Here to Stay (19 page)

Zach tilted his head to study her delicate countenance—the bridge of her small nose, the angle of her fragile cheekbones, and the arch of her fine eyebrows.
Yep
. He was on thin ice, and if he listened to much more, he’d be astraddle a widening crack.

“I’m sorry to hear all that. But where are you going with this, Miranda?”

She scooped her hair back from her forehead. “I hired a sitter for Luke tonight so I could come here and see you, face-to-face, and ask you—no,
beg
you, Mr. Harrigan—to give my brother one more chance. If he blows it again, and you walk away, then I won’t blame you. But
please
, won’t you let him meet Rosebud one more time?”

It was Zach’s turn to gaze off, his attention fixed on Tornado, who had stopped whinnying and pressing against the gate now, but still watched Miranda with unmistakable yearning. A rush of fellow feeling for the stallion swept over him.

“What can it hurt?” she pleaded. “Just one more meeting. If Luke misbehaves, that’ll be it. Sometimes all of us need a second chance. Right? All I’m asking is that you give Luke one.”

Zach released a taut breath. He’d given that horse countless chances, and if he learned Tornado had been abused, he’d surely give the stallion many more. If he was willing to do that for an animal, how could he refuse to do it for a human being?

“All right,” he heard himself say.

“I mean—if you think about it—we’ll both be there. It’s not as if Luke will have a chance to hurt Rosebud or anything. Not that he ever would. Whatever you might think, Luke likes animals, and he’s always been gentle with them.”

Zach brought his gaze back to hers. “I said all right. I’ll give Luke another chance.”

“And if you’ll only—” She broke off. Lips parted, she looked blankly up at him for a long moment. “What?”

Zach couldn’t help himself. He chuckled and barely stopped himself from ruffling her hair. “When would you like to bring Luke back out?”

“Oh, Mr. Harrigan, thank you!” She beamed one of those smiles that somehow made Zach feel warmed through and through. “You won’t regret it, I promise.”

“The name’s Zach. I’m not much for social graces.” He drew out his cell phone, which he’d turned off so it wouldn’t startle Tornado. With a push of a button, the screen lit up. Zach checked his schedule, turned the phone back off, and returned it to its case. “Except for working here, I’m free every late afternoon and evening until next Thursday. Pick your day, and I’ll set aside some time.”

She clasped her hands at her waist, cluing Zach before she spoke that she had another favor to ask.
In for a penny, in for a pound
.

“Actually,” she said, “I was hoping you might bring Rosebud to my house. Luke is more at ease there. I think he might be more receptive if he’s in a familiar setting.”

Zach had no problem taking Rosebud to the lady’s house. The mini needed to experience different environments. “That works. What day and what time?”

“Tomorrow? Seven would be perfect. I usually have supper done by then.”

“Sounds good,” Zach agreed.

She flashed another brilliant smile and then startled him by suddenly going up on her tiptoes to hug his neck. Her lips pressed briefly against his jaw. “Thank you, Mr. Harrigan!
Thank
you. This is so good of you.”

She drew away and began backing toward the door.

“Tomorrow night, seven,” she said. “We’ll be expecting you.”

Zach hoped he wasn’t turning lobster red, and barely caught himself from pressing a hand to the place her lips had touched. To his dismay, he also realized that the brief physical contact had given him a hard-on. Not a good thing when a guy was wearing chaps. He swept off his hat and held it in front of his groin, making a show of finger-combing his hair. “Don’t take off just yet. Aren’t you forgetting something?” When she looked bewildered, his smile widened. “Your address.”

“Oh! Of
course
. You need to know where we live.” She patted her pockets, then held up a forefinger. “One second. I need a pen and paper. My purse is in the car.”

“I don’t need it written down.” When she looked dubious, Zach gestured at all the horse stalls. “When you work with this many animals, there’s a lot to remember, and it takes too much time to check charts constantly. I’ve got a mind like a steel trap.”

She gave him the address. Zach recognized the street as being in an older section of town, which reminded him of a concern that he couldn’t recall having mentioned to her yet. “I may be getting the cart before the horse, pun intended, but just in case I change my mind about Luke, horses aren’t allowed to be kept inside the city limits.”

“I already called the city. I can get a special permit for a service animal.”

Zach was surprised she was already thinking that far ahead. “She’ll also need a fenced outdoor exercise area and a shed for shelter,” he told her.

“I figured as much. Luckily, where I live, the lots are really large, and I have a huge fenced-in backyard. Rosebud will have
lots
of room to exercise, and I’ll get a shelter constructed for her. A really nice one, guaranteed.”

Zach finally felt it was safe to return the hat to his head. “No worries, then.”

“Nope.” She retreated another step. Then she turned to head for the door. As she slipped out into the night, she waved good-bye and called, “Thanks again, Mr. Harrigan.”

“Zach,” he reminded her, but she was gone before he got the word out.

Tornado let loose with a pathetic whinny. Then the stallion shrieked and began kicking the walls of his stall, making such a racket Zach could barely hear himself think. No matter. There wasn’t a thought in his head that made much sense, anyway.

Miranda’s departure made him feel as forlorn as the horse did.

Cookie reappeared on the landing. Hooking his elbows over the railing, he smiled down at Zach. “I can see why you didn’t want to let her slip through your fingers.”

Zach glared at the old foreman. “Oh, stuff it, Cookie. You were a great help. Telling her I kick buckets and get into fistfights. Thanks a bunch.”

“Ah, now, I got her to laughin’, didn’t I? Way you were handlin’ her, she was about to bring the law down on your head.”

Zach grinned at the memory. “She
was
riled up, wasn’t she?”

Cookie studied the stallion. “You gonna work with him some more tonight?”

Zach shook his head. “I’ve got some research to do on Pat Jones, the breeder. If that horse has been abused, clicker training may help, but it’ll take a whole lot more than that to turn him around. I’ll have to change my tactics.”

“First thing is to gain his trust,” Cookie mused. “That’ll take some doin’. You gonna rescue your other bonnet, or leave it in there for him to stomp on some more?”

“Nah.” Zach glanced at the stall as he began taking off his chaps. “I have a feeling it’s a goner, and maybe it’ll get him used to my smell. It’s lucky I’ve got more than one hat. Need to buy another brown one, though. Okay, lights out. I’m going to collect Rosebud and head for the house.”

Cookie lifted a hand in farewell and disappeared back into his apartment.

Thirty minutes later, Zach dumped the remains of a TV dinner in the trash and glanced toward his office. He planned to spend the rest of the evening deep in the bowels of the Internet to find any dirt he could on Tornado’s former owner. Before leaving the kitchen, he poured himself a cup of coffee so he wouldn’t get drowsy, then headed up the hall.

Rosebud followed him, the taps of her hooves on slate becoming muffled as they stepped onto the thick office carpeting. After Zach turned on the lamp, golden light spilled across the ash surface of his cluttered desk, piles of papers casting square-edged shadows onto the leather blotter. He sank onto the leather chair, set his mug off to one side, and reached for his landline phone to check his business messages.

The first two were from people with horse problems; another few were from people in the quarter horse industry shopping for a quality stallion or brood mare. Zach listened with bored distraction, taking notes so he could get back to each person later. Then a voice came over the line that swept the cobwebs of routine from his mind.

“Hello, Mr. Harrigan, this is Jarrod Black calling from the Malheur County district attorney’s office. It’s imperative that I speak with you about a horse you purchased a couple of months ago from Patrick Jones in Ontario, Oregon. Please get in touch with me as quickly as you can, regardless of the hour.”

The attorney left his cell number and bade Zach a hasty, taut-with-tension farewell.

The next messages alarmed Zach even more. The Malheur County sheriff wanted to talk to him. The final recording was from Zach’s attorney, Carlo Bergetti. “Damn it, Zach, where the hell are you? Tried to reach you on your cell around six. You must have it turned off. All hell broke loose in Ontario. The county sheriff and the district attorney need to talk to you about Morpheus, that stallion you bought a while back. Call me. Doesn’t matter how late. The shit has hit the fan.”

Zach sat there a moment, dreading what Carlo might tell him. He had a bad feeling, a very bad feeling. The only sounds in the room were the soft huffs of Rosebud’s breathing, the tick of the grandfather clock, and an occasional squeak of the chair when Zach shifted his weight.

His hands felt oddly numb as he punched in the attorney’s phone number. The man answered on the second ring, barking, “Hello.”

Carlo had been Zach’s lawyer for years, and they’d fallen into a relaxed relationship with no pretense. “Carlo, Zach here. What the hell’s going on? Had my phone off while I worked with a horse and didn’t know you were trying to get in touch with me.”

Zach heard Carlo chew and swallow. “
Finally
you call. Took the wife to Diamond Lake for a two-day get-away, and we no sooner got home this evening than both my phones started ringing off the hook. The sheriff and D.A. are frantic to get in touch with you.”

Zach pinched the bridge of his nose. “How did they get
your
number?”

“One of Jones’s employees must have gotten it off the stable phone, I guess, from that time when I called there to rattle cages about the horse being crazy.” Carlo expelled a tight breath. “Brace yourself, buddy. I’ve got bad news. Pat Jones is dead, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

Zach was stunned. “I knew the guy was ill, but I had no idea he was that ill.”

“Lung cancer. Heavy smoker, I guess. Kicked the bucket two days ago. Did you ever even meet the man?”

“Actually, no. He was so sick when I bought Tornado that his stable foreman had been assigned temporary power of attorney for all the ranch business, and I dealt with him, a fellow named Steve Ristol.”

Zach heard the sharp rap of Carlo’s footsteps and envisioned the lawyer walking across the large expanse of living-area terra-cotta tile to his elegant home office. “They told me the horse is called Morpheus.”

“I got the name changed,” Zach explained. “Can you get to the point, Carlo?”

“Ristol was arrested this afternoon. Apparently Jones was out of commission for months, trusted Ristol implicitly, gave him total control of the ranch operations, and the man turned into a cowboy version of Hitler, mistreating the horses and terminating any employee who bucked him. All his subordinates were afraid of losing their jobs, so they didn’t report him, but after Jones died, they must have figured their jobs were history anyway and started talking.”

A cold chill washed over Zach. He remembered the fiery anger in Miranda’s eyes as she bellied up to him.
Someone has abused this horse
. Zach couldn’t believe this. He just couldn’t believe it. A choking sensation filled his throat. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. “So Tornado
has
been abused.”

“The term ‘abused’ fails to describe it,” Carlo retorted, and then began giving Zach details that made him feel sick to his stomach.

A female stable hand had been the first employee to call the authorities that afternoon to blow the whistle on Ristol. She’d even volunteered to testify in court. According to her, Morpheus, aka Tornado, had been haltered and snubbed to a post, then hobbled to receive his punishment. Ristol had allegedly used an electric prod on the stallion, sometimes holding the ignited tip against the horse’s underbelly so long that it burned the animal. He’d whipped the stallion with a pronged dog collar until he brought up blood.
It feels as if he’s been repeatedly stabbed with an ice pick
, Miranda had cried angrily. Ristol had even denied Morpheus meals, not often enough to make the horse gaunt, but occasionally as a punitive measure. He’d also put him in small enclosures and tossed lighted firecrackers at his feet. The list went on, and Morpheus hadn’t been the only horse to endure such horrible treatment.

Battling waves of nausea, Zach leaned forward on the chair to brace an elbow on his desk. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered. “No wonder the horse acts so crazy.”

Carlo fell quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry, Zach. I hate to hit you with this all at once, but you need to get Tucker over there right away to examine that horse from head to toe for signs of abusive treatment. Apparently when Ristol realized a few months back that Jones might die, he started selling off the horses that bore physical signs of his abuse. The authorities are trying to track down the other buyers, but it’ll take time. The ranch employees remembered you because you’re something of a celebrity, but they’re hazy on the names of the other folks who bought mistreated horses.”

Carlo sighed before he continued. “The cops are scrambling to get a search warrant to look at the ranch files. Jones’s wife refuses to cooperate. She’s probably afraid charges will be filed against her and is conferring with a lawyer who has advised her to protect the records. Or, hell, who knows? Maybe she and Ristol had something going while her husband was sick, and she’s trying to buy him some time. Anyhow, in the meantime, the county sheriff is holding Ristol without any hard evidence, and in Malheur County, arraignment hearings take place every afternoon at one, Monday through Friday. The Malheur County D.A. wants Ristol’s head on a platter. When I spoke to him this evening, he told me he thinks Ristol will run if he’s released from jail. They need some irrefutable physical evidence before that hearing tomorrow.”