Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mystery series) (7 page)

"If I do start seeing you, what about your wife?"

Lonny's face looked sad. "I don't know. It's a problem. I can't seem to make up my mind to get the divorce. She owns half of everything-this place, my business. I can hardly stand to let it all go."

"Is that the only reason you're not divorced?" I asked gently.

"I'm not sure. We weren't happy for a long time. Eventually she found a boyfriend and moved out. I used to want her back. Hurt pride, mostly, I think." He gave me a rueful smile. "It's been a long two years."

I nodded understandingly. I sympathized with what he was saying, but I still couldn't help wondering if financial ties were all he had to his wife. No two ways about it; a man with a wife was not a good bet.

Disentangling myself gently, I stood up.

"So it's no go." Lonny was still sitting on the couch, looking up at me.

"No, not necessarily. I just need to think about it." His eyes were looking straight into mine. They were greenish eyes, direct and intent, the most honest-looking eyes I'd ever seen in a man. "I want you, Gail, more than I can remember wanting a woman. I want to love you."

The look that passed between us then was charged enough to ignite wood, let alone flesh. It might have, too, except that a cat exploded into Lonny's lap. That's what it looked like, anyway. A big pinkish beige cat erupted from somewhere, leaping into and then out of Lonny's lap, and fizzed and bounced around the room like an incautiously opened champagne bottle, batting at imaginary opponents, the pupils of his eyes black and quarter-sized.

"I know. But it'd better wait. At least for a while." I bent down, kissed him lightly on the lips, and headed for the door. Halfway there I stopped to pet the cat, who bumped against my leg. "Thanks, buddy. I never would have made it without you."

Lonny was still laughing as I shut the door behind me.

Chapter SIX

At 6:00 A.M. the next morning I was dressing for the cutting. Acid-washed Wrangler jeans, a loose deep blue T-shirt with a row of little buttons that could be left open at the throat, and my newest cowboy boots, lace-up packers in a gunmetal gray. Studying myself in the mirror, I felt satisfied. The T-shirt made my eyes look bluer than usual, and my figure was trim in the jeans. Hoo-aw, as Casey would say.

Upstairs I found that Bret was already awake; maybe he'd never gone to sleep. He certainly hadn't been back when I'd gotten home. He hadn't dressed up for the cutting, I noticed, his faded jeans and once-bright-red, now-dark-pink polo shirt had seen better days. Despite being slightly bedraggled, he was still handsome. His olive skin and Italian good looks seemed enhanced by old, scruffy clothes, rather than the reverse.

As I made coffee in the kitchen I wondered briefly why Bret held no sexual attraction for me. Too much familiarity, maybe? The certain knowledge that he was of the "love 'ern and leave 'ern" school, and I had no particular desire to be loved and left. Either way, I thought, as I handed him a cup of coffee and smiled at his sleepy expression, looks weren't the answer. Bret had looks to satisfy the most discriminating.

Driving over the coastal hills that separate the Monterey Bay from the Central Valley, Bret and I were both quiet-the comfortable silence of long acquaintance. My mind was on Lonny-what I wanted from him, what I didn't want. The whole issue was confusing me, I had to admit. If I didn't want Lonny, did I want anybody in my life? And if I did want Lonny, did I want to deal with the question of a not-yet-ex-wife?

Shaking my head, as if I could brush away these frustrating problems like gnats, I took in the sunny morning and the bright yellow-gold grassy hills that rolled and tumbled away before us to the valley floor. Everything was open space and blue sky. I sucked in a deep breath and smiled, and Bret met my eyes and smiled back. What the hell, I thought, what the hell. It was good to be alive.

Highway 152 wound its way out of the coastal hills and down to the valley as the fall sunshine warmed up the morning air, softening the sharp acid green of the alfalfa fields, gentling the gray and dusty junkyards, brushing the flat, loud billboards, and tinting the rusting travel trailers and sagging shacks a mellower shade. California's Central Valley slipped by outside the windows of the pickup, looking as good as it ever did.

I'd lived for five years in the Valley when I was doing my graduate work at U.C. Davis, and I knew its moods. Oven-like in the summer, cold and clammy with tuley fog in the winter, often windy in the spring-a soft, sunny day like this one was exceptional good fortune. Even so, I liked the Valley; it wasn't pretty by anybody's standards, particularly those of someone born and raised in a coastal town like Santa Cruz, but to me it felt familiar and comfortable.

I understood the point behind the alfalfa fields, the grain towers, the Holstein cattle, the almond orchards, the car graveyards. The good straight roads ran like rulers, the towns were bare and simple, and if there wasn't beauty, there was, at least, sense.

An hour later, we were chugging sedately down the palm-tree-lined main street of Los Borregos, a typical Valley town with a slightly shabby, left-behind-in-the-fifties air, and took the turnoff to the fairgrounds where the cutting was to be held.

The truck bumped down a dirty entry road and I pulled into a field that was a parking lot for the day. Trucks and trailers in all colors and sizes were parked every which way on the mowed grass, and horses were everywhere-tied to trailers, nickering to their companions, being ridden at a fast trot toward the arena, led by men and women whose spurs went clink, clink, clink with every step. The men were mostly clean-shaven, their hair short and neat under cowboy hats, their jeans pressed and their shirts crisp. The women wore cowboy hats, too; they mingled with the men indistinguishably, as equals, their waists cinched tight by trophy buckles as large as those of their male counterparts. The whole scene was full of movement, shouted greetings, the thud of hooves on grass, the jingle of bits and spurs. In the bright morning air, it felt like an old-time circus setting up in a field.

Getting out of the truck, we threaded our way through the parked rigs and the loping horses, keeping an eye out for Casey and Melissa. Bret said hi to several cowboys.

"Don't you miss being a part of this?" I asked him, gesturing at the sunny jumble of horses and people.

"Sometimes. It's a lot of work, though. You're just looking at the fun part; you're not seeing all those 5:00 A.M. mornings when your hands and feet get numb, galloping horses in the fog, all those evenings you're so sore it's hard to get to sleep." He grinned. "Taking it all in all, I don't miss it much."

His glance roved through the crowd. "There's Melissa," he pointed.

Sure enough, Melissa was walking toward us, looking like a cowboy's dream in a tight, satiny pink blouse that emphasized her large breasts, a belt with a huge silver buckle around her waist. With her blonde hair curling and frothing around her face and her eyes outlined in several interesting colors, she was a Barbie doll come to life. Not for the first time I wondered why she chose to present herself as a cheap toy; she seemed to have more on the ball than that.

"Hi." Melissa gave us a welcoming smile, and Bret grinned back at her with his guaranteed-to-devastate-'em version.

"Casey's saddling the horses up," Melissa said, specifically to me, though her eyes drifted to Bret. "We're parked over there." She waved a hand at a long aluminum trailer where Casey could be seen swinging a saddle up on a sorrel horse. "I'm on my way for coffee."

Will George proved to be a stocky man in his late fifties with silver gray hair, bright blue eyes and a still-handsome face. He was riding a shiny gold, buckskin stud horse and talking with some men riding next to him; he looked an unlikely villain to me-in fact, he looked disarmingly unlike whatever I had supposed a hotshot national champion trainer to be.

"He's the big deal in the business?" I said curiously to Bret. "He just looks like another cowboy."

Bret smiled. "That's his style. He never goes in for a lot of fancy silver on his saddle, or fancy clothes. But he's a big deal, all right. He's won the West Coast Futurity four times in the last eight years. He's the name in the cutting horse business."

I studied Will George some more as he rode by us. You could see it, if you looked carefully. It was in the way his eyes surveyed the cutting calmly, as if the whole thing belonged to him, in the way the other men seemed to defer to him when he spoke. He was the king.

He was a good-looking old fart, too, I reflected. I wondered what kind of vibes would be in the air if he, Melissa and Casey all came face-to-face.

A youngish trainer with all the silver on his saddle Will George lacked reined a gray mare away from the group around Will and rode up to us. "Well, I'll be damned. Bret Boncantini. You here to ask for your job back?"

Bret grinned. "About the time hell freezes over, Jay."

The man who spoke was around Bret's age-late twenties-and had pale, almost colorless blond hair under his cowboy hat and light-colored eyes with an inner hardness at variance with the smile on his angular, fair-skinned face. Laughing, he spurred the gray mare hard in the belly and galloped off, war-whooping at a woman trying to control a fractious bay colt nearby. "Stay with him, honey, stay with him," he hollered.

"That's Jay Holley," Bret explained, "the guy I worked for in Salinas. Don't let him fool you with that goofball routine." He gestured at Jay, who was spurring the gray mare hard enough to cause her to hump her back and crowhop while he fanned her with his chaps, entertaining the crowd. "He's a tough hand, as good as they get. He likes to clown around-it's his routine-but he's dead serious about winning. He went to work for Will George when he was sixteen, started training on his own five years ago, and he's been doing real well. Will more or less sponsored him; everyone calls him Will's protege. He was a son of a bitch to work for, though."

"Why, he make you actually do something?"

Bret grinned. "Not when I could help it."

By the time we reached the trailer, Casey had already swung up on a little blue roan mare that I recognized as Shiloh, and I stopped to admire the picture they made.

Shiloh was a pretty horse, fine-boned and graceful with a dainty head, and her steely blue-gray color was complemented perfectly by Casey's black chaps and hat. He also wore a bright red shirt and a large glittering trophy buckle, and Shiloh's woven saddle blanket was in shades of gray and black with a red stripe running through it. Her saddle was decorated with a few small silver conchos-enough to look dressy, not flashy.

"Lookin' good." I smiled up at Casey. "We've come to watch you win."

"Hope to." Casey's expression was serious. "I damn sure hope to." His gaze drifted through the horses and riders, checking out his known rivals, sizing up the competition. "Better warm this mare up," he said abruptly, wheeling on the words and trotting away.

Bret's lips twitched as we watched him. "That god-damned Casey is such a go-getter." Bret sounded amused; being a go-getter had never been one of his failings.

Watching Casey lope Shiloh around the warm-up ring, I felt a faint anticipatory tingle in my stomach, a mere shadow, I realized, of what the riders on the cutting horses must be feeling. I wished suddenly that I were out there on Gunner, getting ready to show him in competition. Maybe someday, I told myself.

Casey's face was still, almost somber, under his black felt hat as he loped; his attitude seemed businesslike and concentrated. I wondered how much inward pain was concealed under that quiet exterior; surely he couldn't be entirely healed from yesterday's fall.

Melissa had returned, carrying two cups of coffee, and was standing next to me. "Casey took off, as usual," she muttered. "Anybody want this coffee?" Her eyes moved to Casey as she spoke, and I saw her face stiffen suddenly. "Oh, no," she breathed, "Martha Welch."

I looked where she was looking and saw a middle-aged woman march into the ring and step directly in Shiloh's path. Without any hesitation she grabbed at the roan mare's bridle, caught it, and jerked the horse to a stop.

The mare's head flew up in the air, Casey, startled, yelled, "What the hell?" and the woman snapped, loud enough that most people in the ring could hear, "God dammit, Casey Brooks, you've gone too far."

Chapter SEVEN

Martha Welch was tall and fit and aggressively made-up, with fire-engine red lips and the type of foundation that hides any clue to the skin beneath it. The tautness in the line of her jaw and the hollows in her cheeks looked unnatural, and the many carats of diamonds on her fingers and hanging from her ears seemed out of place in the warmup arena. Her dark hair was lacquered in stiff waves that prohibited any sort of disorder, and she stared up at Casey with formidably angry eyes.

"If you think you can kill my horse and just walk away from it, you're wrong," she announced. "I'll ruin you, I swear I will."

"Looks like you're working on it," Casey snapped back. After his initial surprise, his face had fixed itself into a controlled mask; only his darting, restless eyes gave a clue to his feelings. He reached down and, rather gently, removed his rein from the woman's hand. "I didn't kill your horse, Martha; it's the last thing I wanted to happen." Casey's tone wasn't conciliatory, merely matter-of-fact.