Hoofprints (Gail McCarthy series)

Roped

Slickrock

Breakaway

Hayburner

Forged

Moonblind

Going, Gone

Barnstorming

HOOFPRINTS. Copyright © 1996 by Laura Crum. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Santa Cruz County, California, however, is a real place and I live there. Readers should be aware that the towns, streets and physical landmarks described in this story do not necessarily exist, and those that do are not always as described. The Santa Cruz County of the book was created for the purposes of the plot and does not represent my own views on the actual place-at least, not entirely.

HOOFPRINTS

Chapters:

ONE

He didn't give me any warning. I ducked out of the way just in time to feel half a ton slam by and miss me by inches. The sorrel horse pulled back on the rope that tethered him to the post and fought and twisted like a trout on a line. Stressed beyond its limits, the rope snapped suddenly and the horse went crashing over backward. Landing with a thump that shook the ground, he thrashed on his back, red legs waving, hooves beating the air. He wasn't hurt, just dumb enough to have a hard time figuring out where his feet were. In a minute he scrambled up and ran off, dragging the inadequate piece of rope he'd broken. I shook my head in disgust. This was a hell of an overrated way to make eight dollars an hour.

It took me twenty minutes to catch the horse and finish doctoring him; I was cold enough to be mad by the time I was done. Seven o'clock on a foggy morning was not the ideal time to be treating, or trying to treat, an ill-broke backyard dink of a horse.

Washing the rest of the antiseptic salve off my hands, I told the sorrel gelding what a worthless piece of shit I thought he was and turned him loose to eat his breakfast. As I stuffed strands of my once neatly braided hair roughly back into place and shoved my numb hands deep into the pockets of my denim coat, I cursed myself for being a complete idiot. I didn't have to be here. I wasn't even being paid my miserable eight bucks an hour to be here. It was just pure stupidity on my part, my inability to say no to someone who seemed to need help.

The sorrel gelding belonged to a twelve-year-old girl. The girl lived with her divorced mother, who held down a full-time job as a checker in a grocery store. Neither one of them knew the first thing about horses. They had paid too much for the gelding, who was a half-breed Arabian with a bad attitude and no training. The girl rode him bareback on the beach every afternoon after school, and he went pretty much wherever and how fast he wanted to go. But she called him Flame and thought he was perfect, and he represented, both to the mother and the daughter, the idea of the life they wanted. He was their one luxury.

They had called me out to treat him a week ago for a deep, possibly crippling wire cut on a back leg. In their faces, and in the mother's immediate, tentative questions about the cost of the visit, I could see their fear. They could barely afford the horse at all; they couldn't afford a vet bill. They could also, it turned out, barely control the horse. When he objected, naturally enough, to my touching the painful cut on his back leg, he simply dragged the girl all around the field. I had sighed, fetched a knowledgeable assistant in the form of a helpful local horseman, doctored the horse, and accepted the twenty dollars they could stretch themselves to come up with for a sixty-dollar visit. I had also agreed to come out every day for a week and treat the cut so it didn't develop scar tissue and make the horse lame. For free, of course. It was no problem, I told them. I'd be glad to. Yeah, right.

You are really a sucker, Gail, I told myself as I got back in the pickup.

The dog lying on the floorboards lifted his head and wagged his stump of a tail at me. "Stupid horse, huh, Blue?" I rubbed the wedge-shaped head. "Be better off in a dog-food can."

I scratched the old dog behind the ears for a minute, comforted by his presence. Blue was a thirteen-year-old Queensland Heeler, what the AKC calls an Australian Cattle Dog. He looked like a stocky blue-gray coyote with a bobbed tail, and he was every bit as smart, stubborn, and independent as his distant cousin. I had reason to know; Blue had been my more or less constant companion since I was nineteen.

Shoving the heater up to full blast, I put the truck in gear and jolted down the narrow, rutted driveway. The fog was thick enough to make me turn my windshield wipers on about once a minute-a summer morning like every other summer morning in Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz, my hometown, sprawls on the northern edge of the Monterey Bay, a half-moon-shaped bite out of the coast of California about sixty miles south of San Francisco. The city has grown big enough to ramble carelessly over the redwood-studded hills, but the heart of it lies in the flatland along the San Lorenzo River. My charity-case horse lived on the northern outskirts, which forced me to drive through town on my way to the next stop.

I crossed Pacific Avenue, the main street, staring down it with a kind of morbid fascination. Once a familiar, picturesque row of old-fashioned brick and masonry buildings, carefully restored, it was now an incongruous combination of a few surviving structures, some slickly modem brand-new buildings, and gaping empty lots filled with rubble. In effect it was not unlike post-World War II Berlin, but the cause wasn't enemy attack; a 7.1 earthquake had struck Santa Cruz in October of 1989, and the town was still rebuilding.

I rumbled across the San Lorenzo River bridge and up the hill and smiled a little as I looked down on Beach Flats and the Boardwalk. The outlines of the roller coaster and the old Cocoanut Grove Casino were just visible through the fog. They seemed to carry with them a touch of the 1920s carnival air that had made Santa Cruz a fashionable beach-town resort, and nothing, not hell, high water, or earthquakes, could make them appear less than raffishly cheerful.

Warming my still-numb hands in turn against the heater vent, I followed East Cliff Drive, winding for a couple of miles through the small beachside communities of Seabright and Live Oak. Halfway between Live Oak and Capitola, I turned down Rose Avenue, going toward the bay.

Ed and Cindy Whitney's place was the last one on the street, on the tip of a spur of land that stuck out into Monterey Bay. Their front yard was a deck over a steep cliff dropping right down into the surf, and the view from their windows was usually spectacular.

This morning the view was a solid blank of gray. All the tourists here in town for a July vacation on the coast of California were probably sobbing in their hotel rooms. The fog would clear in the afternoon-it always did-but Santa Cruz summer mornings were disappointing for those who had imagined themselves in bikinis rather than down coats.

Cindy's little barn, rustically shingled to match her house and complete with a cupola on top, looked deserted. I couldn't see any signs of life, or human life, anyway. My patient, the cocoa-colored gelding who stood in the barn, hung his head over the half door of his stall and nickered.

Plumber, short for Plumb Smart, was a registered Quarter Horse, four years old, and one of my favorite patients. Cindy had bought him two years ago, paid five thousand dollars for him as an unbroken colt, and invested several thousand more in a couple of years of professional training. I'd been his vet the whole time, seen him grow and change from a sweet, babyish youngster into one of the nicest working cow horses in the whole area, and I'd developed a special fondness for him.

Plumber was a "people" horse, friendly and interested in everything the humans around him were doing. Aptly named, his intelligence, combined with a cooperative spirit, had made him extremely teachable; Cindy and her trainer, Steve Shaw, had won several big contests on him already.

I knew all this because Cindy, a cheerful, talkative extrovert, had chattered happily to me about her horse every time I came out on a routine call, invited me to dinner and several parties at her home, and generally extended the client/veterinarian relationship to one of mild friendship.

I walked over to Plumber and patted his neck, and he bumped me with his nose. Calling, "Cindy," I looked around the empty barnyard in surprise. Cindy was usually waiting for me.

A search of the barn produced zero results. No Cindy in the feed room. No Cindy in the tack room either, just bridles, saddles, blankets, brushes, and medicines scattered everywhere. A dusty old desk seemed the obvious place to leave messages, but all I saw was horse bric-a-brac and general junk-horseshoes, a mortar and pestle, an empty Coors can, half a dozen bottles of bute (horse aspirin), and a couple of rolls of Vet rap (horse Band-Aids). I shuffled the stuff around but couldn't find a note.

Plumber neighed anxiously, hearing noise from the direction of the feed room. I stuck my head in his stall and saw that his manger was empty, which explained all the talking he was doing. Cindy must have overslept; she would never have left Plumber without his breakfast otherwise.

Reluctantly I walked to the house, hoping Cindy was up and dressed and wouldn't stumble to the door in a nightgown and bathrobe.

My knock echoed hollowly in the big wooden house which a real estate agent would have described as a mansion. More realistically, it was a large two-story house with a lot of character. Shingled all over, with a steep roof and many small windows, it had been built by a successful bootlegger during Prohibition, which gave it a kind of disreputable glamour.

I knocked again. Echoes of the wooden banging bounced off the fog, but nobody answered the door.

Back at the truck, I consulted my appointment book. There it was: "Cindy Whitney, 8:00 A.M., shots and worming." Plumber watched me and nickered again, and I glanced at the dashboard clock: 8:15. Cindy's horse was her main preoccupation in life, and she was never late or neglectful of anything that concerned him. I decided to wait fifteen minutes more and sat down in my truck.