Gargantuan_ A Ruby Murphy Mystery - Maggie Estep [39]
I was enjoying my chat with her but I needed to get some Bureau work done. I didn’t want to be abrupt with Lucinda though.
“Well,” I said, leaving it at that.
She had her hands tucked into the front pockets of her jeans and she brought them out now. She started picking at one of her cuticles, frowning as she stared down at it.
After an awkward few seconds she looked up at me.
“What are you doing later?” she asked.
There it was.
“Well,” I said carefully, “I think I have to do some work at home.”
She looked embarrassed.
“Okay,” she shrugged, then abruptly turned and walked away.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning? You’re gonna ride Karma?”
“Yeah,” she called out, without turning back.
I watched her walk away. She was narrow but muscular and moved with a slight stiffness that I guessed was a result of her accident. I noticed a groom from the next shedrow staring after her.
I felt badly for putting her off, but the truth was I did actually have work to do. The Bureau had sent me here to look into a sponging epidemic. Sponging was a particularly evil trick involving slipping tiny sponges up racehorses’ nostrils before races. Basically impossible to detect unless you had the veterinarian dig up there. It’s not like it had a fatal impact on the horses, just impeded their breathing enough to make them run lackluster. Could demoralize the hell out of a poor horse. And, of course, cause some pretty big upsets in the outcome of a race. It pissed me off—as did anything involving people doing shitty things to horses. I wanted to get to the bottom of it for the sake of the horses and the fairness of the game. The Bureau itself was wearing thin on me though. The horse-related assignments were great, but the rest of the Bureau business I could live without. For the most part, it was just boring as hell. And now it had pulled me away from a girl I’d wanted to try going the distance with. I’d had to pack up, put on a new identity as one Sam Riverman, former Xerox salesman, and come down here, to Florida.
I decided to give each of my horses a quick grooming. I rubbed Clove some more and then did the other two, Karma Police and Mike’s Mohawk. None of them were particularly noteworthy specimens of the thoroughbred breed—although I liked all three of them just fine. They were close to bottom of the barrel claimers but they were all three sweet, well-intended horses. Which was good since I was not only training them but cleaning their stalls, feeding, watering, and grooming them as well as walking them off after their workouts. The Bureau had dropped enough money for me to have a few horses but not enough to hire any help, apart from riders.
I finished grooming Mike and put him away. I was planning to spend the next hour or so attempting to get chummy with Roderick, head groom for Giovanni Corso, one of the trainers who, I was pretty sure, was up to no good. Roderick, a huge redheaded fellow, was slow. Developmentally challenged. Whatever the correct lingo was. I didn’t think he was actually in on any of his employers’ shady activities but I thought I might be able to learn something if I could befriend him.
Before heading over to Corso’s shedrow, I stepped into the tiny office I shared with two other trainers. Those two had both already headed home for the day since, unlike me, they could afford to pay someone to feed their string at night.
I walked into the sour, windowless office and turned on the overhead fluorescent. I glanced into