Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [65]
“Is being in Delta Force like the movies? Secret missions, all that jive?”
“I don’t know about that. Delta Force was good to me, but right now, I’m going back to the only thing that makes sense, which is horses.”
I watch him clean the weapon. He is meticulous, patiently running a bore brush and guide rod from the back of the barrel toward the front. That’s how the pros do it.
“You ask about cowboyin’?” he says, concentrating on the gun. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s livin’ in some itty-bitty trailer on the back of someone’s property out near the dump, being treated like dirt, getting into a fight with the boss because he’s some rich guy who doesn’t know dog doo about cutting horses, and then moving on after six months. But I figure whatever low-rent job they throw at me, I’ll do it if it makes me a better horseman.”
“I’m taking care of a horse.”
“Is that right?”
“Just learning how. I live on the hazelnut farm. Do you know Megan Tewksbury and Julius Emerson Phelps?”
He loads the cooler into the truck.
“No, but I heard the names from that other little girl lives over there.”
“Sara?”
He is latching up the doors of the Silverado.
“That’s right. She’s the one I was teaching how to shoot.”
“How do you know Sara?”
“Seen her around town. Told her my sorry story, just like I told you.” He shrugs. “And she says she wants to learn about guns.”
“She say why?”
“I never asked.”
“We’re…political, you know.”
“Not my business. So maybe we’ll meet up again. Stranger things have happened.”
I hesitate. “Did I say thank you, Sterling?”
“For what, Darcy?”
“Saving my life.”
“Back at the corrals? Nah, you were fine. Horses don’t generally want to kill you, if they can avoid it.”
McCord’s got the door open and one boot up on the running board.
He waits. Again, the patience as one wrist in a tight copper bracelet rubs at the back of his sweat-stained neck. His hair is spiky and dirty blond; his eyes, like the bracelet, are rimmed with copper, green at the centers.
“Can I give you a ride?” he asks as someone shouts, “Sterling! Wait!”
Sara Campbell, in a pair of cheeky cutoffs and a scant top, charges around the curve in the road, running in her awkward knee-knocking gait. Her face is flushed persimmon. She falters.
“Sara!” he calls. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh my God!” she sobs.
We both run toward her. I’m thinking, Dehydration! And, with a jealous edge, Something’s going on between these two.
She is panting. “I was hoping you’d still be here.”
“What’s the matter, hon?”
“On my way back, I saw a baby horse. It’s in the bushes—hurt really bad—and there’s sickening blood just pouring everywhere.”
“Blood where?”
She screws up her face. “Coming out of his eyes.”
“Get in the truck,” says McCord.
Twenty-one
The terrain rises and the vegetation becomes sparse as we roll out of the power station toward the mountains. Looking back from higher ground, you can see the cat’s cradle of high-tension wires and transformers enclosed by manzanita, like an alien marker on a planet made of sand; only in America could there exist a sanctuary both for birds and bullets.
Wheeling the vehicle with the palm of one hand, McCord swerves off-road to the riverbed where Sara saw the foal, east of where I crossed the wooded stream. The bulky black machine raises veils of dust as it lurches over the sandstone grist of an ancient floodplain, no doubt fertile as a jungle a million years ago.
“What does it mean if a horse bleeds from the eyes?”
“Snakebite,” says McCord. “The venom is an anticoagulant. They bleed out from everywhere.”
“Can they die?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Down there!” cries Sara.
McCord brings the truck to the edge of a ridge. We scramble out, into the kind of baking heat you feel with all the skin on your body all at once. A sun-dark lizard skitters at our feet. Below, a stand of cottonwoods marks the trail the river took, but since the