
Chapter 9
You got me out of bed for this?” Landry looked from Deputy Saunders to me with the kind of disgust usually reserved for spoiled food.
“She won’t talk to anyone else,” Saunders said.
We walked down the hall toward the squad room, Landry muttering, “Aren’t I the lucky one. I don’t see what any of us are doing here. You could have handled this in the field in half an hour. Jesus.”
“I was assaulted,” I said. “I think that warrants a detective.”
“Then you take whoever is up. You know that.”
“But I’ve already established a relationship with you regarding this case.”
“No, you haven’t, because there isn’t any case. What you talked to me about yesterday isn’t a case.”
We went into the division offices through reception. Landry handed his badge and his weapon to the security officer through the drawer beneath the bulletproof glass. Saunders followed suit. I pulled the Glock out of the back of my jeans, put it and my car keys in the tray. Landry stared at me.
I shrugged. “I’ve got a license.”
He turned to Saunders. “You fucking idiot. She could have blown your empty head off in the car.”
“Now, Detective,” I cooed, slipping past him as the security officer buzzed the door open. “I’m not that kind of girl.”
“Get out of here, Saunders,” he snapped. “You’re about as useful as a limp dick.”
We left Saunders looking forlorn in the outer office. Landry stalked past me, the muscles in his jaw working. We went past his desk to an interview room. He pushed the door back.
“In here.”
I went in and gingerly took a seat. The pain in my back wouldn’t let me draw a full breath. I had begun to wonder if maybe I really should go to an ER.
Landry slammed the door. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“That’s rather a broad question, so I’m just going to take my pick of moments,” I said. “I went to the equestrian center to look for some hint of what might have happened to Erin Seabright.”
“But you weren’t in the barn where she worked, right? She worked for some guy named Jade. So how is it you were in this other barn?”
“Michael Berne is an enemy of Don Jade. This morning I witnessed Berne threaten Jade.”
“Threaten him how?”
“In that if-I-find-out-you-killed-that-horse-I’ll-ruin-you kind of way.”
“So this Jade sneaks in and turns the guy’s horses loose. Big deal.”
“It’s a big deal to the man whose livelihood depends on the soundness of those horses. It’s a big deal to the trainer who has to explain to owners how a horse worth a quarter of a million or a half a million dollars came to break a leg running around loose in the dead of night.”
Landry heaved a sigh and turned his head at an odd angle, as if to pop a vertebra in his neck. “And you’d drag me out of bed for this?”
“No. I did that just for fun.”
“You’re a pain in the ass, Estes. Not like you haven’t been told that before.”
“That and worse. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t have a very high opinion of myself either,” I said. “I suppose you think I’m being flip, and that’s all right. I don’t care what you think of me. I want you to be aware there are bad things going on that all seem to center on Don Jade. Don Jade is the man Erin Seabright was working for. Erin Seabright is missing. Do you see the connection here?”
He shook his head. “So I’m told you’re caught standing there in this other guy’s barn. How do I know you didn’t let these nags loose just to get attention? You want people looking at Jade, so you orchestrate this little opera—”
“Nice turn of phrase. And did I beat myself with a pitchfork handle too? I can assure you, I’m not that flexible.”
“You’re walking around. You don’t look any worse for wear to me.”
I slipped my jacket off and stood up. “All right. I don’t usually do this on the first interrogation, but if you promise not to call me a slut . . .”
I turned my back to him and pulled my sweater up to my neck. “If those marks look anywhere near as bad as they feel—”
“Jesus.”
He spoke the word softly, without anger, without energy, the wind knocked out of his sails. I knew it probably didn’t have as much to do with the marks my assailant had left on me as it did with the patchwork of skin grafts I’d worn for the past two years.
That wasn’t what I had wanted. Not at all. I had lived with those scars a long time now. They were a part of me. I had kept them to myself because I kept to myself. I didn’t dwell on them. I didn’t look at them. In a strange way, the damage that had been done to my body was unimportant to me, because I had become unimportant to myself.
Suddenly the damage was very important. I felt naked emotionally. Vulnerable.
I pulled the sweater down and picked up my jacket, my back still to Landry.
“Forget it,” I said, embarrassed and angry with myself. “I’m going home.”
“You want to press charges?”
“Against whom?” I asked, turning to face him. “The asshole you’re not going to bother to look for, let alone question, because nothing that goes on with that horse crowd is of any interest to you? Unless, of course, someone turns up murdered.”
He couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
The corner of my mouth moved in what passed for a bitter smile. “Imagine that: You at least have the humanity to feel sheepish. Good for you, Landry.”
I stepped past him, going to the door. “How do you like my odds that Saunders is sitting in the parking lot catching twenty? Pretty good, I think. See you around, Landry. I’ll call you when I find a body.”
“Estes. Wait.” He didn’t want to meet my eyes when I turned again and looked at him. “You should go to an ER. I’ll take you. You might have busted a rib or something.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“Jesus Christ, you’re a hardhead.”
“I don’t want your pity,” I said. “I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t want you to like me or care what happens to me. I don’t want anything from you but for you to do your job. And apparently, that’s too much to ask.
“I’ll show myself out. I know the way.”
He followed me back to reception. Neither of us spoke as we retrieved our weapons. I pretended he had ceased to exist as we walked down the hall and down the stairs.
“I’m good at what I do,” he said as the front doors came into view.
&nb
sp; “Really? What’s that? You have a second career as a professional asshole?”
“You’re a piece of work.”
“I’m what I have to be.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re rude and you’re a bitch, and that somehow makes you feel superior to the rest of us.”
The rain was still coming down. It looked white as it passed through the beams of the security lights in the parking lot. Saunders and his radio car were gone.
