'It is very late,' he said in heavily accented English.
I heaved a sigh. 'Tell me about it. We've got a horse with colic. I drew the short straw.'
He frowned at me as if he suspected I might have just insulted him.
'A sick horse,' I explained. 'I have night watch, like you.'
'Oh, yes.' He nodded then. 'I understand. I am very sorry to hear. Good luck with that, miss.'
'Thank you.'
He didn't bother to ask my name or what barn number this phantom horse was in. I had a parking pass and a believable story. That was enough.
I parked back in The Meadows, not wanting anyone's attention on my car. With my Maglite in hand and my gun in the back of my jeans, I walked the aisles of the tent barns, looking for Michael Berne's name, hoping not to run afoul of someone's groom or a roving security guard.
The storm was rolling closer. The wind was coming up, making tent tops billow and flap, making horses nervous. I kept my light low, looking at stall cards and emergency numbers, and still managed to spook some horses, sending them spinning around their small quarters, eyes rolling white. Others nickered at me, hoping for something to eat.
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.
