Dead Blow

by Lisa Preston

  Doll, he called her. Oh, dandy.

  She didn’t much look like a doll to me, but what do I know about dolls? Dolls and me broke up as soon as I discovered horses. I don’t know how old I was exactly but it was before figuring out how to read. Way, way before boys.

  Tall Doll brushed aside long brown bangs hanging shaggy over her eyes and winked at me as she passed by on her way to the ladies’. Older than me by maybe five years, she wore those lace-up riding boots that gave her extra height and let me figure her for someone who spent time in a saddle, since the boots were scuffed in all the right places to show stirrup wear. This gal was horse people. Obviously, she used someone other than me for a shoer, but maybe she was from elsewhere in the county since I didn’t think I’d seen her around town. And I’d been thinking lately, what with growing new roots here in Butte County in general and Cowdry in particular, that a friend would be a nice addition. Guy and I need people to invite to our wedding, though we’re not planning it quite yet.

  A real friend, a girlfriend, that’s something that might be a good thing to have.

  She’d have to be a rider, of course, to be my new best friend.

  In the mirror, I saw Fred Flintstone out in the parking lot. He opened up the big Ford truck, letting me view the Paso Pastures sign on the door. And I realized Wolf Eyes took it in, too. Something in her shoulders relaxed as she rose to come take a seat on the empty stool next to me.

  “Melinda. Melinda Kellan.” She hitched her chin in greeting.

  I’m five-foot-six on a tall day and I’d say we measured the same. This Melinda’s muscles probably resulted from lifting lead, not honest-earned by hefting an anvil and shaping steel.

  Guy set a meal in front of me and headed off with a couple of vegetable sides for another table. I wanted to get after my new job—chowing down—with a good business-like attitude, but then I recollected where I’d seen this Melinda Kellan before. And I bet now that I remembered, I was blanching like Guy’s vegetables. I felt as smart as a carrot.

  She was the police clerk who took something from me during that unfortunate misunderstanding a while back.

  My fingerprints.

  “You work at the Sheriff’s office. The little one out here in Cowdry. You’re the one who fingerprinted me.” Butte’s a small county but Cowdry’s a pretty good ways from the county seat, so there’s just a small deputy force out here, with office space in the strip mall near the grocery store. I’ve been needing to check in with them, to see if I’ll have to testify. I can never remember the investigator’s name. I always thought of him as Suit Fellow.

  Melinda Kellan squinted at me all this time I jabbered and recollected. I figured she ought to be able to help me out.

  “What’s that guy’s name, you know, the investigator?” I waved my hands to help her understand.

  She smirked, said a name that flew in my left ear, sprinted across the open prairie of my mind, and fell out my right ear. Then she nodded. “He’s retiring soon.”

  I hate it when people answer a question that didn’t get asked, not lingering on the one that wanted good answering. Do I really have to see Detective what’s-his-name and will he make me go to court? I wanted to scream, but I kept my mouth very shut.

  “Will you do something for me?” Melinda Kellan spoke like she wasn’t asking, more telling. “Will you let me know if anything, anything at all, strikes you as not fitting while you’re at the Chevigny place?”

  Made me itch to say something like, “Sure, I’d be happy to spy on my new client—a widow at that—for you, you bored little clerk.” Instead, I studied her, trying to get my eyeballs and brain moving instead of my mouth. Melinda Kellan wore running shoes. She’s not horse people. I turned away from the little inquisitor, bit my burger and made eye contact in the mirror beyond. “You ride?”

  Kellan shook her head.

  “Ever make hay?”

  She grinned. “Not in the way you mean.”

  Bristling and not liking her sin-uendo, I turned a little red. I guess I’m a bit of a prude. It figured that she didn’t ride and didn’t get how tough and dangerous the work of making food is. I don’t mean making food like Guy, in a kitchen. I mean making it like Donna Chevigny does, like her departed husband Cameron had. Making feed for cattle and tending those cattle ’til they’re ready for slaughter and—

  “So, I don’t ride. What about it?”

  Then Melinda Kellan went quiet as the tall rider sauntered back from her powder, taking the long walk across the restaurant in her sweet time.

  There’s horse folk and then there’s everybody else. With plenty of people, I can peg ’em for what kind of horse they’d be if they’d been blessed born. Guy, for example, would be a Thoroughbred, though a palomino. Sometimes I can tell more than the breed, I’d know how good the legs and feet would be and what kind of an attitude is in the eye. It’s not always a good thing, this gift of mine. There’s some people I don’t take to, but everybody I cotton to shows up in my mind as a horse. Not Melinda Kellan though. She wasn’t one of us.

  Tall Doll and I made eye contact in the mirror as she passed behind me this time. I winked. We had an instant connection. She would be an Appendix Quarter Horse, with good feet, if she were a horse.

  Tall Doll, my new friend, paused and said, “Watch yourself at the Chevigny place.”

  Turning my stool all the way around, I faced the Tall Doll.

  She made a wry, friendly face then dropped her tone low enough to keep it between us. “Some folks thought she caused Cam’s funeral. You could end up in the ground just like he did.”

  Chapter 2

  WHEN I GOT TO THE BUCKEYE before dawn on the first day of working for Donna Chevigny, two chestnut Quarter Horses stood saddled, with halters over their bridles. They looked to be decent, working horses, a good many weeks into their shoeing cycles. Lead ropes that probably didn’t need to be there tethered these good old boys to the hitching rail by the water trough. Both horses had a hip cocked, resting one hind hoof on the toe. The saddle on one gelding was an old fat-horned Wade with scarred fenders. The other horse’s saddle was older still, with a way-high cantle and bucking rolls that would curve over the rider’s thighs. Easy to stay in a saddle like that, but I’d sure hate to have to get clear of it in anything like a hurry.

  Donna was thinner than I’d remembered from seeing her a few times at the Co-op, our local feed store. Her jeans were baggy enough to be inconvenient and her hair had grown shaggy past her shoulders. With most every word, her mouth pursed and puckered, leathery skin showing she’d forgotten to slather shortening on her face in a good while. As much as I’m in the sun and wind, I’ll be looking a whole lot like Donna if I don’t start greasing my skin. Guy doesn’t keep Crisco in the house, so I’ll have to use his coconut oil or olive oil or some such.

  Batwing chaps went on, covering Donna’s baggy jeans and slopping over the toes of her roper-style boots. Neither of us wore spurs, but with gloves stuck in the front string of her chaps and a straw hat on, she looked more like a hand than me with my open top visor and no gloves. My boots aren’t the cowboy kind. After my California mama gave me these Blundstone boots, I discovered they’re a big thing for English riders. That’s okay, since I have clients who use those little saddles, too. And the boots are great, supportive and comfy.

  Still, even though I wasn’t dressed the part, this ranch work felt right to me and I really hoped this shoeing account would be a keeper. Zing. A bit of fur flew by a foot off the ground, ending in a four-paw skid behind the water trough outside the barn doors.

  “What was that?”

  “An idiot,” Donna said, then called to the dog. “Slowpoke, settle down.”

  Slowpoke wiggled out from his hiding place. He looked like the twenty-pound result of an orgy involving every dog breed in existence. He also looked delighted beyond measure that a horse ride was about to happen, dying to know if he was invited.

  Donna had some good, roomy saddlebags behind
both horses’ saddles and we packed my gear into them without dilly-dallying about it. I’d brought some size aughts and size two shoes, too, just in case she wasn’t as squared away as she thought about every one of her horses having all size one hooves. Ranch outfits sometimes like to simplify things and maybe squeeze a horse onto a shoe too small or wangle a too-big shoe onto a small hoof. The only squeezing I wanted to do was getting all the gear into the bags and we did fine as frog’s hair.

  Then Donna strapped on a rifle scabbard and slid a shotgun—a big mother, twelve gauge, I’d reckon—into place on her old rancher saddle.

  I’m actually not a gun handy kind of girl, which is my mama’s fault, nervous nelly about the gadgets that she was and is. My gun-learning should have happened when I was living with my ranch-hand daddy in Texas, but that must have been a battle mama won with him, because he kept me clear of revolvers and rifles when I lived with him. Now I turned away from the weapon to the open country of still-dark pastures beyond the Buckeye barn. I wondered what she expected to encounter.

  “Packing some extra hardware?” I said.

  “That shotgun is the only artillery we’ve ever had,” Donna said with a shrug. “Cameron always carried it with buckshot and slugs in the backcountry.”

  She swung up ahorseback, so I did likewise and we moved easy as our eyes got better at the low light, her mutt tagging along. Donna carried her reins in her left hand. It’s the right way to ride as it keeps us normal, non-Lucifer-possessed people with our right hands free to rope and shoot.

  Early sun eked out of cracks in the clouds, making pink and orange strips in the sky that reached out to kiss the few tree tops. I felt pretty pleased to be there, astride, feeling the powerful motion of a good horse beneath me. As we trotted out through hock-high orchard grass, Slowpoke ran laps around us.

  From the back pasture, the Buckeye land dropped across a big dry wash then rose again in a long slow way that made for good hay growing as water would neither collect too bad nor run off too fast. The fields went on for a couple of hundred acres, easy.

  With more saddle time, we came to a sharp ravine running across the whole ranch like a scar, separating hay fields from rougher ground beyond.

  Enough daylight was up by then to see the steepness. The ravine was serious, but the strong horses under us sat back on their haunches, picked their way down the fifty-foot cut, crossed the bottom then climbed back up. The land swept away, rockier. A wire fence came into view a couple hundred feet off and I realized we’d almost reached the back of the Buckeye. The rough pasture we were in, though not hay-growing heaven, offered enough forage to sustain the dozen or so milling horses.

  We rode toward a little pole corral, Donna jiggling a small sack of oats. The loose horses got curious enough to head our way.

  The sprawling acreage on this far side of the ravine was split in two sections by the skinny reach of a hogback hill that ran almost to the drop off we’d just climbed. That sudden humped ridge looked like a finger pointing at the ravine. Taut electric wire ran up the center of the hogback on our right, but to the squinting eye, it was the natural hogback that marked a divvying point between us and the east field. The electric cross-fencing up the hogback ran all the way up to an open machine shed at the top of the little ridge. The land behind the shed had to be the grazing lease, federal dirt, marked by barbed wire where the Buckeye land ended. Cattle dotted the slope back there, absorbing the attention of Donna and her dog.

  She sighed. “I’ll have to get them brought in within the month.”

  I pointed at her pooch, who bristled, staring up the hill. “Can he herd?”

  “He can’t do anything but get in the way.”

  * * *

  The day came up with a plan. Clear weather like this makes for cool nights but real hot noons. A tractor rusted away at the base of the hogback, though the machine should have been parked under cover. If the shed was empty, it would offer shade to work under.

  But, no. Donna dismounted and tied her riding horse at the failing pole corral. By the time she haltered the first loose horse, I had my gear set up. Then my mind was on nothing but balanced hooves for hours. Because she wouldn’t actually be working these boys like cow horses, I left them more room in the heels, enough to support them and leave them room to grow.

  As I leaned on my shoe shaper’s handle again and again in quick motions of rounding toes and turning heels, Donna commented.

  “Newfangled, that gadget. But it is the quietest shoe bending I’ve ever heard.”

  “Yep. A Pocket Anvil is a nifty tool.” Only the sound of tails swishing, nostrils blowing, rasping and nailing. Cold shoeing all day also meant no burnt hoof scent in my hair for Guy to wrinkle his nose at tonight.

  “Can’t level a bent shoe with it though, can you?”

  I showed her how I could make a try at it, moving the shoe ninety degrees in a way that would let me pressure it if it wasn’t already flat. “With a bad bent shoe, I’d just start over with a new shoe.”

  Her silly dog offered up sticks and cow pies, hoping for a game of fetch or keep away. I was on the second horse when Donna said, “Might be too late to start over.”

  That came from nowhere and no-how for me, so I let it pass, worked her horses, dripped sweat. We had enough to agree on and didn’t need anything else.

  Donna knew her stuff, it’s just that her stuff’s from an old tradition. She knew her horses too. I could have stretched to setting them up all in size one shoes, with a couple fit tight, a couple with a bit too much room, and a couple needing the heels beveled off so they didn’t cover the commissures of the frog and make picking out more of a chore. But I nailed on some size aught and size two horseshoes that day and was glad I’d hauled them.

  Just before I started the fourth horse, I swallowed a bottle of water Donna offered and wiped my mouth on my sleeve, looking out toward the hogback. Definitely a two-sided shed up there, looked to be some equipment in it but surely it had some room available under a roof.

  Shade.

  We were stuck under the sun and pretty well cooked when we could have worked under a covered area. Summer time, shoeing’s always a Stand There and Chat for the horse owner, but a lot of worked muscles and sweat rolling off the nose for the shoer. Even when it’s cooler weather, I’ve been dripping and glowing while my clients hold a lead rope, snuggled up in a jacket. So, it’s not like clients think about it and notice, like I do, that one of the two of us is warm from work. But it was extra hot today. I was back under a horse again, working hard to get half the herd done in a day.

  “Rainy, sorry. Damn shame it’s so hot.” Donna shook her head a long while later. “This spell of weather we’re having.”

  “Yes’m,” I said, itching for the part where she noticed we didn’t have to slow roast.

  She rubbed her eyebrows. “So much to get done. Haying. Fixing. Herd dispersal. These geldings being shod might help sell them.”

  “Maybe we could go up there next time,” I said, jerking a thumb over my shoulder toward the shed and its salvation from the sun.

  “So much to get done,” she muttered again.

  Donna half-turned toward that hogback crowned by the shed. “Got to bring those cattle in and they’ll be getting a little raunchy by now. I’ve left them untended on the lease land. Got to sell these horses. Neighbor tells me Cameron made a handshake deal on these back pastures before he died, so he’s buying it out from under me. Late on the second hay cutting. I’ll be late on the third. Got gear and fences that need mending.”

  We both swallowed at her list. I got myself a brilliant idea on bringing in her rough cattle.

  “They dog-broke?” I asked. No sense getting Charley clobbered.

  “What’s that, dear?” Donna was awful distracted.

  “Are those cattle dog-broke?”

  “They’re probably not too awful wild.” She squinted at the lease land and frowned, finally paying attention. “You got a dog can move them? We’d hav
e to go over to that shed to bring ’em in. It’s a run-through, the back end’s a big gate. That’s what we use to bring the cattle off the federal lease land.”

  I was finished with the fifth horse and felt half baked. I was about to beg that we make use of the shed next time.

  “Fact is,” Donna began and faltered. She gave me a worn smile over granola bars and more water chugging. “I ought to get some bosals and braided reins out of the shed. Stuff’s going to ruin and rot in that place.”

  Her tractor didn’t have much business being out in the open either, I figured. I wondered how long it’d sat where it was through winter rains and summer sun. If it would start after being idle, driving it back up the hogback and into the shed should have been easy enough. Then I realized I might be looking at the tractor that killed her husband. I felt terrible.

  “We can pack a bit more stuff back to your barn.” I planned to tie the extra gear to our saddles, turn the good horses we rode into moving storage units.

  Good thing I was around Donna hours and hours that day, seeing as how it took her time to move a conversation along. I’d finished the sixth horse and had forgotten what we’d left off talking about when she asked, “Do you think you’d mind?”

  “Mind?” I packed my gear, too tired to think. I had a notion she was asking me to behave or watch over something. I tell Charley to mind a gate when I leave it open. No horse or cow’s ever come through a pass when my little dog’s minding the opening.

  “Do you think you’d mind going up to the shed,” Donna asked, “and fetching those things for me now? And maybe next time bring your dog, move the cattle?”

  “We’ll get it done,” I promised, feeling good to help her out and for being deep into this job. Charley’s at least middle-aged, not a young squirt like Slowpoke, so it would be quite a long trot to get out here from where Ol’ Blue sat parked back at her barn, but he’d have hours to rest while I finished the shoeing. “Shouldn’t take Charley long to get them pushed through a gate. There’s no cattle in this piece we’re in?”