A Taste of Blood and Ashes

by Jaden Terrell

  “Quiet is good, my friend,” I said. “Quiet is the cherry on the banana split of life.”

  He laughed his rumbling laugh. “If you thought that, you’d be in a different line of work.”

  “I like quiet just fine,” I said. “For other people.”

  I filled him in on the case to date. When I got to Maggie’s murder, he sighed and said, “Shit. I hate collateral damage.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” We clicked our bottles together.

  From inside, Zane called, “Bih-yee!”

  “We’re on,” Billy said. “I’ll help you get him up, then you can take him to the show while I catch me some shut-eye. All that standing around doing nothing takes a lot out of a guy.”

  Carlin rode in seven more classes. She placed only once, a single blue ribbon in a sea of undeserved losses. With the exception of that one class, it was as if she were invisible. Zane watched from the wheelchair-accessible section, the hair around his face lifting in the breeze made by a small plastic fan clamped to the arm of his chair. Even with the fan, sweat beaded on his forehead and upper lip. Every time she lost, his expression got grimmer.

  I watched the classes from the railing, taking note of who cheered and who booed, and watching the emotions roil across Gerardo’s face. Hope for my positive recommendation to the insurance company and gratitude that I’d saved Zane’s life mingled with a heaping helping of pride and possessiveness. He clearly saw me as a contender for Carlin’s affections, but whether he felt the threat was to Zane or to himself, I couldn’t say.

  We would have both been happier if I’d gone back up to sit in the bleachers, but that would have felt too much like letting him win. A better man than I was might not have cared.

  I took four more texts from Khanh, then one that said, I com bak now. Forty minutes later, as Carlin finished her last class, I realized Khanh still hadn’t returned.

  I texted her, got no response. Punched in her number, and her phone went straight to voice mail.

  I’d said, If I don’t hear from you, I’ll come and get you. What I hadn’t thought about was how. A vision of me riding into town and tying Crockett to the cannon made me shake my head. By the time I got there, whatever trouble she was in would be long settled. I caught a glimpse of Rhonda Lister on the other side of the arena, hurried over, and said, “Hey, give a guy a ride?”

  “Jim’s showing in a little while. Will I be back in time to watch him?”

  “I hope so. Khanh didn’t check in. I need to make sure she’s okay.”

  “Of course.” She touched my forearm with her fingertips. “I’m parked out back.”

  Rhonda Lister didn’t drive a Ferrari. She drove a candy apple Porsche 911. I loved my Silverado, but my heart beat a little faster when I climbed into the Porsche’s passenger seat. The leather still smelled new.

  “Sweet ride, huh?” she said.

  “You do know how to transport a man in style.”

  She laughed. “That I do, and I’m not just talking about the car. Where to?”

  “She was at the courthouse.”

  “So we take the main strip.”

  The traffic guard waved us out, and we followed the plastic flags and red Sharpie arrows back to the main road. We passed a saddle shop and the cowboy bar, with its neon sign flashing Jake’s Place. Five miles out of town, we took a sharp bend, the Porsche’s tires skidding on the shoulder. My seat belt dug into my ribs, and I clamped my teeth against a yelp. Then, pain forgotten, I pointed across the road. “There. Over there.”

  The Silverado lay on its side, front tires blown out, hood twisted and accordioned, front grille wrapped around a white oak. I was out of the car, bile rising in my throat, before the wheels of the Porsche stopped rolling. I imagined my sister slumped over the steering wheel or thrown like a rag doll through the windshield. Imagined the airbag shattering her bones with 2,000 pounds of pressure. How could I have let her drive, knowing how small she was, how close she’d be to the steering wheel? How she never wore her seat belt?

  Then I saw her, and suddenly I could breathe again.

  She sat on the ground behind the pickup, her arm cradled between her breasts. A young guy in bicycle shorts and a bike helmet knelt beside her, holding a bloodstained towel to the side of her head. Behind them a racing bike stood propped on its kickstand.

  I knelt in front of them, and Khanh burst into tears. “Sorry, very sorry I wreck you truck.”

  In the three months I’d known her, I’d seen her beaten, battered, and in fear for her life and the life of her child. I’d seen her cradling her bloodied hand after a man had hacked a finger from it.

  I had never seen her cry.

  I put my arm around her shoulders. “Screw the truck. Are you all right?”

  The guy in the helmet said, “I was crossing over when she came around the corner. I know, it was stupid, crossing so close to the curve. But there’s not a lot of traffic around here, and I thought it would be no big deal, you know? She came around the corner, and she didn’t slow down, and I thought shit, she’s gonna run me over! Then I saw her standing on the brakes.” He gave a nervous laugh. “I tried to jump out of the way, but I knew I’d never make it. I thought I was a goner. But she put it in the ditch instead. If she hadn’t done that . . .” He shook his head. “She saved my life.”

  And almost lost her own. The cut on her head looked superficial, but that was nothing more than luck.

  Rhonda had climbed out of the car and pried open the Siverado’s crumpled hood. “I got your problem,” she said. She came around to the back of the truck, rubbing her palms on the sides of her jeans. “Brake lines are cut. Not all the way, just enough so when you hit the brakes hard, the hoses would blow.”

  The biker’s mouth dropped open.

  “Hoses?” I said. “Both of them?”

  She nodded. “Tricky to get them both to go at the same time, and kind of a crapshoot since there’d be no way to know for sure how hard she’d hit the brakes. But it worked. There’s something else too.”

  Khanh dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Like that not enough?”

  “The airbag,” Rhonda said. “It didn’t deploy.”

  “That very bad, right?” Khanh said.

  “No, it was lucky.” She looked at me. “Whoever did this expected you to be driving. The airbag might have saved your life, and they didn’t want to take that chance. But small as she is and as far forward as that seat was, it was a good thing it didn’t go off. If it had deployed, it could have killed her.”

  I turned away to check the cut on Khanh’s temple, not trusting myself to speak, not certain what to feel. Relief that Khanh’s injuries were minor, gratitude for the twists of fate that had saved her, anger that someone had put her in danger, shame that I’d allowed it to happen. And yes, a pang, more than a pang, for my faithful Silverado.

  Whoever had done this must have sabotaged the airbag and brake lines sometime after I’d taken the pain pill. After Rhonda had gone but while most of the camp still slept.

  Unless Rhonda had done it herself. She had the knowledge and the opportunity.

  I didn’t want to think about that. Either way, it had been a risky move; no way to know when someone in the camp might stir.

  Khanh wiped her eyes again and said, “Hey, boss man. I wearing seat belt, like you say.”

  I forced a grin. “Good girl.”

  She was favoring her arm, so I put my hands under her armpits and helped her to her feet, careful to bend from the knees and not the middle. My ribs complained, and I ignored them. We were starting to develop a dysfunctional relationship.

  Khanh hobbled to the driver’s door and stopped, perplexed. Rhonda had left it standing open, but with the truck on its side and her only arm injured, Khanh couldn’t climb in.

  Rhonda said, “What do you need?”

  “Black case, long strap.”

  Rhonda boosted herself up and slithered into the cab headfirst. Moments later, she emerged, holding out a bla
ck leather case with a file folder stuck in the front pocket.

  I took it and handed it to Khanh, who hooked the strap over her shoulder and said, “We look at this when we get back, okay?”

  “Sure. But first, you need to get that head looked at.”

  “No, boss man. Just a flesh wound.”

  “And your arm? Is that a flesh wound too?”

  “Probably sprain,” she said. “You got bandage, right? You wrap.”

  28.

  I bandaged Khanh’s cut and wrapped her wrist and forearm, then texted Billy with an update. We transferred the guns and the most expensive equipment to Rhonda’s trunk before calling the sheriff and Triple A. What Hap didn’t know about wouldn’t get confiscated. While we waited for him to arrive, I pulled the bobblehead Batman from the dashboard and zipped it into a camera bag.

  The sheriff took our statements, gave me a modicum of grief for form’s sake, and called in a deputy to photograph the hulk that had once been my truck and was now a crime scene. I left the keys with the deputy and asked him to tuck them under the floor mat for Triple A. They could haul it to the shop just as easily without me.

  The guy in the helmet rode off on his bike, shaken but wiser, and Rhonda Lister drove Khanh and me back to the showground.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think we might have made you miss your husband’s class.”

  “No harm, no foul. He’ll ride again tonight in the Big Lick classes.”

  “He going to have a problem with this?”

  “I texted him while you were doctoring Khanh’s arm. He knows it was for a good cause. But do you mind getting your stuff out of the trunk later? I can still catch his last few classes.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Khanh said, though it looked like it pained her to say it.

  Rhonda parked in the VIP lot behind the arena, so Khanh and I cut through the prep area and the arena on our way back to the campground. As we made our way around the bleachers, Samuel Trehorne came in carrying his daughter on one arm and pulling a rolling cooler with the other. The girl had her arms around his neck and her head on his shoulder, and her hoarse, angry wails said she was having a tantrum and wanted the world to know it.

  A matronly woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a sour expression waddled behind them, lugging a purse as big as a suitcase and a tote bag full of inflatable seat cushions. Trehorne’s wife, Rebecca.

  Trehorne squeezed sideways into a VIP box and plopped his daughter into a folding chair.

  Khanh wrinkled her nose. “You need to talk Mr. Trehorne?”

  “I guess I’d better,” I said. “You don’t have to stay. You could go back to the trailer or go shopping, or whatever it is you do when you’re not working. Of course you could actually do some work.”

  “I working now,” she said, affronted.

  “Yes, you are. I’m teasing you.”

  “Oh. You want me do something else now?”

  “You almost died a little while ago,” I said. “You think you might deserve to take a break?”

  “Maybe need shower,” she conceded. “But then okay to work.”

  “You could do that skip trace, if you wanted to,” I said. “The one you told me about on Wednesday.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Me?”

  “Why not? You know how to do it. If it’s pretty straightforward, you just use the databases I showed you. If you run into a dead end, I can try some other things later.”

  “You keep trade secret, huh?” She gave me a conspiratorial smile.

  “If I didn’t, pretty soon you wouldn’t need me anymore.”

  “True. I very resourceful. Okay, I try. But first, I maybe call mother and Tuyet.”

  “Don’t tell them about the wreck,” I said. “They’ll just worry.”

  “Got to tell,” she said, then flashed me a mischievous grin. “But maybe wait and tell when we get back.”

  I walked her to the door and watched her leave, then sat down in the bleachers and watched Trehorne and his family from the corner of my eye. He helped his wife put cushions on the folding chairs, then opened the suitcase and gave Esmerelda a Disney princess bag. She pushed it away and pouted, and his wife took it and pulled out a coloring book and crayons. She offered them to the girl, who let out another wail and drummed her feet against her chair.

  All kids have tantrums, but for the first time, I felt sorry for Trehorne.

  He swept his gaze around the room. When he saw me, he gave me an embarrassed smile, said something to Rebecca, and headed in my direction looking grateful for the excuse to leave the tantrum to his wife.

  He climbed up the few rows to sit beside me, the metal benches creaking beneath his weight. He looked around again. People were filing into the arena, but it was a slow trickle, and the room was far from full.

  “Damn shame,” he said. “Time was, this place would have been packed.”

  “Maybe they heard about the murder.”

  “Some of ’em, maybe. But a killing don’t keep people home. Just makes ’em travel in packs. Could be the heat, I guess. But used to be, it could be pouring down buckets or so hot these benches would burn right through your jeans. They all came out to see these horses go.”

  I tried for a neutral tone. “Hard to see it go downhill.”

  “Not downhill. Dying. And there doesn’t seem to be a damn thing I can do to stop it.”

  “You ever think of showing flat shod? There’d be a downturn at first, but people would get over it once they got used to seeing the more natural gait.”

  He spat onto the floor. “Don’t be an idiot.” Then, “Your good friends over at TASA, they talk about their plans for that damn association of theirs?”

  “Nope. Too busy saving Zane’s life and mourning for Maggie and trying to put their booth back together.”

  “I heard they had some trouble. Reap what you sow, I say. But damn shame about Maggie.” He put a foot on the bleacher beside me and leaned in close. “Last month they put out a newsletter. All the names of the breeders and trainers who’ve ever had violations. Nothing about how the tests are fallible. Nothing about how the judges are corrupt. You know how many people read that newsletter?”

  I shook my head. No idea.

  “Fifteen thousand.” His fists curled and uncurled. “Fifteen thousand tree huggers who wouldn’t know a Walking Horse if it stepped on ’em. But hell, they all have an opinion.”

  “You know what they say about opinions. They’re like assholes. Everybody has one.”

  He laughed as if I’d partially redeemed myself, then said, “Just out of curiosity, what did young Zane remember yesterday?”

  I said, “He said something about a guy named Owen Bodeen. Carlin said Bodeen disappeared after the accident, never even visited Zane in the hospital. Didn’t anybody think that was strange?”

  “It’s a transient lifestyle,” Trehorne said. “Grooms, trainers, stable hands . . . They come and go.”

  “Not Bodeen. He’d been with Zane’s family a lot of years.”

  “That’s so. But Zane was like a son to him. I don’t think Owen could face what happened to him.”

  “Any idea where he might have gone?”

  “None.”

  “You think Zane’s family might?”

  “No idea. You ask a lot of questions for a guy who’s supposed to be giving me answers.”

  I shrugged. “It’s what I do. Follow leads. Some mean something. Others don’t. I don’t know until I follow them.”

  He took his foot off the bleacher. “You do what you have to do, but don’t forget whose check is burning a hole in your wallet.” He pressed his fists into the small of his back and stretched. In his VIP box, Esmerelda had stopped wailing and settled into a series of loud, angry hiccups. “I’ve got to get back to my family.”

  “Looks like somebody’s having a bad day.”

  “She’s tired and bored. Nobody to play with. And she wanted a Happy Meal instead of the sandwiches her
mother made us at home.” He lifted his hands, palms up. What can you do? “You think about what I said. Carlin Underwood has a plan, maybe to accuse me of soring, maybe to plant undercover workers at my barn and manufacture evidence. Whatever it is, I want to know about it.”

  I gave him a mock salute, and his small eyes narrowed even smaller.

  “Don’t mess with me, boy,” he said. “Or, as God is my witness, I will make you very, very sorry.”

  “Duly noted,” I said, and watched him stalk down the aisle to console his sobbing child.

  29.

  When I got back to the trailer, Khanh was sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, tapping something into the laptop. The side of her face and the skin around the butterfly bandage on her forehead were starting to bruise. Her hair was damp from the shower, and the file folder lay on the table beside her. As I slid onto the bench across from her, she pushed it over to me. Copies of the reports.

  I read them in silence. They were what you’d expect in a rural community. Crushed by a tractor, killed in a car wreck, neck broken in a fall from a haymow. Two suicides: one by gunshot, one by hanging.

  I’d gotten most of that online. What I hadn’t gotten were the names in the blanks for medical examiner and investigating officers. The name Trehorne came up often. When I had time, I’d run the rest through my family-tree databases, but I knew now what I’d find. A web of links by blood and marriage.

  There wasn’t much to read. The cases had been ruled accidents and suicides, then quickly closed. If there was a smoking gun other than small-town nepotism, I wouldn’t find it in the official files.

  I put the reports back into the folder and closed it. Khanh looked up. “You learn anything?”

  I nodded. “Not about the deaths, but about the investigations. I can see why Eli latched onto a conspiracy theory.”

  “You think he wrong?”

  “My guess is, yes and no. What happened to Maggie and Zane—and you—proves something’s going on. But I doubt all these cases are related.”