When she wiped it away, her hand shook. When she tried to swallow, she couldn’t. Her tongue wouldn’t move. He shoved her again, forcing her down the barn aisle and outside. Then he bolted the double door in her face.

CHAPTER 2

IF BILLIE DIDN’T get going home she would be feeding her horses after dark. She’d be walking around on ground she couldn’t see among spiders, scorpions, and rattlesnakes that might or might not give a warning buzz before striking. Even if they did warn her, there was no guarantee she’d jump the right way to escape. More important was the fact that she tried never to make her animals wait for their meals and that she checked each one several times a day to make sure they were all healthy.

She pulled her cell phone out of her hip pocket and made a call. It rang a long time, and she was about to hang up when he answered. “Doc here.”

“It’s me. Billie.”

“Howdy, m’dear.”

“I know it’s late, Doc. I’m sorry. But can I talk to you about something?”

“Anything.”

She heard wind through the phone, and cattle. He was outside somewhere, in the near dark.

“I can call back if this is a bad time,” she said.

“Couldn’t be much better, Billie. I’m waiting for the folks here to catch the bull I’m supposed to castrate.”

He was almost laughing, but she heard the years in his voice. Somewhere in his seventies, he was still out on the range, working into the night.

“I’m at the showgrounds, Doc. I came out here to put up flyers for my place. And I saw a horse being hurt in one of the barns.

His voice turned serious. “How was it being hurt?”

“Something was put on her front legs—on the pastern, just above the hooves. Then they were wrapped in fleece bandages with plastic wrap under them. The groom left her tied to the wall. She was trying to pull away. He came back in with a dropper and squirted something more onto her legs, under the wraps.”

“Were you at a Tennessee walking horse show?” Doc sounded incredulous.

“Yes.”

“I’ll be darned. I didn’t think we had any of those gaited horse shows way out here. In the Southeast and Midwest, even in Oregon and California. But not here. What they’re doing is illegal.” A crescendo of lowing drowned out his voice. “It’s called soring,” he said when things quieted down.

“Soring? This horse wasn’t just sore! This horse was in agony!”

“Soring’s what they call burning a horse’s legs to make it step higher, do a gait called the Big Lick. It’s one of the cruelest practices in the world of horses. Illegal, inhumane. I’m sorry it’s come here.”

“What should I do?”

“Nothing you can do, Billie. Lots have tried.” He told her about a federal law against it. There was even a reward being offered to try to get people on the inside of the industry to turn in their bosses. But so far nothing had come of it. And the law itself made no difference. “It’s damn near useless,” he said. “Almost never gets enforced, and what little enforcement is done doesn’t amount to even a slap on the wrist.”

Through her phone, Billie heard men shouting and the bellow of an irate bull.

“Gotta go, m’dear. They’ve found my patient.”

Billie thought that Doc had hung up when she heard his voice again.

“Billie? Those folk are dangerous, no different from the mafia. It’s organized crime, and people have died trying to stop them. You stay away, you hear?”

“I do, Doc. I hear you.”

She was headed back toward the barn when the door opened and a tall, heavy man in dusty black pants turned up at the cuff and a sweat-stained white shirt stepped out. Billie realized he must be Dale Thornton, the trainer Charley worked for. He was a lot older and fatter than he looked in the photo, but the white hair and beard were the same. From his shirt pocket, he pulled a pack of cigarettes, tapped one through his beard into his lips, and lit it with a match he slid from between the cellophane and the box. He shook out the flame, wet the match end with his tongue, and slipped it into his pocket. His first drag burned almost halfway to the filter. He closed his eyes, held the smoke a long time, and exhaled long and slow through his nose. He took a second drag and held in the smoke.

The door opened again, and the woman from the photo stepped out and stood beside him. She too looked much older. With ruby-painted fingernails, she pinched a cigarette from his pack. He lit it for her, and they stood close together, pulling smoke deep into their lungs, holding it, easing it back into the air. Dale paused when he spotted Billie, as if trying to decide if he knew her, then nodded a casual greeting.

Billie watched them walk away. Ignoring the nagging tug to go home and feed her animals, she stuffed her hands in her jeans pockets and followed them.

At the arena turnstile, she handed five dollars to a girl dressed all in black. The girl stamped Billie’s hand with something illegible and said around her tongue stud, “Thow this if you leaf and want to get bag in.”

Scuffed wooden stairs led up to the bleachers. Billie climbed, wondering what acid green lipstick like the goth girl’s tasted like—key lime pie?—and if it was true that a tongue stud enhanced oral sex. She sighed. Maybe she’d gotten old, but if she met a man with a tongue stud she’d run the other way.

The sky was almost black, with a vivid swath of orange at the horizon. Billie climbed the bleachers in the open-air arena. Luna moths and June bugs flickered through the vapor lights that illuminated the stands, hammering themselves against the fluorescent rods. A large mow of hay, stacked between the barns, glittered in the lights.

There were only a few dozen people scattered through the tiers of

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