No Good Deed

by Lynn Hightower

  Sonora looked into the box.

  The puppies were sleeping – little round balls like hedgehogs, sides going up and down with every little breath, eyes shut tight. They had tiny little tails. Were various blends of brown, black and tan. Sonora counted seven.

  What would Clampett think if she brought one home? Even the world’s most easygoing dog would be green-eyed over a new puppy. And she didn’t exactly need the complications.

  ‘What you think?’ McCarty. Smiling. He really did have nice eyes.

  ‘Now’s not the time,’ Sonora said.

  One of the puppies whimpered, rose up on tiny paws. Shifted sideways and settled back in.

  The woman grinned at her. ‘Honey, you make him get you a puppy. Take two. They can keep each other company.’

  McCarty gazed into Sonora’s eyes. ‘She’s the most tenderhearted thing in the world, so I better get her away, or we’ll go home with that whole boxful.’

  Sonora waited till they were out of earshot. ‘I have to tell you, McCarty, this is the first time I’ve ever been called tenderhearted.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t put the word out you’re human.’

  ‘Where are you going? The auction’s that way.’ Sonora pointed down a concrete ramp that dropped down toward gray swing doors. She heard a man’s twang, the echo of a microphone.

  ‘Let’s go around the back. Never know what you might see.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The back of the arena was a maze of cattle chutes, ramps and dirt pathways cordoned off with gray metal piping. The ground was strewn with manure. Sonora looked around, inhaled the whang of frightened horses.

  ‘Heads up,’ McCarty said.

  Sonora plastered herself to the side rail and an emaciated young man in Wranglers and a red denim shirt trotted a freckled gray horse up the path where they stood.

  ‘Passing through,’ he said, friendly, trotting his horse. He rode a light brown western saddle, no bridle, just a halter with thick white rope reins. The horse moved smartly, head down, the two of them in perfect harmony.

  ‘You’ll be okay, Ranger,’ the boy said, leaning low and rubbing the horse’s neck. He sounded sad.

  ‘Why is he selling that horse?’ Sonora asked. Ranger had relaxed at the boy’s voice, the touch on his neck.

  ‘Probably has to. Ole Ranger looks a bit underfed,’ McCarty said.

  ‘So does the kid. Will he be okay?’

  McCarty looked at her. ‘Sure, he’ll be fine. Somebody’ll buy old Ranger and take him home, probably make a pet out of him.’

  ‘You’re a pretty sorry liar, McCarty.’

  ‘I tried, anyway. You want to go wait in the car?’

  ‘Don’t girl me down,’

  McCarty pointed to a couple of men standing next to a small enclosure where three horses raced from corner to corner. ‘I’m going to talk to those guys over there. You want to come with me, or look around?’

  ‘Look around.’

  ‘Watch where you walk.’

  Sonora wandered in and out of the chutes, could not figure out how to make it into the arena through the maze of metal. She did see a path back toward the parking lot. She could go that way, and head back around the front.

  She veered right, avoiding a large stock trailer, red, with wide metal slats on each side. It was crammed full of horses, most of them quiet, heads hanging.

  Sonora frowned. Wondered how long the horses had been stuck in the trailer, wondered if they were coming or going. A logo on the side of a rusted maroon pickup said The Horseman’s Buddy in large black letters.

  She looked at the horses, pressed tight against the metal slats. They did not look like they had a buddy in the world.

  A quick movement caught her eye, and a reddish-brown nose poked its way between the slats, one big brown eye watching her.

  McCarty would probably lump this one in the chestnut category too, but he was very red, with a white blaze on his nose and a rub mark where black skin showed through. He was wearing a dusty leather halter that looked like it might disintegrate at any moment.

  ‘Hey, boy.’

  The horse looked at her curiously. Stuck his nose out further. She rubbed a hand up to his forelock and he butted her fingers with his head as if he wanted to be scratched. She obliged. He butted harder, scooting up close to the edge of the trailer.

  A muscular black horse with truly impressive hindquarters and a short cresty neck decided that the red chestnut was getting too close. He penned his ears and lowered his head, and the chestnut’s nose went straight up as he jumped back out of the way.

  All of the horses shifted nervously.

  Sonora looked over her shoulder, wondered if anyone noticed that she was causing trouble.

  ‘Take care, buddy.’ She headed out across the parking lot to the sound of microphones and frightened horses.

  The arena had a dirt floor, fenced off at waist level, and a circle of seats rising gradually toward the ceiling. A man in stained brown workpants held a horse by a dingy white lead rope that ended in a chain that was threaded through an olive-green nylon halter and wrapped over the horse’s nose.

  The horse stood with locked muscles, head high, sides quivering, weight rocked back ever so slightly on the hind legs. He kept an eye at all times on the man with the lead rope. Three fresh piles of manure lay in the dirt.

  A child ran down the ramp from the concession stand, feet thumping. The horse jumped sideways.

  ‘Whoa there, buddy.’ The man in brown pants gave the lead rope a vicious yank, and the chain racked the horse’s nose. His head went higher, but he locked his muscles and was still. Sonora saw that his back left leg was scarred.

  The microphone man, loose jeans, a T-shirt and an impressive pot belly, shifted the John Deere hat back on his head. He was built wide and square like a dwarf, yellow-white tufts of hair fluffing from the sides of his cap.

  ‘Now this fella’s been a lesson horse for thirteen years, real gentle with beginners. Somebody needs to take him home.’

  Nobody seemed much interested.

  Tables next to the first row of seats were crammed with saddles, blankets, bridles and bits of leather gear that Sonora did not recognize but thought might be more appropriate to a catalog catering to the S&M crowd.

  Cigarette smoke was heavy. Two or three men stood to the left of the arena, talking. A man in overalls sat down heavily in a chair next to Sonora and lit into a plastic tray of nachos covered with gluey orange cheese and green rings of jalapeño peppers.

  The real buyers sat, smoking furiously, waiting for the next horse.

  The man behind the microphone talked faster and louder, but nobody was bidding on this one.

  Sonora looked down into the ring. She had always wanted a horse. And the man had said he was gentle. He didn’t look all that gentle right now, but terror never made an animal easygoing.

  ‘Not thinking of bidding, are you?’ McCarty bent close, whispering in her ear.

  ‘Just doing reconnaissance,’ she told him. ‘What you got?’

  He grimaced. ‘One guy who thinks he remembers seeing another guy trying to sell a horse and a van, but he’s sure the man had a stud colt, palomino quarter-horse, which is about as far away from a chestnut brood mare as you can get.’

  ‘Welcome to the eye-witness two-step. What about the guy that was climbing all over the truck?’

  ‘Beardsley? He’s around. Hasn’t got back to me yet.’

  ‘Yeah. But that’s two people who remember a guy wanting to sell a horse and a trailer. Do the times pan out?’

  ‘Consistently. Late Tuesday afternoon.’

  ‘Could be our guy.’

  ‘Hell, he’s taking off.’

  Sonora looked up, saw Beardsley heading through the swing door to the outside ramp.

  McCarty looked at her over his shoulder. ‘Meet you in the lot. And don’t buy anything.’

  Sonora looked back at the horse in time to see him being led away with a numb
er on his back. He’d sold for three hundred dollars.

  She hoped he was going to a good home.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Sonora sat on the hood of the pickup, wondering where McCarty had gotten to. She kept an eye on two cowboys who’d been giving her the look. She estimated sixty to ninety seconds before they’d be heading her way. She hopped down. She was attracting too much attention.

  Really, she should work undercover more often.

  She checked her watch, stomach tight with the feeling that time was moving and she wasn’t. Forty-eight hours into the case, and they were foundering. Was this their best bet – tracking a mythical guy who had sold a horse and trailer as a package deal, refusing to let the horse go to slaughter?

  She headed down the right side of the trailer, peered in the grilled window. Oklahoma ignored her, head down. She climbed down off the wheel well, dusted her hands off, saw that she’d gotten a stain on the leg of her pants.

  She glanced at her watch, thinking maybe she should go looking for McCarty. She remembered a drink machine back inside the arena, had a sudden craving for grape soda. She got her jacket and purse out of the truck. The sun was going down.

  Definitely getting colder.

  She heard a shout, the clatter of shod hooves on asphalt, moving fast. Someone yelled ‘Heads up’ and Sonora walked out in front of the truck to see what was going on.

  Found herself directly in the path of a horse who wheeled sideways and stopped on a dime, head bobbing, sides heaving. Tufts of white foam rimmed his sides like dirty meringue, and his legs were braced as if he knew the worst was yet to come.

  The horse’s coat was black with sweat, but Sonora recognized the red chestnut gelding from the stock trailer, same rub mark on his nose. His eyes were wide and she could see the whites along the edge.

  She took a step toward him. He wheeled sideways, nostrils flared and blowing.

  ‘Hold still there, honey, I’ll get him.’

  Sonora did not much like being called honey. Darlin’ was okay, she kind of liked that one. But there was something patronizing about honey.

  ‘Ho there, buddy, hold on.’

  The man’s voice brought the horse’s head up. The gelding wheeled and crow-hopped sideways. Sonora, self-preservation uppermost in her mind, was moving away from the horse’s hind end when he circled again, facing her.

  She pitched her voice into easygoing conversational tones. ‘How you doing, fella?’

  He was trembling hard. She moved toward him a couple of steps, and he skittered sideways. She stopped. Waited. Tried one step. That he would tolerate.

  Step and pause, then his halter was in reach. Sonora unclipped her purse strap from one end of the soft brown Italian leather. Enzo – she’d paid too much for it, especially if the strap was going to be used for a lead rope.

  But she had him. The horse lowered his head. She touched his shoulder, felt his flesh shrink and quiver. His head came back up and he snorted.

  ‘It’s okay, boy, I’ve got you. You’ll be all right.’

  Another brown chestnut in an auction full of horses, half or more of them chestnuts. How many chestnut mares went through this auction in one day? And she was trying to find one in particular – one she was not even sure had come this way.

  Wrong direction. She was going in the wrong direction.

  A man in Wranglers so loose on his hips he could have stepped right out of them reached out and grabbed the purse strap from Sonora.

  ‘Thanks for your help.’ His lead rope was red faded to pink, and topped by a long length of chain which the man threaded through the horse’s halter and over his nose.

  The gelding backed away, and the man, black hair glistening with oil, gel and sweat, snapped the rope sharply, racking the chain across the horse’s nose.

  ‘Is that necessary?’ Sonora said, in a tone of voice her children dreaded. She did not want to be here, did not want any more of her time wasted, and where the hell was McCarty?

  The man gave her a sour look over his left shoulder. ‘I guess since I’m the one bought and paid for this horse, I’ll do what I want.’ But there were people watching, and he smirked. ‘Anyway, this is all I got handy. I left my purse in the truck.’

  The horse’s head went up and he circled the man, who snapped the lead shank again.

  ‘You’re just making it worse,’ Sonora said.

  ‘Honey, I’ll give you some advice won’t cost you a thing. And that is you don’t let no animal boss you around, ’cause otherwise they’ll run right over you.’ He jerked the chain again. ‘Animal needs to learn respect. Thanks for catching him, though.’

  ‘He’d been better off if I’d let him go.’

  ‘You have a strange idea of what horses like, if you think it would be better for him to get squished in traffic.’ The man studied her a minute, a shrewd look. He shifted his weight on to his right leg. ‘He’s for sale, you know, you like him so much.’

  Sonora got that wary feeling. ‘I don’t have the kind of life where you can own horses.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s too bad, this ole boy picked you right out. Surprises me that he come right up to you the way he did.’ He brought the horse a few steps closer. Within petting range.

  Sonora reached out a hand and waited. The horse thought about it a long minute, then stretched his nose to touch the tip of her fingers, as if he could not resist her hand any more than her son could resist trying to get the last word in any argument. The horse snorted suddenly, and blew mucus across her arm.

  The man chuckled. ‘They always do that when you’re cleaned up, don’t they?’

  Sonora nodded, and in spite of herself enjoyed being included in a sort of knowing horseman’s camaraderie. She touched the gelding’s neck. She liked the way horses smelled.

  What would she do with a horse? Where would she keep it?

  ‘You could just try him out for a while, you know. If you don’t like him, I’ll take him back.’ The man stood to one side, stroked the horse’s shoulder. ‘He’s awful nice, when he’s not all worked up and scared.’ He shifted his weight to one leg. ‘Now, any horse with a brain’s going to get worked up at an auction. It’s going to be a real shame to take him off to the killers, but I haven’t been able to sell him, what with one thing and another, and I can’t afford to keep him around.’ The man looked at Sonora’s face. ‘It’s humane the way they do it. Over real quick.’

  Sonora felt a heavy sort of depression settle over her shoulders. All these people, this guy, the kid on the gray gelding he clearly loved, all of them seemed to think nothing of sending a horse straight to hell as soon as it became inconvenient. The guy with the mare they were tracking was a red herring. Joelle’s killer would not have bothered to keep the horse alive.

  Except that killers were quirky. And the mare was valuable. And there might be a reason to keep the horse around Sonora hadn’t thought of. He’d gone to the trouble to take it in the first place.

  She looked into the horse’s eyes. Encountered a look of intelligence that surprised her. Take me home. It’ll work out, somehow. Please don’t leave me behind.

  ‘How much?’ she asked. Only curious. No way could she afford to get serious here.

  ‘Well, this fella here is a full-blooded Arabian horse.’

  Sonora nodded, stroking the horse’s neck. ‘Are they good first horses? For beginners?’

  ‘There are as many opinions about that as there are horses and people who ride ’em. I think they are, ’cause they’re so intelligent. And Arabians, you can ride ’em all day, they don’t get tired. They got endurance. Easy keepers, too, live on almost nothing.’

  Sonora looked at the horse’s jutting hips and sunken rump. This one had been living on almost nothing.

  ‘I’d say eight hundred seems fair.’

  The horse in the arena had gone for three hundred.

  ‘Too much,’ Sonora said.

  ‘I guess, seeing that the two of you have bonded, I could go seven
twenty-five.’

  ‘You already said you couldn’t sell him.’

  ‘Killers pay by the pound.’

  Sonora opened her purse. Took out her checkbook and looked at the register. ‘I have six hundred dollars in my checking account and thirty-seven dollars in cash.’

  ‘You give me a check for six hundred, and twenty-five dollars of your cash, and honey, you got yourself a horse.’

  Sonora took a deep breath and tried not to think. There went the grocery money.

  Sonora’s hand shook when she wrote out the check. The man had said she could bring the horse back if she wanted, and she could probably clean him up and sell him herself. He was a full-blooded Arabian – he’d have to be valuable.

  ‘How old is he?’ she asked. She hadn’t had such a mix of Christmas-morning excitement and sheer terror since she’d gotten her first mortgage on a house.

  ‘Oh, about eleven or twelve.’

  ‘What does he eat?’

  The man did not seem the least surprised by her question. ‘Just run him round on a little patch of grass, throw him some hay when the weather gets cold, and a coffee can of grain a couple times of day, he’ll do. Make sure he’s got lots of fresh, clean water.’ He reached into his pocket, handed her a dirty, wrinkled card. The Horseman’s Buddy. ‘You got any questions, he don’t work out and you want to sell him back, you just give me a call. You got a trailer?’

  She nodded and led him to the truck. Wondered if he expected her to put the horse in herself. She would just open that back door and hope the horse went in.

  ‘Nice trailer,’ the man said. ‘You buy it new?’

  ‘It’s not mine. Belongs to a friend.’

  ‘You should’ve been here day before yesterday. Could’ve got you a horse and a trailer in one package deal.’

  Sonora thought of the missing mare. Beardsley, saying he saw a man with a horse and trailer.

  ‘I could use one of my own,’ Sonora said. ‘You buy that one that went through here, I might be willing to take it off your hands.’