Dark Horse

by J. Carson Black

  “I understand. You’ve made it all too clear. I hurt you a long time ago, and apparently, you have a memory like an elephant.”

  A void opened up inside her. “All right,” she said quietly. She turned and walked along the rail, putting some distance between them. If he didn’t want their friendship, she had no choice but to accept it.

  She had a lot more to worry about right now. Lifting her binoculars, she tried to concentrate on the filly. Shut him out of your mind, McAllister.

  Shameless cantered calmly beside her pony rider on the backstretch. Dakota wondered what it was about the dark filly, even at this distance, that made her stand out from the others. Some of the colts were bigger, flashier, breedier. They moved just as nicely. And yet Shameless was special in Dakota’s eyes. She supposed that owners everywhere felt that way about their horses.

  The tote board, it seemed, agreed with her. Although Shameless had never run a race, she was the favorite.

  Dakota suddenly felt claustrophobic. What did they say?—the best ones ran their hearts out. They didn’t stop, even when they were injured. Swallowing her fear, Dakota tried not to think about it, but couldn’t block the picture of Blue Kite from her mind. Why not just breed her? Why had she let it get this far? She wanted to leap the rail and run out onto the track, catch up with the jockey and tell her to dismount, there had been a mistake, she was scratching the filly. But she stood rooted to the spot.

  She didn’t know when she became aware that Clay had walked up to stand beside her. She glanced at him out of the comer of her eye. He stared straight ahead at the citron-hued grass, the brown ribbon of track, the voluminous blue sky. At last he spoke. “Want to make a side bet?”

  Relief drenched her. “What kind of bet?”

  “How about the winner buys dinner at the Cowpony?”

  “You’re on.”

  “You want to see the break?”

  She nodded. They jumped into the starter’s truck with the other trainers and were driven to the gate.

  It took an eternity for the horses to load. Dakota stood beside Clay, her mouth dry. His arm touched hers, and she nearly jumped a mile. She imagined her skin was composed of the tiny dots on a snowy TV screen, sensitive to the touch. Her pulse pounded in her ears.

  Just friends, huh?

  Everyone was in line. The gates would crash open at any moment. In fewer than eighteen seconds, the answers to all her questions would be realized.

  “No, no! Not now!” cried an assistant starter. The colt next to Shameless reared up, almost went over backward. The jockey stood up in the gate, like a monkey clinging to a cage. They managed to bring the colt down and straightened him out.

  Shameless faced forward, all four feet planted on the ground, oblivious to the other horse’s antics.

  “Good luck,” Clay whispered in her ear.

  “You, too.”

  The gates banged open to the clamor of the bell, the shouts of the jockeys, the popping of the riding bats.

  From where she stood, the start looked like a fast break of pool balls. The babies broke clumsily, bouncing into each other and running toward both rails. All except Shameless, who broke cleanly and was ahead by a jump. She was long gone by the time the five horse came over and sideswiped the three horse. She headed the field in two jumps, drawing away with that incredible, punishing stride of hers, bashing the ground repeatedly like some motorized miner’s pick gone haywire. She crossed the finish line, ahead by two lengths, her head bowed to her chest. Her only competition had been the tight hold on her mouth.

  Straight Eight came in a respectable third.

  Dakota’s mind went blank. When Clay hugged her, she hugged back, clasping her hands around his neck and returning his kiss. It was a fast kiss, an excited kiss—not sensual at all. He hugged her tightly, picked her up, whirled her around,

  “She did it!” Dakota cried. “I can’t believe it. She did it!”

  He set her down. His mouth crooked into a grin, and his eyes darkened.

  Suddenly, Dakota realized what she’d done. “Clay—”

  “We’d better get you to the winner’s circle.”

  That night, after checking on Shameless and making sure she came out of the race all right, Dakota went with Clay to the Cowpony Bar and Grill. She ordered a Cattleman’s T-bone, medium rare, baked potato and sour cream, and a salad consisting of lettuce, cabbage, carrot shavings, but no tomato. Dakota remembered that Coke had always complained that steak houses never put tomatoes in their salads. Coke had trained a horse for the owner of the Cowpony, and that horse had been named No Tomato as a joke. No Tomato had won the Santa Cruz County Futurity that year.

  Clay and Dakota ordered margaritas and toasted both Shameless and Dangerously.

  They scrupulously avoided talking about what happened at the pool. Clay was friendly and casual, without any apparent trace of regret. She was beginning to wonder if it really mattered to him how close they’d come to making love again. Maybe it wasn’t as important to him as she’d thought. Maybe he’d just given it a shot, on the off chance that she’d fall for it

  He drove her home right after dinner. He didn’t even try to kiss her. Again, Dakota felt disappointed. This was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? His friendship. A platonic companion without risk.

  But maybe the risk had been there all along.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Dakota swam up out of a deep sleep to the shrilling of the phone. Trying to shake free of the clouds, she remembered with a thrill that the filly had won the Futurity trials.

  She answered on the fourth ring. The panic in Lucy’s tone slammed her into consciousness. “It’s Shameless.”

  Dakota’s fingers tightened on the receiver, and she closed her eyes, trying to hear over the sledgehammer of her heart, wanting more than anything in the world not to hear. Because she knew what Lucy would say next. The words materialized in the air around her like a swarm of angry bees. She’s dead.

  “Someone’s been poking around her stall!”

  The phone slipped from Dakota’s ear as she opened her eyes to pounding blackness. Safe. Shameless was safe. Her voice found purchase. “Stay there. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” She thrust the bedclothes aside. Her relief was short-lived as she realized the crisis wasn’t over. Cold, gelid fingers of dread clutched her insides. Dakota pulled her jeans on over the shirt she slept in and put on her running shoes. She grabbed her keys and ran for the door.

  It was more like fifteen minutes by the time she reached the stable gate. She asked the guard who let her through if anyone had come out in a hurry. “No, ma’am. It’s been quiet tonight.”

  She told him what had happened and asked him to keep anyone at the gate until she found out what was going on.

  Dakota drove up to the stall, her headlights sweeping the barn. Lucy was there, pacing back and forth and hugging herself, rubbing her arms to keep away the chill. Ernesto had put a halter on Shameless and was leading her around, letting her pick at the weeds lining the shedrow. When he saw Dakota, he ducked his head in shame.

  “What happened?”

  Lucy seemed close to hyperventilating. “Dad was at the Steak Out and I had to bring him a message, and on the way back I decided to look in on Shameless, and when I got here I saw this man leaning over her stall, and he saw me and took off. I knocked on the trailer, but Ernesto wasn’t there, and I didn’t know what to do!”

  “Calm down,” Dakota said, although she herself was far from calm. “What did he look like?”

  Lucy shook her head. “I didn’t get a real good look, but he was big. Tall.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was standing at her stall, and then he saw me and he walked away real fast. He was holding a coffee can, like we use for grain? He was carrying the can, and I thought that was weird, so I yelled at him to stop, but he just kept on going.”

  Dakota’s heart lurched. Had someone tried to poison Shameless? She opened the stall door and shined her flashl
ight on the grain tub. It was clean, as usual—the filly always cleaned up her grain—except for a few crumpled-up green leaves stuck to the bottom.

  They shouldn’t be there.

  Dakota lifted one of them out of the tub and looked at it in the security light fixed on the roof at the end of the shedrow. The jigsaw piece of leaf was smooth and dark green, its leathery, cushioned surface silvered by the light. She had little doubt it was oleander, which was toxic to horses.

  She looked at Shameless, who was taking advantage of her night out and grazing, pulling Ernesto along behind her as she sought out the best tufts of grass.

  How long before the poison worked? Had the filly eaten any of it, or had Lucy caught her in time?

  “Was the filly eating when you came up?” she demanded.

  “No. I put a halter on her right away and led her out. I didn’t know what he did, but I thought maybe—because of the coffee can and all—he put something in her tub. Then Ernesto showed up and I handed her to him, got to a pay phone, and called you.”

  “Good.” Relief vied with the adrenaline rushing through her system. She turned to Ernesto and, in her broken Spanish, asked where he’d been. He motioned toward the trailer.

  One of them was mistaken. “Are you sure he wasn’t in the trailer?” Dakota asked Lucy.

  “He didn’t answer my knock. You’re not mad at him, are you? I’m sure he’s usually here.”

  She sighed. “No, I’m not mad at him.” Disappointed, yes. She’d thought he was so gung-ho about looking after Shameless, but he’d let her down when it counted. It was hard to believe she’d been wrong in her assessment of him.

  Dakota crouched down beside the stall. Maybe some of the stray leaves had fallen on the ground, inside or out. Her light played over the dirt, which was liberally sprinkled with hay and sawdust. It would be impossible to find the stuff. The whole stall would have to be cleaned out down to the dirt, and the sawdust replaced. Suddenly, she was aware that all of them had trampled the entrance to the stall, obliterating any footprints that might have belonged to the intruder.

  She stood up, strode to her truck, and dialed the car phone. It was time to call the sheriff. As she waited, Dakota started to shake. She was still shaking when he arrived.

  “He was tall?” asked Derek Blue.

  “Real tall,” Lucy said. “Maybe six foot three. And he had broad shoulders.”

  “You said he wore jeans. You notice anything else?”

  “He was wearing boots.”

  “What kind of shirt? Can you remember the color?”

  “I think it was blue. Light blue. It was a western shirt, you know, with snap buttons. But I couldn’t swear to that. I think it was blue. Could have been the light, though.” She nodded to the light at the end of the barn. “But I’m sure of the cowboy hat. It was black.”

  “Were the jeans new or old?”

  ‘They looked new. Dark navy, not faded at all. And he had on a belt, with a big silver buckle. Oval. I remember that because it caught the light when he turned around.”

  “You have quite a memory.”

  Lucy smiled, looking proud of herself.

  “Do you know of anyone around the track who looks like that?” Derek Blue asked Dakota.

  “The clothes are pretty typical. I guess the only thing that stands out is the height, and I’ve seen a lot of tall men around here.” Even Clay might fit the description, if you fudged the height a little. And Dan Bolin must be six-three at least. He was broad-shouldered. But she couldn’t imagine why he’d want to hurt Shameless. He didn’t even have a license to get on the backside.

  “Anything else?” Blue asked Lucy.

  She squinted, as if that would help her remember, “His hair could have been dark blond or brown. I only saw him for a second, and the hat hid his face.” She turned to Dakota. “You won’t fire Ernesto, will you? I’m sure he had a good reason for not being here.”

  “No, I won’t fire Ernesto.”

  “Good. He’s really torn up about it.”

  “We all are,” Dakota replied.

  “I guess that’s it.” Derek Blue put a foot on the bumper of his Bronco and wrote something on his pad. “I called the gate man. No one of that description has tried to drive out. But anybody could get over the fence around here.” He motioned to the barbed wire that loosely surrounded the racetrack grounds.

  “Aren’t you going to dust for fingerprints?” Dakota asked.

  “I don’t think it’s necessary. Fingerprints only work when you have someone in custody.”

  “Everyone at the track is fingerprinted. Wouldn’t it be worth a shot?”

  “I suppose we could take some, but I don’t know that the racing association would let us—”

  “I don’t think it’ll work,” Lucy said. “I just remembered. He was wearing gloves.”

  “Work gloves?”

  “I think so.”

  Blue shrugged. “I guess that’s that.”

  The filly was back in her clean stall by two thirty in the morning, and Dakota drove out the security gate, feeling as limp as a wrung-out dishrag.

  She reached for the car phone, retracted her hand. It was late, and there was really no reason to wake Clay. The crisis was over, and she didn’t want him thinking she had to rely on him for comfort.

  As she pulled into the yard at Black Oak, her mind kept returning to Lucy’s description of the intruder. It could have been Dan Bolin, although that didn’t make sense. He had enough worries without trying to sabotage a racehorse.

  Suddenly, she remembered Rita’s man Friday, Mario. Any woman who would offer a million dollars for an unraced horse might be unstable enough to do something like this, just to get rid of Dakota.

  If Shameless died, Dakota would go back to LA, leaving Rita a clear field.

  The woman was obsessed with Clay.

  As Dakota jumped down from the truck, she saw headlights bouncing down the dirt road from the direction of Dan’s house. She decided to wait for him.

  “What are you doing up at this hour?” he asked, his voice brusque.

  Dakota told him what happened, watching his face. He had about as much expression as a cigar store Indian. “Lucky your girl was there,” was all he said. He headed for the broodmare barn.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Mare’s about to foal. I set my alarm for three.”

  The mare was already in labor when they reached the box stall. Dan liked to leave the mares alone if they were doing all right; the less interference, the better. But he was always there in case there was trouble.

  Within half an hour, a nose and two tiny dark hoofs appeared, and Dan took the legs in his hands and tugged gently along with the mare’s contractions. The neck and shoulders appeared. The mare heaved one more time and the foal spilled onto the straw.

  He looked as if he had been shrink-wrapped. Although the milky, bluish membrane covered him from head to toe, Dakota could tell he was a dark bay. Dan wiped away the membrane and cleared the little tyke’s nostrils, positioning him close to his mama’s head. The mare swiped at the foal’s wet coat with her tongue, making him look a little less like a clump of seaweed.

  “He looks like his daddy,” Dan said, “except for that star and strip down his nose.” He cut the umbilical cord and hovered as the foal attempted to rise, only minutes after his birth. The stilt-like legs stretched out straight ahead, bending slightly as the little guy’s soft hoofs gained purchase. He almost made it, his front legs quivering with effort, but slid back down to sit on his hindquarters. He looked around, big brown eyes a study in comic surprise. The look on his face said, “What do I do now?”

  The mare, standing now, neighed encouragement and butted him in the back.

  He rested a moment, got his second wind, and hoisted himself to his feet. He took one tottering step, then another, before falling back down in a bundle of knobby knees and ramshackle legs.

  “Ought to name him South,” Dakota said.

&nb
sp; “Huh?”

  “The South will rise again.”

  Dan was not amused. When the colt made it up this time, Dan guided him with big gentle hands to his mother’s teat. The baby caught on quickly, nuzzling and sucking noisily, his little tail flicking from side to side.

  Dan looked for all the world like a proud papa. Her own spirits soaring, Dakota caught his eye and grinned.

  His smile lost its warmth like fast food left too long under a lamp.

  He wasn’t going to let her forget his resentment of her for a minute. But nothing could spoil the fact that Dakota had witnessed this remarkable miracle or that Dan’s heartstrings could be plucked, too.

  She went to bed with the image of the newborn foal still in her mind.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Dakota awoke at ten. Still groggy, she walked out to get the newspaper. She started back toward the house, sifting through it for the sports section. A separate sheet of paper floated down onto the grass. Typed across the top of it were the words: try and try again. Startled, Dakota dropped the newspaper.

  Beneath the “try and try again” was a typed list of five names: Tulie Queen. Thrilled with Yawl. Mr. Texas Twister. Blue Kite. Shameless.

  With shaking fingers, she picked up the note and stared at it. Blue Kite, she knew. The photograph was still vivid in her memory: a wild-eyed colt running on three legs.

  Her father kept a ledger that listed his racehorses in alphabetical order. Dakota went to the house, pulled the ledger from the shelf and threw it on his desk, the force causing the front cover to smack the tabletop hard. Dry-mouthed, she found the name Mr. Texas Twister. Her worst fears were confirmed: he’d fractured a sesamoid bone at Turf Paradise during a work and had to be destroyed. It had happened last year, after the accidents started.

  Dakota snapped the pages forward.

  Thrilled with Yawl, Tulie Queen, Blue Kite, Mr. Texas Twister. All of them dead. Two from broken legs, one from a heart attack, and one from colic. Every one of them had died within the last year, except for Blue Kite.