Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mystery series)

CUTTER

LAURA CRUM

CUTTER. Copyright © 1994 by Laura Crum. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First edition: August 1994 I098765432 I

Table of Contents

Chapter ONE

The phone jerked me awake at seven o'clock on Saturday morning. Fumbling on the bedside table, I wondered who in the hell could be calling me at this hour on my day off.

"Yes?"

"Gail, it's Casey. Casey Brooks. Half the horses in my barn are colicked. Two are dead already and Jim's off on another call. Can you come?"

"I'll be right there."

The stress in Casey's voice, as much as his words, galvanized me out of bed as if I'd been stuck with an electric cattle prod. Jim was my boss-and officially on call today-but an emergency of such catastrophic proportions shattered my resentment at having my free time interrupted. Grabbing a baggy blue sweatshirt, I pulled on some jeans and boots and glanced in the mirror as I went by. My shoulder-length dark hair bounced and waved wildly in an effect a punk-rock star might have envied, but there wasn't time to fix it now. I slammed out of the house, jumped in my truck, and pulled out of my driveway with a slight chirp of tires on pavement, my mind on Casey Brooks.

I'd met Casey about a year ago, shortly after I'd moved back to my hometown of Santa Cruz, California, to take my first job as a practicing veterinarian. It had been an encounter of an oddly picturesque intensity; Casey was half hidden in a blur of dust, pushing cattle down a crowding alley; I could just make out the shape of a cowboy hat and hear his yell-"Hoo-aw."

Standing by the arena fence, I'd watched the cattle move slowly down the alley and into the pen. The whooping shape behind them rode out of the cloud-a tall denim-clad figure on a little roan mare. He carried a rope, which he was twirling lazily at the heels of the last few steers, and he looked me over without comment and kept on about his business, pushing the steers into a corner and loping the roan mare back and forth in front of them. He didn't acknowledge me in any way.

Now I'm not unfamiliar with the semi-hostile, passive-aggressive behavior displayed by some of the good-old-boy types toward women-and I'm not particularly patient with it. After waiting another polite minute for him to stop and greet me and being ignored, I'd opened the arena gate and marched in. When I'd walked far enough that I was actually in his way, he'd pulled his horse up.

"If you're from Will George, you can go to hell." He said it almost pleasantly.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I told him, slightly startled. "I'm from Santa Cruz Equine Practice. I was called out here to see a sick horse. I'm the new vet," I added, as some people didn't tend to assume it.

He'd stared at me from under the brim of his hat, his face showing an emotion that was hard to place. It was a mobile, expressive face-the features were nondescript and unremarkable, like his brown eyes and hair, but the sense of intensity that came from him was palpable. I couldn't imagine what was going through his mind.

"You're not from Will," he said finally.

I shook my head, still mystified, but before I could speak he went on. "The son of a bitch is trying to put me out of business." Then he looked straight at me and his face changed. Instantly he was laughing. "You're the new vet?" A long wolf whistle. "Best looking vet I ever saw."

I had to smile. His laugh was so goofy-sounding it was infectious. "Yeah, I'm the vet. Gail McCarthy. And you're ... ?"

"Casey Brooks." And he held out his hand.

Casey Brooks had turned out to be an original. He trained cowhorses, I'd discovered, but that was only part of what I thought of as his mystique. In some deep, quintessential sense, Casey was that legendary being-the trail-driving cowboy of the old West.

I'd been around the western horse world, at least in a peripheral way, ever since I'd done my graduate work at U.C. Davis, near Sacramento in California's Central Valley-an area where Wrangler jeans and cowboy hats are the height of style. Cutting horse trainers and bridle horse trainers, team ropers and plain old ranch cowboys are still a dime a dozen in the Central Valley, and I'd known plenty of them, but Casey was different. In his entirely independent, oddly fearless spirit I recognized something of which John Wayne was but a Hollywood version; Casey, unlike most men who sported a cowboy hat, neither admired nor evoked nor imitated an image: he was its essence.

Despite or maybe because of his sometimes awkward disregard for conventional politeness, Casey and I had gone on to become friends. He'd been instrumental in helping me to acquire my horse, Gunner, a three-year-old Quarter Horse gelding, royally bred to be a champion cowhorse, who'd been given to me when he severed a suspensory tendon. The owner, a client of Casey's, had been all for putting the horse down; between us Casey and I had convinced him to give the colt to me to be (hopefully) rested into a full recovery. That was six months ago now, and at some point in the interim I'd given Casey my home phone number, which was why he'd been able to reach me this morning. Normally my day off was sacred, but this, this sounded like a full-blown disaster.

Half of his horses were colicked. That meant ten or so horses had gotten sick all at once. Colic is a generic term for any sort of digestive disturbance in a horse, and there were dozens of possible causes, but it was unusual for a whole barn full of horses to get sick at the same time. Moldy hay, I speculated, or the water system had failed.

Rolling the window down, I let the crisp, cool early morning air pour into the truck. It was late September and we'd been going through an Indian summer-sunny days that were much warmer than the real California coastal summer, which is often foggy and cold.

Wind ruffled my already wildly tangled hair as I admired the clear blue curve of the Monterey Bay, spread out before me from my vantage point on Highway 1, halfway between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. Santa Cruz sits up at the northern cusp of the bay, a small and still picturesque resort city, though somewhat damaged by the Lorna Prieta earthquake of I989. The area south of Santa Cruz, where I was headed, is mostly rural, dominated by the agriculturally oriented city of Watsonville.

Watsonville has none of Santa Cruz's charm. Set in the middle of the Pajaro Valley, it lacks beaches, wharves, and boardwalks, has few buildings of gingerbread quaintness to interest the vacationer. Though the city suffered equal damage in the I989 earthquake, there was little agonizing over the destruction of its old structures. Watsonville is a practical, unimaginative town which was built for one purpose-to provide housing and services for the people who farm the fertile Pajaro Valley.

Field after field of vegetables and strawberries blanket that valley and produce uncountable wealth for a few and work for many. Generations of immigrant farm workers have bent over the fields: Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and, most recently, Latinos have provided a labor force for the land and brought their varied cultures to Watsonville. Some, particularly the Japanese, have evolved into landowners, but in the main ownership (and wealth) are held by a smallish group of European-derived folks-Italians, Germans, Swiss, Slavonians, a few English.

Indian Gulch Ranch, where I was headed, was owned by one of these old-money land barons, a third-generation Slavonian named Ken Resavich, one of the many "ichs" whose grandparents or great-grandparents came from Yugoslavia and settled in Watsonville. Ken owned and farmed five hundred acres in the Pajaro Valley, primarily raising lettuce and cabbage, and had more money than I'd know what to do with.

Casey Brooks worked for Ken as a resident trainer-Ken's hobby being cowhorses-and was allowed to train other people's horses on the side to supplement his income. It wasn't an uncommon arrangement; few horse trainers could make enough money working on their own to survive the high cost of living on the California coast.

Taking the Spring Valley exit off the freeway, I threaded my way through the shopping centers, gas stations and chain restaurants of Watsonville's suburban sprawl, and headed inland, driving the speed limit. Hills closed in around me, their flanks round and golden with dried grass, the creases filled with dark green live oaks and redwood trees. Patches of flat ground planted in apple orchards whizzed by, and the rushing air smelled of apples and wood smoke, the faint and indescribable fragrance of fall. Not too far to Casey's now.

An elaborate black wrought-iron gate that marked the drive to Indian Gulch Ranch appeared around the corner, and I made a hard right turn, my tires screeching a little. Taking the gravel driveway at the fastest clip I dared, I roared past the big house that belonged to Ken Resavich, past Casey's mobile home, and pulled up in front of the barn.

Melissa ran out to meet me, her face blotchy and red from crying. Melissa Waters was Casey's girlfriend. She was about ten years younger than me, in her early twenties, and under normal circumstances excessively pretty in a Goldilocks kind of way. Her childlike face, with its round blue eyes and softly pouting mouth, combined with blonde hair that frothed and curled casually over her shoulders, made her look like the prototypical dumb blonde, but her appearance was deceptive. Under a superficial baby-faced sexiness which she put on for reasons I didn't understand, Melissa had a shrewd mind.

She was too upset for any feminine affectations this morning. "Gail, my God, hurry! Reno's down; I think he's dying."

Grabbing my emergency bag, I ran after her. I had a brief glimpse of the concrete-floored breezeway of the barn, immaculate as always, and then I was at the open door to a stall where a brown horse was thrashing frantically on the ground. Casey was in the stall with him, pulling at the lead rope attached to the halter, desperately trying to get the horse up. The pain was too great. The horse's eyes rolled and his body twisted and heaved. Casey jumped out of the way as the horse turned over, metal-shod hooves crashing into the wall of the stall, legs tangling. He lay still for a minute, his sweaty flanks gasping, half stuck.

"Quick, sit on his head," I told Casey.

He was there almost before I could get the words out, immobilizing the horse by pinning its head down. I took the syringe of banamine out of my bag and knelt on the ground, feeling for the horse's jugular vein. I found it, poked the needle in, and depressed the plunger. In seconds the tense muscles under the wet hide relaxed as the painkiller took effect. After a minute the horse folded his legs under him and heaved himself to his feet, stood there sweaty and trembling, but quiet.

"Is this the worst one?" I asked Casey.

"Right now. Two of them are dead. Five or six more have bellyaches, but they haven't gone down like this."

I looked back at the brown horse. "Keep an eye on the rest of them and let me know if anyone looks worse. I want to check this one."

Casey disappeared and I began checking the horse's vital signs. His pulse and respiration were severely elevated-not good. On a hunch, I took a stomach tap-inserting the long needle into his abdomen and withdrawing fluid. It was green and murky, a sure indicator that his intestines had ruptured.

Casey and Melissa were back in the stall and I shook my head at them. "This one's got a ruptured gut. We'll have to put him down. I'm sorry."

Melissa's face seemed to crumple, and she turned and walked out of the stall quickly. Casey looked after her. "She liked this horse," he said briefly. Then back at me. "Let's get it over with."

I injected the kill shot in the horse's jugular vein and he stiffened, a sudden alarm in his eyes almost instantly superseded by blankness, and I jumped back from his lurching body as he went down quickly, collapsing onto the ground. When he lay quietly on the clean shavings, I turned away, feeling the usual mix of sadness and half-unconscious anger. "Let's go look at the rest of them."

We went from stall to stall, and I treated seven horses in degrees of distress that ranged from mild discomfort to pain almost as severe as that of the horse I'd had to put down.

I did an abdominal tap on this horse, too, but the fluid was clear and pale; the horse's intestines were probably still intact.

In general, the treatment was the same. After checking the vital signs, I gave each horse a painkilling shot, ran a tube through its nose and down its throat and pumped mineral oil into the stomach (to move whatever had disturbed the digestive system along more quickly and loosen up any big impactions), and promised to come back that afternoon and check on things.