“We don’t know that Gully got hurt at the show.”
He stepped away from her. “You are defending them. What do these people do to their horses, Billie? They burn them. They are burners, and they burn their horses. At home. At shows. Use your eyes, Billie. And for God’s sake use some common sense. You had a barnyard full of burners, and your dog got burned. Not just his paw but his tongue, from licking his paw. A caustic did that to him. These people use caustics on their horses’ legs, don’t they? No matter what they promised you, they are the same people who were at that show when you called me a while back. The same people who hurt that filly you…bought.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, crevassed and stained. “Horse stealing’s a hanging offense out here, m’dear. I’m glad you…bought…her. You did the right thing, then, by her. But now you’re off that track, and you’re messing up.”
He climbed cautiously into the truck, protecting his hurt arm. “Your horse’s cuts are healing fine. Your dog will be okay. But you I worry about. Take care, m’dear. Be careful who and what you invite into your life.”
CHAPTER 16
BILLIE TURNED ON the laptop and plugged the flash drive she had gotten from Charley into the USB port. The first seconds were disorienting, fuzzy black-and-white footage of movement too blurry to discern. She realized the sound was off on her computer and turned it on. Southern voices. Indistinct words. A yell. A whinny.
She was looking at the inside of a barn. A man walked in front of the camera, toward a horse, pulled back his arm and punched the animal in the face. Billie flinched and pulled back as if it had happened in front of her. The man turned toward the camera, and Billie recognized Dale. He said something she couldn’t understand, stepped to the next horse, and did it again. And again. Down a long row of horses standing in cross ties, watching him approach, unable to escape. He slugged each in turn, hitting with detachment and force.
Billie paused the video. It didn’t make any sense. Why batter these horses, already tied in their stalls, helpless and immobile? She couldn’t watch anymore. Tears ran onto her lips.
When she worked for Frank, reporting on the horrors of child abuse and rape, she had learned when she got overwhelmed to take a minute to anchor herself. She had done that so often and for so many years, it had become second nature. My laptop, she told herself. These are my notebooks. My hands. My ranch. My home.
She wiped her face with her palms, rewound and pressed play, her hand hovering over the stop button, poking at it to slow down the action so she could actually see what was happening. She missed it on her first pass, rewound and looked again. This time she saw that a groom knelt beside each horse, palpating its front legs the way an inspector would at a show. The instant a horse flinched, Dale punched it.
“He’s stewarding the horse, teaching it not to react to the exam,” she whispered.
The camera aimed at the horses’ legs, following Dale. He bent down, lifted a front hoof, and squirted something from a bottle on its leg. The horse reared back then collapsed to its knees.
“Get up, you sorry son of a bitch!” Dale kicked it in the gut.
Billie watched the rest of the footage. Dale poking a horse with an electric cattle prod. Dale standing by while two grooms tried to drag a prostrate horse by its head. Dale burning a horse on the lips with a cigarette. Charley must have been the videographer, she realized. He had told her he was going to turn in more abusers than just Dale for the reward, and there were two grooms in this footage.
She pressed play again. This time she waited through more snow and smudges until, at last, there were new images, new voices. A woman talking, a man’s mumbled answer. The woman’s voice again. Eudora stepped in front of the camera, walking ahead of Charley down the barn aisle at the farm where Billie had worked. Eudora gave instructions, pointing to stalls and telling him what to do to each horse inside. They stopped, and she pulled open a stall door. A wild-eyed mare tied to the wall at the back of the stall tried to turn toward them.
Eudora said, “Get her done today, okay? She can cook overnight, and we’ll see if she can move in the morning. If she’s good and paralyzed with pain, he’ll ride her. Otherwise, you can do more then. Got it?”
The camera swept up and down nauseatingly as Charley nodded. His hand rose toward his head, and the video went dark. When it flicked on again, Billie was looking straight at Sylvie, standing backlit in the stall door. Charley was inside the stall, looking out at her. She pointed, and he turned to see at what. The camera picked up the mare Eudora had been talking about. She lay on the floor of her stall. Sylvie knelt beside her, snapped a lead to her halter, and pulled. The mare didn’t even lift her head. Sylvie kicked her, but she still wouldn’t get up. She lit a cigarette and held it against the mare’s rump.
Eudora’s voice laughed. “This’ll do. Go get Dale.”
The video turned again into undecipherable smudges, but Billie heard the horse moan.
The mare was up when Billie could next decipher what was going on, crouching, shifting her weight from side to side, her front feet barely touching the floor. She tried to sit, but Sylvie prodded her with a pitchfork. Blood trickled from the punctures.
“If she does okay for Dale,” Eudora said, “I’ll break her tail this afternoon, and we can get her into the tail set in time for the Big Show.”
The last thing Billie heard Eudora say was “Get the chains, Charley.”
The last
