Dark Horse

by J. Carson Black

  Although she ran Shameless as little as possible, Dakota had to work her to keep her sharp, and there was no hiding the filly’s speed.

  She worried every time Ernesto asked Shameless for more than just a gallop. The filly’s legs seemed fine, and she came back feeling good, but Dakota was always on edge, waiting for something to happen. Shameless ran so hard, and Dakota worried that something was going on under the surface she couldn’t see, and so she spent more money she didn’t have on ultrasound tests. Even though the filly’s legs appeared normal, she couldn’t relax. There might be stress fractures too tiny to detect, but potentially crippling. There was no way to be absolutely sure.

  The Rainbow Futurity trials would be run in late June. Dakota concentrated on keeping her fit. Shameless was happy and eager to run. Her attitude was the best indication of soundness.

  Dakota was cleaning the filly’s stall one morning when Clay came up and leaned on the open stall door. “When’s Shameless due for her work?”

  Dakota tried to ignore the pounding of her heart. She couldn’t look at him, so she concentrated on her work. “Sunday morning.”

  “I have a colt who needs to work in company. Would you send her out with him?”

  “You have a lot of horses. Why don’t you use one of them?”

  “He’s got a lot of talent, and I want to see what he does if he’s really pushed.”

  “Clay, I—”

  “I know what you’re going to say. You’d rather not.” He stepped into the stall and took the pitchfork from her hands. “Don’t you think you’re being too hard on yourself?”

  He didn’t appear to be laughing. Or gloating. But her face burned as she remembered what happened her first night in Ruidoso. The worst thing was that she couldn’t remember everything she’d said . . . or done. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She reached for her pitchfork. “Couldn’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Not until you tell me what goes on in that crazy head of yours.” His were dark, stormy, like the ocean at midnight. “Do you think you’re the only person in the world who feels anything? You had too much to drink that night, you think you made a fool of yourself, so you punish me.”

  “Punish you? You’re the one who—”

  “Who what?”

  She grabbed the pitchfork away from him and stabbed at the bedding angrily. “Never mind.”

  “Turned you down?” His voice was quiet.

  She glared at him. “How do I know you turned me down? I only have your word for it.”

  “You really think that?”

  “You hurt me before.”

  “Here we go again. I destroyed our marriage, I left you heartbroken, I came back into your life and tried to pull the same thing again. When are you going to face your own part in it?”

  A stray lock of hair fell into her eyes, and she swiped it away, feeling grubby. “I know it wasn’t all your fault.”

  “Do you think I really care that you drank too much wine one night and told me how you really felt?”

  She couldn’t face the humiliation. Couldn’t face him. She pushed past him into the blinding sunlight.

  Clay didn’t follow her. “The truth is, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me at all.”

  Dakota pulled her gloves from her jeans and put them on, grabbed the handles on the wheelbarrow. She didn’t dare speak.

  “For Christ’s sake. You’re only human.”

  “Only human? For throwing myself at you? I guess I’m no exception,” she said bitterly.

  He ignored the barb. “I miss you, McAllister.”

  She couldn’t move. Just stood there, her hands on the wooden handles of the wheelbarrow, her heart pounding. His words echoed in her mind. I miss you, McAllister.

  She realized then that this problem was not going to go away. There were too many unresolved feelings on both sides. She couldn’t ignore it anymore. They had to work this out, or she would go crazy.

  “If you want to see me, I’m at Barn Fifteen.” He strode past her.

  “I do,” she said under her breath. Why pretend she didn’t? She wasn’t fooling anyone.

  “You still like fly-fishing?”

  She nodded.

  “How about we go out for an hour or so after evening feeding?”

  Dakota swallowed. “Okay.”

  They fly-fished in the Rio Ruidoso below Dakota’s cabin. They didn’t talk about what had happened, and after a short period of awkwardness, slipped back into that easy companionship Dakota was beginning to realize was a part of her life, whether she’d planned for it or not.

  It was on that evening that Dakota faced what she’d known instinctively for months: Clay was a man she could trust. He wasn’t the boy she’d once known.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The night before the Rainbow Futurity trials, Dakota was too wound up to sleep. She and Clay had gone to the Inn Credible for dinner and then to a movie. He’d left her at the door with a kiss that had set her blood humming. For a moment, she had been tempted to ask him in, but her head won over her body. This time.

  Now she wished she hadn’t been so demure. The pleasant ache his kiss elicited had deepened to an almost unbearable intensity, keeping her awake.

  It was one in the morning, and she was in heat. She gave up any pretense of trying to sleep, got up, and padded through the cabin in her bare feet. Refrigerator hopped down from the bed and followed her. She poured some milk for the cat and heated the rest for herself. Turning on the light in the tiny living room, she picked up her father’s journal and sat down on the couch. Refrigerator curled up in a neat ball on her lap, the thrumming of her motor reverberating against Dakota’s thighs. Affirmed, lying near Alydar beside the fireplace, lifted his head sleepily and thumped his tail once against the floor. Alydar sighed in his sleep.

  Dakota leafed through the entries, restless and aching with bittersweet desire. The words blurred before her eyes, not making much sense:

  Tanner came by today. Told me I’d better stop talking about him, or he’d sue me for slander.

  Refrigerator shifted on her lap and dug her claws in. Yelping, Dakota pulled her terry cloth robe back over her bare flesh so the cat would have a pincushion. She didn’t want to think about Tanner, so she turned the pages until she came to an entry concerning Shameless.

  I let the filly run today for the first time. Man, she’s got it.

  Dakota’s mind kept wandering to Clay. Would it have been so wrong to ask him in? She turned the pages, skimmed the journal. Dan’s away . . .

  Dan’s away for two weeks and everything falls apart. Like the last time, when Judgment was ready to be bred and I couldn’t find a drop of Something Wicked’s semen anywhere! I took matters into my own hands that time and look how it turned out . . .

  Her eyelids grew heavier.

  Had to send that kid back twice to find him. Imagine that, not being able to find Black Oak’s top stud!

  Dakota caught herself dozing off. She was half horny and half sleepy. It was increasingly difficult to concentrate.

  . . . There was a partial eclipse, like the gods were trying to tell me something.

  She’d read this before. Setting the journal down, Dakota turned out the light, gently spilled the cat onto the couch and stood up. A cool breeze flirted with the curtains at the open window; she could hear it way up in the pine tops, a soft exhalation.

  Like silk rasping against flesh. Dakota touched the lace edge of her pink teddy, envisioning Clay’s hand on her thigh. She pictured him standing outside her window, serenading her with a guitar. She’d open the window and call to him, and he’d climb in just like Romeo . . . on an impulse, she pulled one of the curtains back and peered out.

  A hooded figure stood in the clearing, looking right up at her.

  Reflexively, her hand shot back, letting the curtain drop away. Shocked, violently awake now, she sat down on the couch, crushing Refrigerator’s tail. Th
e cat yowled, scaring her even more, and jumped to the floor.

  Panic sailed through her, gaining height like a kite in a high wind, crashing into her throat. Someone was watching her! He’d looked up into her window, perhaps seeing her shape behind the thin, cotton curtains.

  Her heart scrambled in her chest. How naive to think she’d left it all behind—that a few hundred miles could make a difference to whomever had been terrorizing her!

  She stood up again, hugging herself. It was suddenly freezing in here.

  She tried to recapture the fleeting image in her mind’s eye. Medium height? Weight? She thought so. His hands had been in his pockets, she thought. The hood could have been from a jacket.

  He might still be there.

  Dakota crept back to the window. Slowly, she eased the right curtain away from its mate. She told herself that the watcher couldn’t see her, since the light was out. There was just enough of a slit to see through.

  The figure was gone. All that remained was the moonlit yard, the vertical black stripes of pine trunks and tall grass.

  It was almost as if she’d imagined it.

  She couldn’t believe this was happening, on the night before the Futurity trials. But it did make some kind of sense. Shameless had nearly been poisoned a few days before the Santa Cruz County Futurity.

  The filly.

  Blood pounding in her ears, she picked up the phone and called Ernesto.

  THIRTY

  The day of the Rainbow Futurity trials dawned rainy and cold.

  Shaken from her encounter at the cabin, Dakota had stayed up until three o’clock in the morning, when she could no longer keep her eyes open. She’d seen the cold front come in, heard the first spatters of rain on the window that would soon turn to a steady downpour.

  When the alarm awoke her at five, she dragged herself out of sleep like a losing prize fighter standing up for the last round. Fueling up on coffee, she gazed in despair at the rain pouring off the rainspout outside in a waterfall. She tried to swallow down her anxiety along with the coffee, but it remained in her throat like a knot. Rain meant a muddy track, a dangerous track. She’d planned to put bandages on the filly’s legs for today’s race, but that was shot now. Mud could pull the bandages off and cause the filly to trip and fall.

  Blotting out visions of tragedy, Dakota dressed hurriedly in jeans, shirt, and jacket. She’d come back and changed around noon, since the filly’s race would be later in the day.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about the figure outside her window. Maybe she’d imagined it. It could have been the tree trunks, the way the moonlight hit them—

  But she didn’t really believe that.

  She wouldn’t tell Clay now, not before the races. He had enough to think about.

  Clay’s colt, Straight Eight, would be running in the first trial for the Rainbow Futurity. As Dakota watched his deft preparations, she tried to stem her nervousness.

  Who would want to watch her? Her mind whirled with questions as she drove to the grandstand to watch Straight Eight’s race.

  Over a hundred and fifty horses were set to run in the sixteen Futurity trials. The horses with the ten fastest times would move on to the Rainbow.

  The first race set the tone. As the horses passed the finish line, one of them faltered, his leg snapping right in front of the grandstand.

  It wasn’t Straight Eight, thank God. But someone owned him, someone loved him. Dakota stood up, made her way through the crush to the restroom, and vomited. On the way back, she seriously thought of running over to the racing office and trying to scratch Shameless.

  She couldn’t do it. She remembered how the filly looked this morning. Shameless had known something was up, and there had been a quality to her that Dakota had never before seen in any of her dad’s racehorses. It was electric—that keen, edgy quality only barely contained, that said: I can do this. Dakota could swear to that. Like a soldier who hears the trumpet call, Shameless had already girded her loins for battle.

  It was that knowledge that set Shameless apart from other horses. Horses sensed when they were going to race, they got excited. But with Shameless, it was more than that. After only two races, this filly knew what her job was and approached it as a professional. Dakota sensed that keeping the filly from doing her job might destroy her, as surely as a broken leg would do.

  She might be fooling herself, but that was the way she felt.

  “I’m not made for this,” she muttered, sitting down at her table in the Turf Club. Her stomach tightened as she watched each race, expecting the worst. Clay joined her, his own expression guardedly optimistic. “His time was slow,” he said, in answer to her questioning gaze. “At least he came back all right. That’s the main thing.”

  “Why do people do this to themselves?” Dakota demanded. “There’s so much damn risk, and so little reward. Most of those stables out there won’t break even, and they’re just setting themselves up for heartache. We’re running for the big money, but think about all those people who run their horses in claiming races, who never have a good horse. They can lose their animal anytime. Or come back with an empty halter. And for what? A couple of thousand dollars that wouldn’t pay for feed and vet bills? It’s like the jockeys. Thirty-five bucks a ride to risk your life, maybe end up paralyzed for the rest of their lives!”

  “They can’t help it. It’s in the blood.”

  “Like my father,” Dakota said bitterly.

  “Like your father.” Clay caught her gaze, his own eyes knowing. “Don’t be too hard on him. That’s the siren call of the racehorse business. It’s older than God. My horse can beat your horse. The need to prove it is irresistible.”

  “It’s nerve-wracking, is what it is.”

  He grinned. “You’ve been bitten by the bug.”

  “I guess so,” she said gloomily. “I guess that’s why I feel like I’ve got malaria.”

  Clay smoothed out the race program. “You ready to see Runaway Train in action?”

  “Shameless can beat him,” Dakota said automatically, then heard what she’d said and laughed.

  “He’s undefeated.”

  “So is Shameless.” But she knew that the gray colt was trained by one of the top trainers in the business, and he had been running against the finest quarter horses in the nation. Shameless was still untested. Runaway Train had won the Ruidoso Futurity, the first leg of the triple crown—the race she passed up for the less intimidating Santa Cruz County Futurity. Not for the first time did she wonder if she’d gotten in over her head. How would Shameless have fared against Runaway Train in the Ruidoso? She’d never know.

  ‘That’s the horse that’ll win the Rainbow,” the man at the next table said to his wife.

  Clay handed her the binoculars. “Look at him. He ought to be in a painting.”

  Dakota had to agree. Runaway Train was slate gray, with a tail that started out almost black and ended up purest white. He was well muscled and mature for his age with a springy step and a mind set on business.

  He won his race easily, in the fastest time so far, despite the greasy, muddy track conditions and the blurring rain. Dakota stared gloomily at the track, trying to smother the dread that crept up like a rising water level in her chest. “I’d better go home and get ready.”

  “I guess that’s it.” She checked the girth one last time. The rain hadn’t let up all morning. They stood under the overhang in the saddling paddock, waiting for the harrow to finish going over the track. The post parade had been scrapped because of the rain. The horses would go directly to the gate. There would be no time to warm up, which added to Dakota’s nervousness. The wait was interminable, although Shameless stood as still as a statue. Only Dakota could feel the restrained power underneath the gleaming coat.

  The paddock at Ruidoso resembled a circular courtyard. The saddling enclosure, divided into ten open-ended stalls facing the stands, made up half the circle. One or two horses trampled the radius in the rain, already too hyped
up to stand quietly. The rain fell on the round terrace of flowers and brick in the center, where proud owners usually gathered to see their horses saddled. No one was there today.

  The paddock identifier raised his hand. The first horse lunged out of his stall as the jockey swung aboard, followed by the two horse. Dakota had drawn the number eight post position—closest to the yelling crowds, which might serve as a distraction. But she was glad they hadn’t drawn the inside rail, which looked like soup. She handed Shameless to Ernesto and walked to the end of the shed to get Tyke.

  As Dakota led the filly down the track, she tried to calm herself. It would all be over in the space of a few seconds.

  Four hundred yards, that was all. She prayed like crazy, from the foxhole of her own making. Please, please, please, God, let Shameless get through this all right. I don’t care if she wins, I don’t care if she comes in last, but please let her come out of it all right.

  Tyke lost his footing and nearly went down, sending Dakota’s heart into her mouth. The filly had mud caulks on her shoes, but it wasn’t slipping that Dakota was worried about. Shameless’s punishing stride dug deep into a track, and moving all that extra real estate would add to the stress on those fragile legs.

  Dakota saw Clay ahead, ponying his colt Dangerously. She wished she could talk to him. He would know just what to say.

  They reached the gate, walking in a circle as they waited to load. Right before she handed the filly to the gate man, Dakota whispered in the dark ear, “Go with God.”

  Then she rode her horse over to Clay to watch the break.

  The gates clattered open and Shameless took off like a rocket. For a moment Dakota couldn’t see any leader in the surging tide of horseflesh, especially from where she sat Tyke behind the gate. She could barely hear the loudspeaker, but thought she could hear the word “Shameless.”