Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mystery series)

by Laura Crum

  "Let's go say hi to Casey," I said, breaking his reverie.

  "Whew," he shook his head.

  "It's hands off as long as I'm around, buddy," I told him firmly. "I'm not up for breaking up a fight."

  Bret gave me an undaunted smile. "I'll have to check her out some other time," was all he said.

  We started toward Casey's trailer, Bret pointing out people as we passed them. "There's Will George."

  Will George proved to be a stocky man in his late fifties with silver gray hair, bright blue eyes and a still-handsome face. He was riding a shiny gold, buckskin stud horse and talking with some men riding next to him; he looked an unlikely villain to me-in fact, he looked disarmingly unlike whatever I had supposed a hotshot national champion trainer to be.

  "He's the big deal in the business?" I said curiously to Bret. "He just looks like another cowboy."

  Bret smiled. "That's his style. He never goes in for a lot of fancy silver on his saddle, or fancy clothes. But he's a big deal, all right. He's won the West Coast Futurity four times in the last eight years. He's the name in the cutting horse business."

  I studied Will George some more as he rode by us. You could see it, if you looked carefully. It was in the way his eyes surveyed the cutting calmly, as if the whole thing belonged to him, in the way the other men seemed to defer to him when he spoke. He was the king.

  He was a good-looking old fart, too, I reflected. I wondered what kind of vibes would be in the air if he, Melissa and Casey all came face-to-face.

  A youngish trainer with all the silver on his saddle Will George lacked reined a gray mare away from the group around Will and rode up to us. "Well, I'll be damned. Bret Boncantini. You here to ask for your job back?"

  Bret grinned. "About the time hell freezes over, Jay."

  The man who spoke was around Bret's age-late twenties-and had pale, almost colorless blond hair under his cowboy hat and light-colored eyes with an inner hardness at variance with the smile on his angular, fair-skinned face. Laughing, he spurred the gray mare hard in the belly and galloped off, war-whooping at a woman trying to control a fractious bay colt nearby. "Stay with him, honey, stay with him," he hollered.

  "That's Jay Holley," Bret explained, "the guy I worked for in Salinas. Don't let him fool you with that goofball routine." He gestured at Jay, who was spurring the gray mare hard enough to cause her to hump her back and crowhop while he fanned her with his chaps, entertaining the crowd. "He's a tough hand, as good as they get. He likes to clown around-it's his routine-but he's dead serious about winning. He went to work for Will George when he was sixteen, started training on his own five years ago, and he's been doing real well. Will more or less sponsored him; everyone calls him Will's protege. He was a son of a bitch to work for, though."

  "Why, he make you actually do something?"

  Bret grinned. "Not when I could help it."

  By the time we reached the trailer, Casey had already swung up on a little blue roan mare that I recognized as Shiloh, and I stopped to admire the picture they made.

  Shiloh was a pretty horse, fine-boned and graceful with a dainty head, and her steely blue-gray color was complemented perfectly by Casey's black chaps and hat. He also wore a bright red shirt and a large glittering trophy buckle, and Shiloh's woven saddle blanket was in shades of gray and black with a red stripe running through it. Her saddle was decorated with a few small silver conchos-enough to look dressy, not flashy.

  "Lookin' good." I smiled up at Casey. "We've come to watch you win."

  "Hope to." Casey's expression was serious. "I damn sure hope to." His gaze drifted through the horses and riders, checking out his known rivals, sizing up the competition. "Better warm this mare up," he said abruptly, wheeling on the words and trotting away.

  Bret's lips twitched as we watched him. "That god-damned Casey is such a go-getter." Bret sounded amused; being a go-getter had never been one of his failings.

  Watching Casey lope Shiloh around the warm-up ring, I felt a faint anticipatory tingle in my stomach, a mere shadow, I realized, of what the riders on the cutting horses must be feeling. I wished suddenly that I were out there on Gunner, getting ready to show him in competition. Maybe someday, I told myself.

  Casey's face was still, almost somber, under his black felt hat as he loped; his attitude seemed businesslike and concentrated. I wondered how much inward pain was concealed under that quiet exterior; surely he couldn't be entirely healed from yesterday's fall.

  Melissa had returned, carrying two cups of coffee, and was standing next to me. "Casey took off, as usual," she muttered. "Anybody want this coffee?" Her eyes moved to Casey as she spoke, and I saw her face stiffen suddenly. "Oh, no," she breathed, "Martha Welch."

  I looked where she was looking and saw a middle-aged woman march into the ring and step directly in Shiloh's path. Without any hesitation she grabbed at the roan mare's bridle, caught it, and jerked the horse to a stop.

  The mare's head flew up in the air, Casey, startled, yelled, "What the hell?" and the woman snapped, loud enough that most people in the ring could hear, "God dammit, Casey Brooks, you've gone too far."

  Chapter SEVEN

  Martha Welch was tall and fit and aggressively made-up, with fire-engine red lips and the type of foundation that hides any clue to the skin beneath it. The tautness in the line of her jaw and the hollows in her cheeks looked unnatural, and the many carats of diamonds on her fingers and hanging from her ears seemed out of place in the warmup arena. Her dark hair was lacquered in stiff waves that prohibited any sort of disorder, and she stared up at Casey with formidably angry eyes.

  "If you think you can kill my horse and just walk away from it, you're wrong," she announced. "I'll ruin you, I swear I will."

  "Looks like you're working on it," Casey snapped back. After his initial surprise, his face had fixed itself into a controlled mask; only his darting, restless eyes gave a clue to his feelings. He reached down and, rather gently, removed his rein from the woman's hand. "I didn't kill your horse, Martha; it's the last thing I wanted to happen." Casey's tone wasn't conciliatory, merely matter-of-fact.

  "You didn't ride him, either." Martha Welch was still on some track of her own. "Just let him stand in the barn and charged me training fees."

  "I rode your horse, just like I rode the others. I can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Casey was firm. "I've got to get ready to show; I'll talk to you later. Alone." And he kicked his horse up into a lope, leaving Martha staring after him.

  "I'll sue you, you bastard." She said it plainly; thirty people must have heard her. Then she stalked back out the gate.

  "The bitch," Melissa hissed.

  "Who was that?" I asked. Bret's eyes looked amused.

  "Martha Welch," Melissa repeated, unnecessarily. "She owned Reno. The horse you had to put down," she added, to me.

  "Oh."

  "That's not why she's mad, though, the lying old bitch." Melissa sounded furious. "Casey called her last night to tell her the horse had died, and he said he'd swear she sounded relieved. She had that colt insured up the ying yang, and she'll collect more for him that way than she could ever have sold him for. He was a real mediocre horse."

  "Maybe she liked him," I said mildly.

  "Not her," Melissa snorted. "She barely ever saw him. She paid a bunch of money for him as an unbroken two-year-old-a hot Futurity prospect, or so she thought. He didn't really pan out-he wasn't that talented-which is mostly how it goes. But Martha couldn't buy that. No way could the great Martha Welch have simply picked a dud. It had to be Casey's fault. She blamed him, said he didn't ride the horse enough. She's just a bitch."

  Melissa gave Bret and me a small, angry smile. "She doesn't care that the horse is dead. I was the only one who liked that colt; he was real sweet, even if he wasn't a world-beater. She's just trying to make Casey look bad, because she's mad at him. I wouldn't be surprised if she collects the insurance money on that horse, makes a profit, and then sues Casey for more mon
ey."

  With a toss of her fluffy golden curls, Melissa stomped off toward Casey, and we could see her talking animatedly up at him as he sat on Shiloh. Casey said little and shrugged a lot. After a minute, Melissa turned away, apparently in a huff.

  The loudspeaker crackled; the first class was announced.

  "Come on," I said to Bret. "Let's go over where we can see. I want to watch these horses work."

  As we walked toward the arena, Bret asked me, "So what did you think of Mrs. Gotrocks?"

  "Mrs. Gotrocks?"

  "Old Martha. Haven't you run into her before? She's been involved with show horses in Santa Cruz County for years. She had a horse or two in training with Jay Holley when I worked for him." Bret chuckled. "She's a dandy. Scads and scads of money-she's the heiress to some kind of timber fortune-and she's tighter than a clam with it. She's been through four or five husbands; she doesn't keep them around any longer than she does horse trainers."

  "I can see why. She looked fierce. But I'm pretty sure I've never seen her before."

  Bret grinned. "She doesn't get along with vets much, either. She's probably had some kind of spat with Jim Leonard years ago, and won't use his office."

  I shrugged. "Well, it's no loss; that I can see."

  We reached the rail of the show ring and I leaned on the fence to watch the horses work, asking Bret occasional questions. A cutting, I discovered, was, generally speaking, remarkably slow watching. A herd of cattle were brought into the ring and "settled" by four horsemen-that is, the cattle were herded up against one fence and the horsemen rode around them and through them until the cattle got comfortable enough with this that they quit trying to break and run. The whole procedure took ten or fifteen minutes, after which the herd was pronounced ready to work.

  Each competitor rode into this herd in turn with two and a half minutes to show what his or her horse could do. The horses were scored between 60 and 80 by a judge who sat in a small elevated booth in the center of the ring. Every horse, Bret explained to me, started out with a 70, to which the judge added and subtracted points as need be.

  The rules for scoring were definite in some ways and ambiguous in others. If a horse let a cow get past him and back to the herd it was an automatic five points off-an easy-to-spot mistake, and lethal in terms of the score. But other things were more subtle-a "miss" meant that the horse had gotten slightly off position; a "hot quit" indicated that the rider had pulled his horse off a cow that was still trying to get by him, rather than waiting until the animal was defeated and turned away; "switching a cow" seemed to mean that while the rider was in the process of selecting one cow out of the herd for the horse to work, he first committed to one and then tried to work another. Most important, a horse could not be guided at all when he worked a cow, and the most common mistake appeared to be "bumping" the bit; a rider would stop his horse with the reins, afraid that the horse wouldn't stop with the cow on his own. All these things resulted in points being taken away from the 70 the horse started out with.

  Points were added more or less at the judge's discretion, it seemed, though Bret explained that a horse was supposed to be given credit for certain things-a high degree of difficulty in the cow, keeping the animal in the middle of the pen, separating it from the herd quietly, etc.

  I watched the horses desultorily when nothing much was going on, intensely when a horse "locked on" to a cow, and took in the whole scene meanwhile. All around us, whenever it veered from the horse that was working, the conversation between cowboy-hatted men and women was of the West Coast Futurity next week-who was going, who wasn't, who had a good horse, who didn't. Will George seemed to be favored to win once again; I wondered if it would be on the horse named Gus that Casey had started.

  When Casey and Shiloh were called, I tuned out the talk around me and concentrated on the scene in front of my eyes-a little blue roan mare walking quietly into a herd of cows. Casey guided her until they had a black brockle-face steer standing by itself, separated from the herd. Then Casey dropped the reins so they hung loosely on Shiloh's neck. It was up to the mare.

  Driven by the herd instinct, the black steer made a tentative stab at getting back to the group; he ran to the right, then darted back to the left. Shiloh stayed with him, blocking him, stopping when the steer stopped, turning when he turned, running when he ran. The reins swung loose; every judgment was Shiloh's own. The steer paused in the middle of the pen-fenced right and left, right and left again, leaping back and forth, head down. Shiloh mirrored him perfectly, dancing back and forth with him, nose inches from the ground, ears pricked forward. Her eyes were filled with what I could only call delight. This mare, like many good cowhorses, loved to work. Little shivers ran up and down my spine.

  The crowd started clapping. I clapped with them; even Bret gave a war whoop. Casey cut a second cow that was a runner, and Shiloh ran and stopped for all she was worth. Dirt clods rattled against the fence as she slid into the ground and jumped out again the other way. The cow kept driving hard, but the mare never weakened, and when the buzzer sounded to indicate the end of the two-and-a-half-minute cutting run, the whole crowd broke into loud applause and the judge marked a 74, easily the highest score all day. Casey was beaming as he rode out of the ring.

  I turned to go offer congratulations, and found Casey in the warmup pen, sitting on Shiloh and talking to two men, one of whom I recognized as Ken Resavich. The other I'd never seen before. Casey's expression looked stiff to me.

  I approached the group tentatively, not wanting to intrude, but Casey saw me and gave me a wide grin, waving me over.

  "Congratulations," I told him. "That was wonderful; I'm sure you won the class."

  "It's not over till the fat lady sings," Casey said, but he sounded confident. "Gail, you know Ken Resavich, right? Gail McCarthy; she's our vet."

  Ken and I nodded politely at each other, and he smiled a small, formal smile. He looked every inch a businessman in slacks and a lightweight sport jacket; he certainly didn't look like a farmer. I imagined that farming, at his level, involved sitting at a desk and making decisions on which millions of dollars rested. His formality seemed slightly ridiculous here at the cutting, where the uniform was jeans.

  The man next to Ken Resavich smiled widely and appraisingly at me, and I smiled politely back, but nobody made a move to introduce us.

  Casey was talking to Ken again, and the other man's eyes swung back to the conversation. In his mid-fifties, with a worn-out-looking face, he had red hair that was fading to gray and fair skin deeply lined and blotched by age and weather. The expression in his eyes was somewhere between aggressively friendly and aggressively belligerent.

  "Yeah, we need cattle," Casey was saying to Ken Resavich now. Casey's eyes were directed firmly away from the stranger.

  Ken's eyes moved over to him, though, and he asked, "Can you bring them this week?"

  "Sure, I can bring you cattle this week, buddy." The redheaded man spoke directly to Casey, with an underlying tone I couldn't place.

  Casey's eyes flashed at him, but he still didn't say a word.

  Ken Resavich, seeming to ignore or be oblivious to all of the undercurrents, said, "Fine. We'll expect twenty fresh head this week."

  "Sure thing." The stranger gave Casey a short, almost taunting smile, and turned away. "I'd better be going. Got to get those cattle rounded up for Casey."

  He walked off and got into a flashy, two-toned red dual-wheel pickup, one of the fanciest rigs in the field. Melissa strolled up to our little group just as he jockeyed it out of its parking place and drove away.

  "Who was that?" I asked her curiously, drawing her aside.

  She glanced at the departing pickup and frowned. "That's Dave Allison." Glancing quickly at Casey she whispered, "Casey doesn't like him."

  "So I gathered."

  "He works for Will George a lot. He's the one that came to pick up Gus that day; he and Casey got in a fight. Ken's been buying cattle from him."

  She
focused on the conversation between Ken and Casey, which appeared to be about a horse Ken was thinking of buying. I noticed Ken hardly looked at Shiloh, never stroked her shoulder or rubbed her forehead. Wondering what drove him to be in the horse business-he certainly didn't appear to love horses-I wandered off in Bret's direction.

  He ambled over to meet me; he'd been chatting with his ex-employer, Jay Holley. "Jay thinks that Shiloh mare is the best novice horse he's seen in years," Bret said as he walked up.

  "She sure looked great to me," I agreed, "though I don't know much about it. Who's Dave Allison?" I asked him curiously.

  Bret laughed. "Oh, old Dave. Dave's your classic failed horse trainer. He used to be a big name in the business, so they say. That'd be before my time. The boys tell me he'd let all the horses stand in the barn for weeks and never ride one. Too busy drinking and chasing girls." Bret grinned. Drinking and chasing girls were his normal occupations. "Then, when a show would come along, Dave'd get the horses out and try to tune them up the day before. Eventually people quit sending him horses. He more or less works for Will George these days, I think."

  "He works for him?"

  "Will gets so many horses he sends the ones he isn't crazy about to other trainers to ride-for half the training fees. That's what Dave is these days-a hired boy for Will. He raises cattle, too. But he did used to be a big name."

  "He sure drives a fancy truck."

  "The bank probably owns it." Bret grinned his impish grin. "All these trainers are big on keeping up with the Joneses. Every single one of them has to have just as big and fancy of a dually pickup as the next guy, even if they're about to go broke."

  I smiled at Bret's irreverence and looked back at the little group surrounding Casey. They were moving in our direction, Casey riding Shiloh and talking to Ken, Melissa following them. Jay Holley rode by and called a comment I didn't catch; Casey responded with a wild "Hoo-aw" and a wide grin.