Dark Horse (9 page)

I cut the light as I walked the dogleg from The Meadows to the next set of tents. If I was lucky, Berne’s horses were stabled relatively near Jade’s. Their run-in had taken place at the schooling ring nearest Jade’s barn. Maybe that was Berne’s schooling area too. If I was unlucky, Berne had gone out of his way to pick a fight with Jade, and I would have to walk forty stables before I found what I wanted.

A gust swept in from the west, shaking the trees. Thunder rumbled overhead. I ducked into tent twenty-two and started checking names.

A quarter of the way down the first row I stopped and listened. The same sounds as in the other tents: horses moving, nickering, kicking against the pipes that framed the stalls. Only these sounds weren’t coming from the horses around me. The disturbance was a couple of rows over. The creak and groan of a stall door opening. The shuffling sound of hooves moving through deep bedding. A horse whinnied loudly. The horse in the stall nearest me rushed its door and whinnied back.

I flicked the light up at it to see a bay, head high, ears pricked, white-rimmed eyes focused past me, past the horse across the aisle. The horse whinnied again and spun around. Another down the row followed suit.

I doused my light and crept down the aisle to the back end of the tent, the Maglite held like a club in my hand. The flashlight weighed three pounds. When I’d been in uniform I had once used this flashlight to defend my life against a 270-pound biker on PCP. He’d ended up in the hospital with a concussion.

I didn’t draw my weapon. I wanted to see, not confront. The Glock was my last line of defense.

The wind howled and the tent top swelled upward like a balloon wanting to take flight. The thick ropes holding the tent stakes squeaked and groaned. I slipped around the end stalls, staying close to the wall. The land behind the tent dropped off sharply to ground that had been cleared and burned over the summer, being made ready for more tents, more schooling rings. It looked like a moonscape. The smell of ash flavored the air.

As I started to ease around the end stall to the next aisle, I heard a door swing back on its hinges, and there was a sharp, distinct sound that didn’t register until the next thing had already happened.

Like a specter running from the otherworld, a huge, ghostly gray horse barreled down the aisle straight at me. He was nearly on top of me before I could react, knocking me backward. I scrambled to keep my feet moving, to throw myself out of his way. A tent spike caught my right ankle and jerked my leg out from under me, dumping me to the ground with a jarring thud. I tried to cover my head and pull myself into a ball, every inch of me braced for the horrible strike of steel-shod hooves and the driving weight of a half-ton animal coming down on soft tissue and fragile bones. But the gray leapt over me, then soared over the edge of the embankment. I scrambled to my knees and watched in horror as he stumbled hard down the bank, going down on his knees, hind legs still running. He squealed in fright, flailing to right himself, dragging himself up and running on into the night.

Pushing to my feet, I turned back toward the tent as another horse ran out. Dark with a blaze. Whinnying as it ran after the gray. I dove to the side as he bolted past.

A slap on the ass.

The sound I’d heard before: the flat of a hand slapping a horse’s rump.

I ran back into the tent. The rest of the barn was in an uproar by now, horses screaming and banging in their stalls. The flimsy pipe-and-canvas stalls shaking and rattling. The tent walls shuddering as the wind kicked at them. I shouted, hoping to frighten the perpetrator with discovery and send him running.

Another horse pranced out of an open stall, saw me, snorted and bolted past, knocking me into the door of the stall behind me. Then that door shoved forward, pushing me with it, knocking me to my knees.

I scuttled ahead like a crab, reaching for the door across the way to pull myself up. The horse came out of the stall behind me like a rodeo bronc, a raw bellow coming from it as it bucked and kicked out at me. I felt the air whoosh past my ear as the hoof just missed its mark.

Before I could start to turn around, a smelly, suffocating blackness engulfed my head and upper body and I was shoved forward against a stall. I tried to claw at the blanket, but couldn’t get my arms up. I wanted air. I wanted what little light there was. I wanted to be free to fight my assailant, who jerked me backward, then sideways, one way and then the other.

Dizziness swirled through my head and I staggered and stumbled and went down on one knee. Then something struck hard, hitting me across the back with enough force to make me see stars.

On the third blow I fell forward and lay still. My breath was a hot rasp in the shallowest part of my lungs. I couldn’t hear anything but a roaring in my head, and I wondered if I would know what was happening before the next loose horse ran over me, crushing me beneath its hooves. I tried to push myself up and couldn’t. The messages scattered somewhere between my brain and my nerve pathways. Pain kicked me in the back and I choked and coughed, needing air, unable to take a deep breath.

A moment passed. No horses trampled me. No pitchfork impaled me. I figured my attacker had run, which left me in a very bad place at a very bad time. Horses were running loose. If someone came rushing into this barn and found me . . .

I tried again to gather my strength and managed to shove the horse blanket off my head. Gulping air, fighting nausea, I grabbed hold of the stall door and dragged myself to my feet. Dizzy, the ground seeming to pitch beneath me, I stumbled out the back of the tent and fell down again.

The Maglite lay on the ground where it had landed when the first horse had hit me, its beam a yellow beacon in the dark. I scooped it up, grabbed hold of a tent rope, and pulled myself up.

Horses were running in the cleared ground down the slope. Some were running between this tent and the next. The wind was blowing harder, carrying the first pelting drops of rain. I heard someone shout in the distance. Time to go.

I stepped inside the tent just far enough to flick the beam across the front of an open stall.

In Case of Emergency Phone Michael Berne
. . .

“Don’t move. Drop the flashlight.”

The voice came from behind me on a beam of light that spilled around my shoulders. I kept the Maglite in my hand, but held my arms away from my body.

“I heard a commotion,” I said, turning slightly. “Someone was in here opening stall doors.”

“Yeah, right,” he said sarcastically. “Guess who. Drop the flashlight.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said, turning a little more. “I tried to stop them. I’ve got the bruises to prove it.”

“I’m not gonna tell you again, lady. Drop the flashlight.”

“I want to see who you are. How do I know you’re not the person who did this?”

“I’m with security.”

I didn’t find that reassuring. Security for the show grounds was contracted out to a private company that lowballed the bid for the job. The staff was probably as reliable and well trained as the people who let lunatics get on commercial airliners with guns and knives. For all I knew, half of them were convicted felons. With my back to him, I couldn’t be sure he was even wearing the uniform.

“Let me see you.”

He huffed an impatient sigh. Before he could say no, I turned around and hit him full in the face with the beam from the Maglite.

I noted his clothes second. I noted his gun first.

“Is that part of the uniform?” I asked.

“It’s part of
my
uniform.” He made a motion with it. “Enough with the questions. Cut the light and give it to me. Let’s go.”

I did as instructed, more than willing to get out in the open where I knew there were other people around. I considered and rejected the idea of making a break for it. I didn’t want people looking for me, my description and sketch on the front page of the newspaper. Nor did I want to get shot in the back. Playing along for the moment could offer an opportunity to learn something.

Outside, people were calling, horses were whinnying. I could hear hoofbeats on the hard-packed road. The guard herded me to a golf cart parked on the side of tent nineteen—Jade’s barn.

I wondered how long the cart had been parked there. I wondered how easy it would be to buy a guy like this to open some stall doors. Working nights for peanuts guarding horses worth more than the average man would make in a lifetime might alter a person’s perspective of right and wrong.

I slid onto the passenger’s side of the bench seat, the seat wet and slippery as the rain came harder. The guard kept his gun in his left hand as he started the cart and backed it around. I shifted positions, turning slightly toward him, and surreptitiously touched the Glock, still secure in the back of my jeans, beneath my jacket and turtleneck.

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer. A walkie-talkie crackled on his belt. Other guards radioing about the loose horses. He didn’t get on the air to tell anyone he’d apprehended me. I didn’t like that. We started down the road toward the main part of the show grounds, a ghost town at two in the morning.

“I’ll want to speak to your supervisor,” I said with authority. “And someone will need to call Detective James Landry with the Sheriff’s Office.”

That turned his head.

“Why?”

I took my turn not answering. Let him wonder. We passed other guards, other people running through the rain to join in the fun of trying to catch half a dozen hot-blooded horses drunk on freedom.

We drove through the maze of tents and down a row of deserted retail shops. The rain came now in sheets. We drove farther and farther away from any source of help. My heart rate increased a beat. Adrenaline was like a narcotic in my bloodstream, the prospect of danger intoxicating and exciting. I stared at the security guard and wondered what he would think if he knew that. Most people would find it disturbing.

He pulled the golf cart alongside one of the big trailers that housed the various show grounds management offices and cut the engine. We clattered up the metal stairs and the guard ushered me inside. A heavyset man stood beside a metal desk, listening to the noise coming over a walkie-talkie the size of a brick. He had a throat like a bullfrog: a sack of flesh wider than his head, spilling over the collar of his shirt. He wore the blue security uniform too, with a couple of extra pins on the chest. Decorated for meritorious ass-sitting and delegating above and beyond the call, I guessed. He scowled at me as I stood dripping water all over the floor.

“She’s the one,” the guard said. “I caught her opening stall doors.”

I looked him in the face and said with just enough point to make my meaning crystal clear: “Any more little surprises like that in your pocket?”

He had stuffed the gun. I could see him struggle with the notion that he’d blown it showing me the thing. I had something to use against him. He wasn’t supposed to be carrying on the job. He probably didn’t have a permit for it either. If that was true and I reported him to the police, there was a good chance he’d lose his job at the very least. I could see on his face all these things were just now occurring to him.

If he’d been overly bright he wouldn’t have been working dog watch in a rent-a-cop uniform.

“You caught me standing in a barn with a flashlight,” I said. “I was trying to help. Same as you.”

“You got something against Michael Berne?” the bullfrog asked. He had the thick drawl of a panhandle Floridian, where the Sunshine State and the Deep South rub loins, as it were.

“I’ve never met Michael Berne, though I did see him having a loud, threatening argument with Don Jade this morning. You might want to find out where Mr. Jade is right now.”

The supervisor stared at me. “Berne is on his way,” he said. “And a couple of deputies. Have a seat, Miss . . . ?”

I didn’t answer and I didn’t sit, though my back was aching like a son of a bitch from the beating I’d taken.

“You’ll need to tell the deputies to treat that stall area as a crime scene,” I said. “In addition to letting the horses loose, your perp assaulted me when I tried to run him off. They’ll find a pitchfork or a broom—something with a long handle—that may have his prints on it. I’ll want to press charges. And I’ll want to go to the emergency room for an examination, and to have them take photographs of my bruises. I may sue. What kind of management does this place have if they can’t keep people or animals safe?”

Bullfrog looked at me as if he’d never seen one of my kind before. “Who are you?”

“I’m not telling you my name.”

“I need your name, miss. I have to make a report.”

“That’s a problem then, because I’m not telling you,” I said. “I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re not an officer of the court or of the government, and therefore you have no right to demand information of me.”

“Deputies are on the way,” he said by way of a threat.

“That’s fine. I’ll be happy to go with them, though they have no grounds to arrest me. Standing in a barn aisle is not a crime that I’m aware of.”

“Bud says you let them horses loose.”

“I think you should ask Bud again what he saw.”

He looked at Bud. “Was she letting them loose or not?”

Bud looked constipated, unable to tell the lie he wanted to tell either to cover his own ass or to grab a little glory with his boss. “She was right there.”

“So were you,” I pointed out. “How do we know you didn’t open those doors?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Bullfrog said. “Why would he do something like that?”

“I could only speculate. Money. Maliciousness. Mental illness.”

“Maybe those motives all apply to you.”

“Not in this particular instance.”

“You have horses here on the grounds, Miss—?”

“I’m through speaking with you now,” I announced. “May I use your phone to call my attorney?”

He squinted at me. “No!”

I sat then in a straight chair beside the desk. Bullfrog’s radio crackled. The gate guard announcing the arrival of the sheriff’s deputies. A stroke of luck. I didn’t want to meet Michael Berne in these circumstances. Bullfrog instructed the gate guard to send the radio car to the security office.