Sun Kissed (12 page)

“Blue won’t hurt me,” she insisted. “I never for a moment thought he might.”

Tucker had no doubt that Samantha had a very special relationship with the stallion. As a general rule, horses were incredibly devoted and faithful creatures who responded reciprocally to love and gentleness. “I’m sure he wouldn’t intend to hurt you,” he compromised. “Right now, however, he may not be able to stop himself.”

Despite the warning, Samantha remained at Tucker’s elbow. He decided to let it go. She’d been raised around horses, just as he had, and surely understood the risks. It wasn’t his place to lecture her.

Blue was swaying on his feet now. When Tucker touched the stallion’s neck, the animal showed no sign of agitation. Taking care not to move too quickly, Tucker deposited his satchel on the floor of the stall.

“Good boy,” he intoned softly. To the men holding the ropes, he called out, “You can cut him some slack now!” The instant the lines relaxed, Tucker drew them off over the horse’s head. “Now let’s see if we can figure out what’s wrong with you, fella.”

The first thing Tucker always did when he examined a sick horse was check for colic. After withdrawing the
stethoscope from the satchel, he pressed the chest piece to the animal’s belly. In cases of severe colic, all intestinal activity often ceased, the result being an ominous and deadly silence.

Acutely aware of Samantha’s anxious gaze following his every movement, he said, “The belly sounds good.”

He stepped around to the horse’s head. The stallion’s pupils were dilated, but given the sedation, that was to be expected. Tucker folded back the equine’s lip. “Good capillary refill response. Two seconds on the dot.”

Tucker placed the stethoscope on the right side of the stallion’s chest to get a pulse reading. “That’s odd,” he murmured, and then immediately wished he’d kept the thought to himself when Samantha asked, “What’s odd?”

“His pulse rate is forty. With all the sedatives in his system, I expected it to be a little slow, not at the high end of normal.”

“Is that a bad sign?” Her voice trembled as she posed the question.

Tucker frowned as he checked the stallion’s respiratory rate, which was also normal. Then he bent to rifle through his bag for a large animal thermometer. “I don’t think it’s a bad sign, necessarily,” he told Samantha as he took the equine’s temperature. “The normal range is from thirty-six to forty-two. It’s just unusual for it to be that fast under sedation.”

The stallion’s temp proved to be normal as well. After returning the thermometer to the satchel, Tucker moved to the corner of the stall where a black rubber dish sat. “Is this the grain dish?”

“Yes.” An older man with graying brown hair and dark
eyes entered the stall from the paddock where he’d been manning one of the ropes. He was a good-looking fellow for his age, trim yet well muscled, as most ranchers and horsemen tended to be. “If you’re wanting to see what he ate, I can fetch you a little of the cob.”

“There are traces still in the dish.” As Tucker bent to collect the bowl, he noticed a deep gash on the older man’s forehead. “Ouch. The horse do that to you?”

“Did it to myself by staying when I should’ve went,” the man replied with a humorless smile. “Can’t blame the horse for my own stupidity.” He thrust out a hand. “Name’s Jerome Hudson. I’m the ranch foreman.”

While shaking the foreman’s hand, Tucker said, “Looks to me like a trip to the ER is in order. You’ll be needing a few stitches.”

The older man nodded. “I’ll drive to town and get it taken care of in a bit.”

“Hell you will,” Frank said from the gate. “I’ll take you in.”

Tucker returned his attention to the bowl and what remained of the wet cob. A white, barely visible powdery substance clung to the corn particles. “Do you mix vitamins in with his cob?”

“We give vitamin powder in the morning with the bran and grain,” the foreman replied.

“Do you rinse out the dishes between feedings?” Tucker asked, thinking some of the powder might have clung to the bowl.

“Rinse and dry them both,” Jerome assured him.

Tucker moistened his fingertip to collect a bit of the powder. “There’s something on this cob.”

The foreman stepped over to have a look. “That’s not vitamin powder. Ours is yellowish brown.”

“Did you notice any powder on the cob when you measured it out?” Tucker asked.

“I didn’t measure it. We have the day-shift people do that before they leave. The filled dishes are put on a shelf, which is numbered according to stall order. Saves me work late at night.” The foreman shook his head and glanced apologetically at Samantha. “I didn’t notice any white powder on Blue’s cob, but I didn’t really examine it, either.”

Samantha pressed close to examine the dish’s contents. Then she lifted a frightened gaze to Tucker’s. “What do you think it is?”

“I’m not sure.” Tucker handed the dish to Hudson. “Can you put this someplace safe? We may need to have that powder analyzed.”

“Analyzed?” Samantha echoed.

Tucker avoided her worried gaze as he returned to the horse and drew a blood sample. The situation baffled him, and he didn’t want to do too much of his thinking out loud. The traces of powder on the cob indicated possible poisoning, but the horse exhibited none of the usual symptoms.

When the vial of blood had been filled and marked, Tucker deposited the sample in his bag and went back to studying the horse. “Has he had any diarrhea?” he asked, directing the question to no one in particular.

“Nope,” Jerome replied, stepping over to the gate to hand off the dish to Clint for safekeeping. “Far as I know, he’s been fit as a fiddle until tonight.”

“Another horse did have diarrhea, though,” Samantha interjected. “Tabasco, a four-year-old stallion. It was the worst case I’ve ever seen, and we called out a vet.” She glanced at Jerome. “What was it, a week ago?”

“Last Sunday morning. He hasn’t perked back up the way we’d like to see, either, and we’ve been worried.” The foreman met Tucker’s gaze. “We planned to call someone out in the morning to give us a second opinion.”

“What was the first opinion?” Tucker asked.

“That it was nothing more than a little stomach upset,” Samantha replied, her soft mouth thinning with disgust. “The vet was Doc Washburn’s new partner. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

Tucker had heard stories about the new veterinarian, and none thus far had been favorable.

Samantha gestured limply with a hand. “I wasn’t impressed, and needless to say, I won’t use him again.”

“I’d like to have a look at Tabasco later,” Tucker told her. “First, though, I need to treat this stallion’s lacerations.”

Blue suddenly threw up his head and looked at them with white-ringed eyes. Only a little time had passed since the sedative had been administered, and Tucker was taken by surprise.

“The sedative’s wearing off,” he noted out loud.

“So soon?” Samantha sent him a bewildered look. “Doesn’t it normally last longer than this?”

Tucker was too busy filling another syringe to reply. But he wasn’t quick enough. The stallion shrieked and wheeled. Frank slapped the gate closed so the animal
couldn’t escape, and Tucker looped an arm around Samantha’s waist to swing her out of the way.

“Get out of here,” he ordered as he released his hold on her.

Jerome grabbed Samantha’s arm to propel her toward the gate.

“Whoa, boy, whoa,” Tucker soothed.

The stallion quieted, and the moment he did Tucker stepped in close to give him another injection. Then he, too, vacated the stall.

This time the horse didn’t get quite so excited, and the injection worked a little more quickly because there was still some sedative in his system. Tucker’s brain had begun to race with all the possible causes of excitement that could be controlled with sedatives for only short periods of time. One of those possibilities truly alarmed him.

When the stallion was standing calmly again, Tucker left the stall to find some privacy and whipped his cell phone from his belt to call Isaiah, his twin brother and partner.

Isaiah answered in a hoarse, sleep-slurred voice. “Coulter residence.”

“Hey, bro,” Tucker said. “I need your help.”

“Tucker?” Isaiah yawned loudly. Tucker heard his sister-in-law Laura murmur sleepily in the background. “What do you mean, my help? It’s…what…midnight?”

“A few minutes after. I’m sorry for waking you up, but this is an emergency. I’ve got a loco horse on my hands.”

Tucker began relating the particulars, only to have his
brother say, “Whoa, slow down. Give me a minute, here. I’m still half-asleep.” Isaiah sighed and yawned again. Then, “Okay, all right. What kind of cocktail did you say you mixed?”

“Xylazine and Dormosedan. It only kept him calm for a little over twenty minutes. Then he started going ape again.”

“That soon?” Isaiah was starting to sound more alert. “Xylazine is short-action, but with the Dormosedan on board, it should have worked longer than that.”

“What if the horse has ingested an opiate?” Tucker suggested.

“An
opiate
?”

“You heard me. That’s all that makes sense. A sedative might only counteract the effects of an opiate for twenty minutes or less. That’s essentially what I’m seeing, a horse that’s chemically restrained, but not reacting normally to the sedative. His pulse is forty, at the high end of normal range, and his respiration is normal as well. By all rights, both should be a little slow—unless there’s a stimulant in his system to counteract the sedatives.”

“An
opiate
?” Isaiah repeated. “Who in his right mind would give a horse an opiate? I know they used to dope racehorses with opiates to make them win at the track, but that was outlawed years ago. If you don’t know exactly how much to give, you can overdose an equine and make it go completely berserk.”

“I need some blood panels done, stat,” Tucker informed his brother. “If this horse ingested an opiate, it won’t wear off for four to six hours. To keep him calm, I’ll have to inject him with xylazine and Dormosedan
every twenty minutes or so. I hate like hell doing that. With the opiate breaking through like this, I’ll be guessing each time on how much is safe to give him. I don’t want to kill him with an accidental overdose.”

“Where the hell can you get blood panels done at this time of night?”

“The hospital,” Tucker replied. “They have a twenty-four-hour lab.”

“They don’t do equine panels.”

“I don’t need any norms. We know what those are. All I need are the blood workups, just like they’d do for a human. I’ll make sense of the results myself.”

“They’ll think I’m nuts.”

“Call Ann Kendrick. She used to be a nurse at Saint Matthew’s. She may still have some connections.”

“You want me to call Ann Kendrick at a quarter past twelve in the morning?”

“Yes.” Their sister, Bethany, was married to Ryan Kendrick, Ann’s son. Tucker didn’t think Ann would mind being awakened in the middle of the night by her daughter-in-law’s brother. “Tell her I think someone deliberately overdosed a horse with morphine.”

“Sweet Christ, Tucker. Do you realize what you’re saying? There are only two reasons I can think of that someone would do that.”

Tucker knew exactly what reasons had popped into his brother’s mind. A horse overdosed with an opiate was bound to do one of two things—injure himself and die a brutal death, or kill a human being.

“Call me crazy for thinking it. Just do this for me, Isaiah. Please.”

“Like I’d ever say no?”

In the background Tucker heard the rustle of clothing and pictured his brother getting dressed. He gave Isaiah directions to the Sage Creek Ranch. “Get here as fast as you can,” he urged. “If I’m dealing with an opiate, I need to know it. Otherwise this horse could go berserk when I least expect it and kill someone.”

“I’ll be there in twenty,” Isaiah promised.

“I really appreciate this.”

Isaiah made a snorting sound. “Not a problem. You know that.”

Tucker returned to the stall and set to work treating the stallion’s injuries. Some would leave scars, he knew. He doubted Samantha was happy about that. He could tell by looking that this horse was a very expensive animal with champion bloodlines.

Only as they worked together, cleaning and bandaging the cuts, all Tucker saw in Samantha’s lovely eyes was pain—a pain that ran so deep it couldn’t be expressed with words. She loved this horse. It wasn’t about the value of the animal, not to her.

By the time they’d finished treating the stallion’s cuts, the sedatives were wearing off again. Tucker quickly gave the horse a third injection, praying as he did that he wouldn’t overlap the amounts and accidentally kill his patient.

After giving the shot, he knew he would have only about twenty minutes before the drug began to wear off. “I’d like to cross-tie him,” he informed Samantha. “Also, I need some leg pads if you have them.”

Impressing Tucker with her agility, Samantha vaulted
over the stall gate as easily as any man he’d ever seen. She was back in a couple of minutes with leg wraps, the quality of which was almost as impressive as her gate-jumping ability. Everything at this stable was first-rate, Tucker realized, including the woman who owned it.