Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [61]
Here on the lost farm, birds are singing their hearts out and wind ruffles the big-leaf maples. In the distance, cars begin their noisy claim to the country roads, and deep in the valley, a chain saw. Closer, there is the scrape of hooves on the old planks, and the faint ringing of chains in the cross ties. As I gaze through the wide doorway of the barn at the placid Victorian farmhouse, half-sunk in coronas of lavender, my stomach churns. The Branch Davidians believed their spread was a sanctuary, too.
“What’s the mood?”
“Megan is depressed, Stone is high. The kids are staying out of the line of fire.”
“What’s going on with Megan and Stone?”
“She wanted to return these beautiful horses to freedom, and it all turned to shit.”
“Sounds like an opening.”
“She’s a lot more practical. He’s all Action Jackson, flies off the handle.”
“If there’s a wedge between them, drive it.”
“Roger that.”
“Hold on a minute—”
I overhear Donnato speaking sharply to his wife, Rochelle, and wish I hadn’t. It’s the kind of talk that other people shouldn’t hear—the phone tap that blows the cover. If I were married to him, we would sound like that sometimes, too, which kind of kills the fantasy. On the other hand, would I rather be in an air-conditioned bedroom, arguing with a good-looking man in his underwear, or standing in a pile of horse manure?
I turn for solace to Sirocco, a pretty mustang mare with buckskin coloring and a white blanket with black spots on her rear. Three months ago Megan rescued her from a racetrack where she had been a companion horse to Thoroughbreds. She had fallen on the track and broken her hip. She was pregnant at the time and lost the baby. Now she is unrideable, suited only for a pet or the slaughterhouse.
Sirocco is patient with amateurs like me and doesn’t kick while I hide out in her stall. From here, I have good sight lines through the barn doors. Across the road, the tops of the hazelnut trees are still in darkness, but as the sun rises, golden light begins to play across the orchard floor, each rut and groove struck visible, as if a ghostly herd had left a thousand hoofprints filled with shadow. The crows are making a racket, pierced by the engine of Stone’s tractor starting up with an aggressive whine.
“Now is not the time,” Donnato tells his wife. “Can’t you take the kids to school?” Then to me: “Hi, I’m back.”
“What’s the matter, pal?”
“Pressure.”
“How’s her dad?”
“Not good.”
I can hear his tension, but it is nothing compared to the sound of the tractor, like a raging alarm through my nervous system. I am pacing, keeping a lookout through the open doors in both directions. Stone, wearing the battered straw hat, keeps on going back and forth.
I don’t like it. I don’t believe it. Why would Stone give it all up to plod the same rectangle day after day? Why, after those mint-issue Los Angeles mornings, when everything is possible, would you cut yourself off from success? Twenty-five years old, freshly shaven, wearing a starched white shirt and tie, he had to have felt like a hero about to be made—the Smith & Wesson in the shoulder holster, draping his coat on the seat back, Mr. Cool, hanging the handcuffs over the brake pedal in case he had to make a quick move out of the Bu-car.
Why did Dick Stone, “eager to be led in the right direction,” renounce it all and quit, so bitter he went over to the other side? Catching sight of the rig, precisely arcing in the turning space beyond the trees, I am certain of one thing: A cop does not surrender his weapon. Not ever.
“Mike? Are you there?”
Donnato and Rochelle are still squabbling. “All right, I’ll take them. Do they have their lunches?”
Sirocco’s head is hanging lax, eyes shut.