by Laura Crum
With all my will, I forced my mind to quit blithering. Stay calm, I told myself, don't panic. How likely is it they have alfalfa hay on Mars?
The thought of the hay, something known and familiar in this frightening blackness, was comforting. I rubbed my nose into it, smelled the sweet, dusty, green smell and tried to ground myself in reality.
It was unnerving not to be able to see, now that the blindfold was off. I was still sure I was in a barn, but what barn and where?
I wondered how long I'd been here. It seemed like forever, but I guessed it might have been for as little as two or three hours. Somehow I felt it was the same night, though again I couldn't be sure. It had been about nine-thirty when I'd left Melissa's; it could be, say, midnight now. If that was right, there would be many more long, dark, cold hours before morning.
Or would my killer step through the door in five minutes?
The thought sent me to rubbing my bound wrists on the nail, but it was soon obvious I was making no progress. Since I couldn't think of any other productive thing, I set myself at getting the gag off the same way I'd gotten the blindfold off. It took a long time. I persisted.
By the time it finally came off I'd been tasting the warm rusty flavor of my blood for a while. Lying still for a second with the gag and blindfold loosely around my neck like scarves, I was aware of my knee aching. Then I started yelling.
At first it sounded like a feeble croak. I sucked more air into my lungs and did my best. "Help! I need help! Come here. Anybody!"
Even in the straits I was in, it was hard to do. I felt ridiculous. But it couldn't hurt, I reasoned, and might help. If my captor had left me gagged, it meant he wanted me quiet. Maybe there was someone, somewhere, within hearing distance, who might come to my aid.
I yelled for a long time, but eventually hope faded. No one answered; no one came. No response of any sort. The barn remained unrelentingly silent. Once, when I stopped to listen, I heard an owl hoot. That was it.
My spirits, which had risen a little, plummeted drastically. Once again tears rose in my eyes as I contemplated the hopelessness of my situation. Nobody was going to help me. I was going to die, I was sure of it.
Frantically I started yelling again. "Help! Please help!" I kept it up, near hysteria driving me.
It was when I stopped to draw a breath that I heard the noise. Bushes crackling, leaves crunching, an irregular crashing in the brush. My whole body tensed and froze and cold reason gripped my mind. Someone was out there. Should I yell again?
I listened intently. Crackle, crunch. Silence. Snap, rustle. Not very far away. Someone or something, I corrected myself. The noises were erratic, haphazard, not the steady tromp, tromp that would be more typical of a human being. Deer, probably-maybe cattle or horses, though I didn't think so. There was none of the thud, thud effect that their heavier bodies were apt to produce.
I tried a tentative "Help!" and all noise ceased for a moment. Then, once again, crackle, crash, as the creature moved through the scrub. I yelled some more, on general principles, but produced no other results. The barn was somewhere remote, then, or at least somewhere where there was brush around it, and deer.
Still, I wouldn't have been left gagged if noise didn't matter. It was an off chance, probably, but the only chance I could see. I began yelling again, forcing myself to shout, "Help! I need help!"
I stopped to listen and heard only silence. Even the deer seemed to have disappeared. I shouted again, listened, shouted, for what seemed like hours, but could have been only minutes. My voice grew sore and my shoulders and knee throbbed agonizingly. Finally I lay still, feeling beaten, my face pressed against the hay, my eyes staring unseeingly at the darkness.
You will not quit, I told myself silently. You will not quit. I opened my mouth to shout again and saw light. Faint, but growing steadily brighter, it came from across the barn, fitful and bouncing, flaring suddenly and then dimming, gradually illuminating an open archway in the barn wall, revealing itself as the round yellow beam of a flashlight.
Hope surged hard in me, followed instantly by fear. For a long moment I lay perfectly still, my eyes fixed on the doorway and the approaching light. Closer, closer, it bounced and jerked until a figure stepped into the barn. In the peripheral glow of the flashlight, I could see the gist of his features under his cowboy hat and my heart dropped to the pit of my stomach.
This, most assuredly, was not rescue. Helplessly I watched the flashlight beam sweep to a spot maybe fifty feet away from me; the spot, I imagined, where I'd been left. Finding nothing, the light combed the barn relentlessly, searching.
There was nowhere to hide, no way to move quickly. My heart pounded as if it would burst from my chest; I strained against my ropes and tried to fight down an intolerable panic. The light was approaching.
It touched my face, blinding me, and I heard a muttered grunt of satisfaction.
Desperately, praying someone else was somewhere around, I screamed, "Help! Come quick!" at the top of my voice.
No response but quick footsteps across the hay and a savage "Shut up, bitch." A boot connected with my jaw and my head seemed to explode.
For a second I saw stars, literally, stars of shocking pain. Blinking my eyes, I willed myself to stay conscious, and stared up at the man above me.
With a wide, mirthless grin, Dave Allison met my eyes. "Now we'll see about you, miss nosy veterinarian."
Chapter TWENTY
It was the face I'd been imagining since I finished my phone calls; my fearful mind pictured him with all the sharp clarity of high noon, though I could barely see him with the flashlight trained in my direction.
Faded hair and skin, belligerent eyes, the strong wiry body of a man in his fifties just starting to sag toward the slackness of old age. Dave Allison. The failed horse trainer.
He reached down and flipped me over roughly, checking to see if my arms and legs were still securely tied, and my very flesh recoiled from his touch, cringing like a sea anemone.
Apparently he was satisfied; shoving me back on my side, he set the flashlight on its end and fiddled with it until it shed a soft diffuse glow rather than a sharp beam-instant lantern. Putting down a pack of some sort that he carried over one arm, he turned back toward me and stared into my face.
"Well now, I guess you were a little too smart for your own good." His expression terrified me. Sharp, eager malice. He was pleased to see me tied up and miserable. It made him feel good.
Desperately I searched the barn for possibilities in the light of the lantern, but drew a blank. It was just an empty barn-no hay bales, no equipment, nothing. Only the loose chaff covering the floor, residue of the alfalfa hay that had once been stacked here. Virtually an endless plain of hay from my point of view on the ground, stretching maybe fifty feet to the wide open archway of the door. Bitterly I noted that I'd probably taken the longest possible route to a wall in my rolling.
Dave Allison prodded me with the toe of his boot. "Did you think you were gonna get me locked up?"
He was gloating. I could hardly believe it. Naked, savage pleasure was plain on his face. I'm not sure what I expected, but not this.
Steeling myself, I croaked, "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't even know who you are."
He kicked me in the ribs, hard enough to hurt, and grinned at the wince I couldn't hide. "Don't bullshit me. I know what you've been doing."
I was silent and he smiled in satisfaction. "And you're not going to be around to keep doing it. I got it all figured out." He looked happy.
His hole, I thought desperately, his hole. His pride. Keep him talking. "Why do you need to kill me?" I tried to keep my voice calm.
"You think I was gonna wait around for you to ruin me? Old Dave's a little smarter than that. You're dead, you stupid bitch. You're not playing any more detective games with me."
He stood looking down at me, the phony good-old-boy mask completely gone. A weak, spiteful child looked out of the faded eyes, but a d
angerous child. A child who could kill.
Fighting down my panic, I kept my tone conversational. "Pretty good scam you pulled off."
He couldn't resist the impulse to brag. "You're damn right. I just collected twenty thousand dollars, and you're not going to get in my way, honey."
Scared as I was, I resented the "honey" and the sneer in his voice, but I managed to trot out a wide-eyed look. "How'd you make it work?"
"Don't you know, with all your poking around?"
"I know Will George rode a ringer at the Futurity, and that you were the one who produced it. You rode the Gus horse for Will."
"Well, I'll be damned. You ain't as smart as I thought you were. Seeing as you'll be dead shortly, though, I'll tell you; Will had nothin' to do with it. Will ain't smart enough to plan a thing like this." Smug satisfaction in his voice.
He seemed to like bragging to me while I was tied up at his feet, beaten and helpless, so I kept it up. "How'd you do it?"
"It was easy. That Gus horse is a solid bay, not a white hair on him. I went back to Texas and found me a good old pony who could really work and looked a hell of a lot like the three-year-old. There were a couple of little things, sure; the old horse had a big scar on his chest, but I got a breast collar that mostly hid it. Will never even looked at the colt the whole time I had it; I knew he couldn't know the difference.
"See, Will didn't like Casey. I guess you knew that. He didn't want to ride a horse Casey trained, so he had me ride him and just got on him at the Futurity. He had no idea he was riding a ringer. Will was my dupe, all right. I put him on the old horse to ride at the Futurity and sent him back home with the three-year-old and he never knew the difference."
It was all too possible, I thought. Will would have had his hands full at the Futurity; he'd probably had upwards of a dozen horses to show, some of which he would have trained himself and been really interested in. He could easily have never looked twice at the horse called Gus.
"So Casey caught you?" I stared up at Dave Allison's still-grinning face.
"That goddamned Casey was a little prick. I was sure as shit glad to kill him, I can tell you. Bastard never did anything but try and make trouble for me. See where it got him."
I remembered Melissa saying that Casey had beat Dave up when he came to get the horse, and recalled Dave's almost taunting glances at Casey at the cutting. Casey had made a worse enemy than he knew.
Dave was rolling now, distracted from whatever his plans were for me, interested in boasting. "I'll tell you, this thing was my idea, all mine, from the very beginning. The horse business is full of crooks; everybody in it is trying to cheat everybody else. If you want to win, you've just got to be the smartest. I used to be an honest horse trainer and look what happened. I was starving. I never made any money. But I figured out how you could make money, and I waited. Waited for the right guy to come along." Dave laughed.
Despite my situation, I almost felt like laughing, too. Dave's view of the world. An innocent horse trainer, trying to make it in a crooked business and having to cheat to survive. No mention that you needed talent and a good horse and willingness to work hard. Dave had apparently wanted an easier system.
"So who was the right guy?" I encouraged him.
"None of your damn business."
The sudden savagery in his tone was startling, and I flinched away as though from a physical blow.
In his watery eyes pure enjoyment showed. He saw me, I could tell, simply as an enemy, a threat. He had no sense of me as a human being, no sense that he was wrong to do this. I would never reach him through appeals to his morals or his pity. The only thing that counted to him was Dave and if I was a danger to Dave he would eliminate me. My best hope was to keep him talking.
"How'd you kill Casey?"
"It was easy. That goddamned Casey called me on the phone, told me he knew I'd given Will a ringer to ride, said he knew why. Said he'd ruin me. Next thing I knew Will called me and said Casey was telling him the horse was a ringer. I smoothed Will down, but I knew I had to do something about Casey.
"I just drove up to that spot where you can see the whole ranch the next morning and waited. I've gathered cattle on that ranch a dozen times in the past year; I know all the trails. When I saw which way Casey was taking that roan mare, I zipped on down the hill and waited for him. Easiest thing in the world to brain him with a rock. I made good and sure he was dead before I left. End of my troubles."
Ducking away from the too-obvious glee he felt in the killing, I asked, "Why'd you poison the horses to begin with?"
"You ain't even figured that out. Well, I had my reasons. But I poisoned a few more of them just to bother that damn Casey. If I'd had any luck at all the fucking cinch I cut would have broken at the right time and killed him. Spared me a lot of trouble."
The childish cruelty in his voice was more frightening than any amount of heavy menace. I made another effort. "Come on, Dave, what'd I ever do to you? Let me go and I'll help you. A vet could be useful."
"I'm not so stupid, honey. You'd get me in the end. Now shut up if you don't want your pretty little face all bruised."
He turned away toward the bag he'd set down, and my mind spun uselessly. I needed something-a lever, a bribe-something to influence him.
I tried the only thing I could think of. "You won't get away with this. I told the cops what I know, and Melissa knows Will rode a ringer. She's the one that told me."
Dave didn't stop rooting in his bag. "I don't think you told the cops anything, honey, because I haven't heard from them. And I sure ain't worried about Melissa." He turned back to me with a wide grin. "Melissa's dead."
Chapter TWENTY-ONE
The shock of it froze me for a long moment. Somehow I believed him absolutely. Melissa was dead and he'd killed her.
"But why?" I finally blurted out. "She didn't suspect you. She wasn't even interested. She wouldn't have pursued it."
"Precautions." He was rummaging in the bag again, getting things out. "A smart man takes precautions and old Dave is no dummy. Who knows what Casey might have told her. I decided I didn't need her running around. Yep, I took care of her today. She's in that truck of his, deader than a stone, in the bottom of a canyon in the Lost Hills. With any luck it'll be spring before someone finds her. And if it's sooner, so what. She took off, like her note says-part of a letter she wrote to her sister, the dumb bitch-took a back road, and got in a wreck. Nobody'll think any different.
"I was just sneaking back up to her place to tidy it up, make it look more like she'd left for good, when I saw you poking around. I watched you; you were a sitting duck in that window, and I figured out soon enough what you were up to, so I loosened all the lug nuts on one of your wheels. If you'd bought the farm in that wreck it would have been no big deal, but since you didn't, I've got other plans for you. People are gonna notice when you're not at the office tomorrow morning. I've got a use for you."
My skin prickled at his words; my mouth felt dry. What was he getting out of the bag? What was he going to do?
I stared at the things he'd set out. My God. An ax, some split kindling, newspapers, a box of matches, lighter fluid and a fire extinguisher. Oh my God. He was going to set the barn on fire. I couldn't believe it. Had to believe it. I stared at the objects on the straw, as mesmerized as a mouse with a snake.
Dave was crinkling up the newspaper. My heart pounded. I could feel clammy sweat in my armpits. I was going to die. Be burned to death.
I found myself hoping he'd knock me out before he did it, and shuddered at the thought of the rushing blackness. The end. End of everything I'd ever known, everything I might have hoped for.
Images flashed into my mind. My parents-would I see them? Lonny-regret for what we would never have, now. Blue and Gunner-who would take care of them?
I wasn't ready to die, my mind screamed. I hadn't lived enough. Stop it, I told myself fiercely. Think. My mind flopped like a jellyfish. Fear was unrelenting. Think. Think.
<
br /> Twigs snapped somewhere outside the barn. For a second my heart leapt wildly in hope and I opened my mouth to yell. Crackle. Crunch. Silence. Deer, I thought, it's just the deer.
Dave was frozen by his pile of kindling, listening. Suddenly, he lunged across the barn and grabbed my hair. Pain shot through my scalp as he jerked my head back and forced the gag up in my mouth. I could smell his breath, feel the heat of his body. Rough stubby fingers jerked the scarf until it cut my lips, then tied it tight.
Crackle. Crash. Corning closer.
Dave stood, listening. I could see the uncertainty on his face. Picking up the flashlight, he adjusted the beam so it was narrow and focused rather than diffuse, and strode out of the barn, the light bobbing away with him.
Blackness reigned. Think. The objects that had come out of the bag. The objects that hadn't been there before. Suddenly, I knew what to do.
Visualizing the barn interior as accurately as I could, I flopped over, rolling toward where I remembered them as being. Not too far away. Maybe ten feet.
Flop. Roll. My face thudded into the hay. I felt no pain, only wrenching anxiety. Twisting, I searched with my face, brushed something hard, splintery. Wood.
The kindling. The ax was next to it. I wriggled, felt the edge of the ax blade with my face, twisted until my wrists were against it, and rubbed furiously, heedless of skin and blood.
Back and forth, back and forth, as much pressure as I could apply. I could feel the ax cutting the rope, but it was slow. Stay away, Dave, I prayed. Please stay away.
One piece of rope gave, then another. I jerked my wrists apart, sat up, grabbed the ax, and started working on my feet.
Too late. A faint light bobbed in the distance. Dave was corning back.
I sawed furiously at the ropes around my ankles. One gave, then another, and I pulled them off. I could see the round yellow circle of the flashlight beam. Too late to run, too late to ambush him as he walked in the door. Gripping the ax, I scrambled to my feet and almost fell.