Dark Horse

by J. Carson Black

  He was sorry, but it was too late for the Ruidoso in May; he couldn’t take her.

  “If she’s not ready, we don’t have to run her,” Dakota said.

  “Sorry. Can’t do it.”

  Frustrated, Dakota demanded, “But why not?” She regretted the outburst immediately. She couldn’t force the man to take her horse.

  “I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “What do you mean? What chances?”

  Spackman paused. “I just don’t want to risk it.”

  “Risk what?”

  “Look, Miz McAllister, I’ve got some valuable horses in my barn. One of ‘em’s slated for the All American. I can’t afford to have anything go wrong.” He lowered his voice. “Things get around in this business. Don’t say I told you, but a lot of people think someone had it in for Coke.”

  Had it in for Coke? Dakota remembered the videotape. Hadn’t Coke said something along those lines? “Are you telling me no one wants to train my filly because Coke had enemies?”

  “I have my owners to think of. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. I hope you find somebody.” And he hung up.

  Stunned, Dakota set the phone down and stared at her father, who smiled down at her from one of the many eight-by-ten glossies on the wall, holding the bridle of another winner.

  SEVEN

  At seven the following morning, Dakota hitched a horse trailer to her father’s truck and drove Shameless to the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds. She’d worry about finding a trainer later. Today, the filly was going to the track.

  As she pulled up at the stable area, the gate man’s eyes widened at the sight of the Black Oak trailer.

  Dakota breathed the crystalline air deep into her lungs, exhilaration swelling her heart like wind filling a ship’s sails. In this instant, the rare, cutting beauty, the grandeur of this high valley, seemed locked in a silent prism. Gradually, the sounds of the racetrack came through: country music on a radio, snatches of conversations in Spanish, the squeal of an angry horse, the faint growl of a down-shifting semi out on the highway. Against the backdrop of sparkling grassland and clean blue mountains, the pageantry of morning on the backside unfurled before her, as familiar as the old clothes she wore.

  Several horses were already warming up on the track, some galloping, some walking and trotting alongside their pony horses. Riders led their charges to and from the track. Hot walkers were set up by each shedrow, looking like stripped-down carnival rides, the horses tied to them trampling the same radius over and over. A horse received a bath after a workout, its coat gleaming like dark caramel. There was no shade here, anywhere, but it wasn’t yet hot enough for anyone to notice.

  Without warning, Dakota was hit by memories she’d thought long buried. It was as if she’d never left. The backside was an exclusive club, and she’d been a member. Once. Dakota had forgotten how just being here grabbed the heart and squeezed, how her stomach warmed with nervous excitement.

  I’m only here temporarily, she warned herself sternly as she unloaded Tyke, the Black Oak pony horse. Inaptly named, the big paint was more than a match for Coke’s heavy western saddle. Dakota would ride Tyke and lead Shameless around the track. A walk or slow jog twice around would be sufficient for today, just enough to reacquaint the filly with the racetrack and let her remember the feel of the saddle and bridle. Tomorrow Dakota would pony the filly again, and if everything went well, she’d let her stretch out into a slow lope. By the end of the week, she’d like to have a rider up and start galloping a mile.

  This is just a stopgap measure, she reminded herself, until I find a trainer.

  Better, right now, to err on the side of caution. If Dakota was careful, she could do little harm to the filly in a week, and just maybe, a little good. Surely she’d find a trainer by then. Unless they all felt the way Ron Spackman did.

  His words haunted her. Someone had it in for Coke.

  “Want me to tack her up?” asked Judy, the groom who had always accompanied Coke to the races.

  Dakota nodded. “I don’t know her quirks. She’ll be nervous enough without a stranger saddling her.” But as Judy readied Shameless, the filly was calm, almost aloof.

  After Dakota had mounted Tyke, Judy handed her Shameless’s lead shank. Here goes nothing, she thought, biting her lip. I just hope I don’t end up eating mud pies in the middle of the track. The good ol’ boys would sure have a field day with that.

  She led Shameless to the gap which opened onto the track and started around the dirt oval. Nerves caused Dakota to hold onto the lead too tightly, making Shameless angry. The filly tossed her head and kicked her hind legs out. Dakota gave her more rope. It would be better not to fight her so much. She wanted the filly to walk as calmly as possible.

  Shameless was worlds away from the tame show jumpers Dakota handled back home.

  Everyone was watching her. She could feel it. By now, they knew that Coke McAllister’s daughter was here, with the filly she’d bought back for a ridiculous price at the auction. A lot of them didn’t remember her from ten years ago, and the ones who did probably thought California had softened her up. Dakota knew she was viewed as an outsider, and it rankled her. Wasn’t Black Oak once the premier quarter horse ranch in Arizona? How could they forget? And yet, just from the way they looked at her—as if they were weighing her mentally—she knew any respect her father might have garnered did not apply to her.

  She gritted her teeth, forced herself to sit straighten. Held her head high. Tried to get back into the rhythm, remember how it used to be. They kept toward the outside, staying out of the way of the serious runners.

  Dakota began to regain her confidence as they reached the backstretch. The filly bounced against Tyke’s sturdy side like an overgrown puppy, her mouth on his neck as if he were nothing more than a stick to be fetched. Still kicking her hind legs out, but because she felt good.

  Testing. Looking for weakness.

  As they came around the last turn, Dakota noticed Clay mounted on a horse before the grandstand, staring at the far side of the track. He must be watching one of his horses gallop. When he saw her, he waved, and Dakota lifted her hand slightly. The filly tossed her head in anger.

  Damn, she was strong. “If you can run like you pull, you’ll be all right,” Dakota muttered.

  Just then two horses shot by her like a bullet. The filly jumped sideways, then lunged forward. Dakota could almost hear her arms rip out of their sockets.

  Shameless took off.

  Helplessly, Dakota watched the horse’s bunching hindquarters and felt the sting of dirt clods. Despair gripped her.

  She knew that chasing the filly would only make her run faster.

  She was a witness to a disaster.

  Her eyes registered Clay, only a hundred yards ahead. He wheeled his mount and started down the track—facing the same direction as Shameless—and waited for the filly to come even with him, his right arm outstretched to catch her.

  Dakota saw Shameless head straight for them, at the last minute trying to swerve—

  A crash was inevitable.

  Dakota closed her eyes, preparing for the thud of colliding flesh.

  It never came.

  A kaleidoscope of motion, sound, fragments coming together.

  Dakota’s heart lurched. She couldn’t breathe. The filly shied. Clay’s horse ran alongside her now as he made a grab for her lead.

  And caught it. Already slowing down, already uncertain, Shameless came back to him like a rubber band.

  And then Clay leaped to the ground, holding Shameless as she pivoted around, her eyes wild.

  Thank God! Dakota said, or thought—she wasn’t sure which—as relief doused her in a warm bath. She could feel the freezing trickle of sweat under her arms. Shaking, she managed to slide down from Tyke without falling on her face. She didn’t know how she managed to walk the distance between them.

  The danger over, mortification set in. She could have caused a serious pileup, been responsi
ble for hurt riders, destroyed horses.

  Even now, Dakota knew she faced potential disaster. The filly could be ruined for good.

  Dakota stared at the blur of slender legs, unconsciously expecting to see splintered bone held together only by bloody wraps—the horror of a broken, dangling limb. One misstep on the track, and the filly’s ankle could be shattered. She would then have to be destroyed.

  No blood. The filly was putting her weight down on all four legs. Clay soothed Shameless, rubbing her neck and speaking softly, giving her the time and freedom to calm down.

  “Is she all right?” Dakota asked, feeling like the lowest worm on the face of the earth.

  “Looks like it.”

  She closed her eyes, swallowed. Maybe she’d gotten out of this unscathed. Shaking, she knelt down and felt the filly’s legs.

  “You won’t know until later.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Here.” Clay handed her a cup of black coffee.

  Dakota sat miserably on the wheel well of the Black Oak farm trailer, still shaking. She’d always despised people who gave in to self-pity, but right now she couldn’t help the tears that brimmed in her eyes.

  I’ve ruined her. I know it. I’ve ruined my father’s horse.

  Not only that, but she felt utterly helpless—something else that was completely foreign to her. Clay had done everything. He’d rented a stall, applied cold to the filly’s legs before wrapping them, and all the time Dakota just stood off to the side, like a zombie.

  She was really good in a crisis.

  “We’ll know more later,” he said, sitting beside her.

  Dakota stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. “You have your own horses to deal with.”

  “They’re being seen to,” he said simply.

  “I could have killed—”

  “You didn’t.”

  “The filly could be crippled.”

  “So far so good. She didn’t get far.”

  “Thank God.”

  As she stared unseeingly at the mountains, Clay spoke to her, his words comforting. It happened, he told her. Horses got loose. They hurt themselves and others. She was lucky, everything turned out all right, the jocks who were working those two horses had come too close; it was their fault.

  But Dakota knew better. She hadn’t been able to control her horse. She hadn’t paid attention to her surroundings.

  She’d failed. And suddenly she couldn’t hold the tears back. Clay held her, stroked her back, told her it was all right, and she pressed her face into his shoulder, trying to stifle the sobs that shook her body. The irony was not lost on her. Here was her ex-husband, the man she’d tried to forget, holding her in his arms. And worse, she didn’t have the strength to resist him.

  She might as well admit it: Coke McAllister’s daughter was a—

  “Weenie,” she mumbled.

  “Weenie?” Clay’s voice vibrated against her cheek. “What?”

  “I’m a weenie!”

  Clay laughed. His laughing made her feel better. Suddenly the world didn’t seem so bleak. Before she knew it, Dakota was laughing, too. Out of relief or hysteria, she didn’t know.

  But the fear that Shameless might be ruined for life sobered her up. Real fast. She drew away from Clay, put her head in her hands. “I could have caused a really bad pileup. Everyone here must hate me.”

  “You’re blowing it out of proportion.”

  She glared at him. “You think so? I saw their faces. They expected me to fail.” She swiped at a tear that threatened to drip off the end of her nose. “I can’t believe, after all these years, that they could act that way. I suppose it’s because Coke—Coke . . .” She couldn’t continue.

  “You think most people believed that stuff about Coke?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “You don’t drug your own horse when you know it’s going to show up in a test. You don’t run a horse you know will break down. Not when you have horses that are that good. Everyone knows that Coke couldn’t have changed that much—or gotten that stupid.”

  “Then you believe it, too. That someone was trying to hurt his reputation?”

  “Coke made a lot of enemies. He was responsible for one jockey’s suspension at Los Alamitos. The guy was one of the top money-earning jockeys in the country this year. He’s been suspended for a year, and he’ll probably lose three hundred thousand dollars from missed rides. That’s a conservative estimate. And you’ve already met Tanner. I’ll bet losing his job didn’t go down too well.” Clay took a sip of coffee. “Coke was a good man. He didn’t like to see horses abused, and he spoke up about it. That cost a lot of people a lot of money.”

  Dakota shivered. It wasn’t the cold morning, but the idea that Coke was hated that much.

  And where had she been when he needed help? Of course. Coke was too stubborn to admit he needed someone— anyone.

  Clay stood up. “Will you do me a favor?”

  She nodded. At this moment, she’d do anything for him.

  “I want you to pony Budget Taco for me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What’s the first thing you learn when you get on a horse?” He answered for her. “When you fall, you get back on.”

  “But I might cause an accident.”

  “You won’t. You were getting the hang of it. I saw you. It just happened that you got unlucky.”

  Unlucky. Like Coke.

  “Dakota, if you don’t do this, you’ll never live it down. These guys admire guts. If they sense a weakness, they’ll eat you alive.”

  “I’m getting a trainer.”

  “I’m not talking about training a racehorse. I’m talking about self-respect.”

  That did it. This man had always known which button to push. She stood up. “Where is he?”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “I’m not your girl.”

  “So I’m not politically correct.”

  As they headed for his horses, she said, “What in the hell kind of name is Budget Taco?”

  EIGHT

  Dan Bolin stood in the foyer. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Dakota had come back around noon, still shaken from the filly’s disastrous first outing. She’d called the vet before ponying Budget Taco, but had reached his answering service. After waiting an hour, Dakota decided it would be awhile before he returned her call, so she came back to Black Oak. She knew what to do: apply cold treatments to her legs twice a day, and watch Shameless like a hawk. When Dakota thought about what could have happened . . .

  “Did you hear me?” Dan asked.

  “Sorry, I was thinking of something else.”

  “It’s the vet. We haven’t paid him in a while. Swears he won’t touch another horse until we do.”

  “How much do we owe?”

  “Eight hundred and thirty dollars.”

  She stared at him in disbelief.

  Dan shrugged. “Your dad always budgeted for vet bills, but since he died . . .”

  “I see.” Dakota followed him out to the barn, where Jared Ames, the vet who saw to the Black Oak horses, leaned against his truck, arms folded across his chest. Tall and completely bald, the vet had a perpetually dissatisfied expression, his mouth bracketed by deep grooves. Today, he looked more put out than ever.

  “I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” she said, feeling small.

  “I’ve got bills, too, you know.”

  “I’ll write you a personal check. Will that be all right?”

  “That’ll be fine.” But his sour expression didn’t change.

  After she’d paid him, Ames agreed to drive out to the track and look at Shameless.

  “I thought he was on the staff,” Dakota told Dan, after the vet’s van disappeared down the road.

  “Not for the past couple of years. Things haven’t been going all that well, so Coke had to stop paying him a salary and called him out as needed. Jared took it as a personal insult.”

  Just anoth
er dissatisfied customer in a whole line of them, she thought.

  Even though she knew Dan didn’t like it, Dakota went to his office again and spent a few hours going over the stud farm books. It was difficult to get a handle on the operation.

  When Dakota had asked Dan anything about the day-to-day operation of the ranch, he gave her grudging, piecemeal answers—if he bothered to answer her at all. But as sullen as he was, Dakota felt sorry for him. She’d heard from Alice that his wife needed a heart transplant. That must take a horrendous toll on him. No wonder he resented her moving into his territory. The stud farm was probably the only place where he had control.

  He still hadn’t given her the files. It had become an unspoken battle of wills. Feeling petty, especially in light of Dan’s personal problems, Dakota left a message on his answering machine, asking him to leave the files at the house when he came by for evening feeding. When she returned from getting the mail, she saw them stacked neatly on the side table in the foyer, no note attached. Well, she’d won that one, but it seemed a hollow victory.

  She prepared herself a grilled cheese sandwich and iced tea, then went to her father’s study. The sun had slipped below the horizon, submersing the study in gloom. The answering machine blinked. She played back the message and heard her mother’s cool, disapproving voice, asking her to call back as soon as possible.

  After what happened today with the filly, Dakota didn’t feel like tiptoeing through a verbal minefield with her mother. Eileen Wood hated Black Oak and made her feelings known at every juncture.

  Dakota could imagine what her mother would say about Shameless.

  She glanced at the painting of her father and his favorite racehorse above the mantel. How in God’s name had she gotten into this? It wasn’t as if she wanted to be here.

  But as much as she longed to go home and resume the life she knew, Dakota couldn’t leave yet. She hated loose ends, hated a mess. And this was a huge mess.

  She’d been the one to put the filly in danger; she had to make sure Shameless was all right. After her humiliation today, Dakota wanted a second chance to prove she could handle a racehorse. She was still Coke’s daughter. Even though they hadn’t been close for years, she wouldn’t denigrate his memory by running away. McAllisters didn’t do that.