скачать книгу бесплатно
“I agree.”
He nodded and turned to Ben. “Hey, Ben.” He smiled and put a hand out. “Good to see you again.”
Ben shook his hand. “Thanks. Looks like you’ve got a winner on your hands out there.”
“You know it.”
“How would you feel about running him up against one of mine?”
Victor laughed and ran a hand through his sandy-blond hair. “Bring it on.” He looked behind him and signaled to the jockey on Kate’s Flight. “You talking about that colt from Sunuawa?”
Ben smiled and nodded. “You’ve heard.”
“Hey, word travels. But I’d love to see what your boy can do. You know where to find us.” He turned to Kate and said, “I don’t want to interrupt you two, so I’ll see you later.”
“You’re not interrupting us!” she said quickly, but he was already leaving. Obviously, Bianca had shared her harebrained plan about Kate and Ben with him.
She watched him go, wondering what on earth to say to Ben, who was still standing beside her.
“So I hear you’ve got the technology for Fireflight to sire more,” Ben said, looking sideways at her.
“It’s not for sale,” she said quickly.
“No?” He looked surprised. “I was misinformed, then.”
“It was for sale. My father sold some, but there’s very little left now. As I’m sure you can imagine, offering Fireflight’s bloodlines is our ace in the hole.” She thought about that for a moment. “So to speak.”
“Hmm.” He nodded, keeping his eyes on the track and the horses that were running against each other. Kate’s Flight was leading the competition by a considerable margin. “Not at any price, huh?”
“Nope.” Then, as an afterthought, she added, “Sorry.”
“No problem.” His words were casual, but when Kate glanced at him she thought he looked grave.
“Hey!” a voice barked behind them.
Kate turned to face a squat, wizened old woman she’d noticed several times running the betting windows.
“One of you Katherine Gregory?”
Kate had to work to keep from laughing. “That would be me,” she said, adding the obvious, “Not him.”
The woman didn’t so much as crack a smile. “There’s a phone call for you up in the shop.”
Kate frowned. “That’s weird. Did they say who it was?”
“Think it’s your father or something.” The woman gave an exaggeratedly disinterested shrug. “He said he couldn’t get through on your cell phone.”
“That’s crazy. I don’t need to go all the way to the track shop to get a call.” She patted her pocket, looking for the phone she was sure had been there earlier. But it was gone. “Hmm. Okay, I guess I do need to go all the way up to the shop.” She started toward the main building, tossing over her shoulder, “Nice talking to you, Ben.”
He raised a hand in response.
The woman asked, “Ben Devere?”
“That’s right,” he said slowly.
“There’s a telephone message for you there, as well.”
Kate paused. “We both got phone calls up there?”
“Guess so,” the woman said.
Ben looked at Kate with a frown. “You don’t suppose that fence is down between the properties again, do you?”
She groaned. “I hope not. That was a mess.”
“We’d better go see what’s going on.”
They hurried to the building, up the stairs and into the darkened shop. “You’d think she could have left the lights on, at least,” Kate commented, feeling her way to the counter, where she remembered having seen a phone before.
“There’s something strange about this,” Ben said.
The door closed behind them and they both looked back at it for a moment. Then Ben found the light switch and the room was flooded with fluorescent glow.
Kate found the phone and picked it up, looking to see which line was on hold.
None of them were.
“For Pete’s sake.” She pressed line one and dialed her father’s number.
As soon as he answered, she asked, “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine, Katherine,” he said. “Why?”
She frowned. “They said you were trying to get hold of me and couldn’t get through on my cell phone.”
“That’s nonsense,” her father said to her. “I didn’t try to call you.”
She was somewhat relieved, even while she was flummoxed. “What about Bianca? Where is she?”
“She’s at the track with Victor. With you, too, I guess, if you’re there.”
She watched as Ben poked around, looking for the message that had supposedly been left for him. An uneasy feeling snaked into Kate’s stomach.
“I gotta go, Dad. I’ll talk to you later.” She hung up the phone and rushed to the door.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Ben asked. “What’s the emergency?”
She got to the door and tried it.
It was locked.
Exactly as she’d suspected.
“I don’t think there is an emergency,” she said, not adding that there was going to be one just as soon as she got out of here and wrapped her hands around Bianca’s neck. “There’s been some sort of…mistake.” She jiggled the doorknob, hoping to throw the lock.
“Is that locked?”
Kate turned around and leaned her back against the cool door. “Yes, it is.”
“So we’re locked in here?”
“Yes, we are.”
He heaved a sigh and went over to the phone, muttering something about idiots in charge. He lifted the receiver and pushed a button. Then another. And another.
Then he tapped on the receiver button.
Kate watched with growing trepidation. “What’s wrong?”
“Phone’s dead.”
“I just used it.”
“Well, now it’s dead.”
“Do you have a cell phone?”
“No.”
This pushed her panic buttons. “What do you mean, no? How can you not have a cell phone?”
“I notice you don’t, either.”
“Yes, but I did.”
He looked at her too patiently. “Then where is it?”
“It must have fallen out of my pocket. Or something.” At this point she was sure Bianca was behind this somehow.
“Whatever. Let’s stop talking about what we can’t do and figure out what we can.” He frowned and looked around. “First thing is, we should look for keys.”
“Okay. Good.” Hope surged in Kate. Surely, Bianca hadn’t been that thorough. They began riffling under the counter and in the cash register, looking for a key.
At one point they both put their hands in the same cubbyhole at the same time and Kate pulled her hand back as though she’d touched a snake.
Ben looked at her for a moment. “Something wrong?”
“No, I—” What could she say? How could she explain what looked like such a distasteful reflex? “I was startled.”
He kept feeling around the cubby before pronouncing, “And for nothing. There’s nothing here.” He stepped back and folded his arms in front of him. “We’ll have to figure something else out.”
“We could break the window,” Kate suggested, gesturing toward what she thought was obviously the only thing left they could do.
“Kate, it’s a racetrack. They plan for security breaches. That’s not glass. It’s thick Lucite. You couldn’t break it if you tried. Not without a power tool.”
“Do they sell power tools in here?” she asked halfheartedly.
“Afraid not.”
They both looked at the inventory of horse-themed T-shirts and sweatshirts, key chains and the like.
“If it wouldn’t appeal to a thirteen-year-old girl, I don’t think they sell it here,” Ben concluded.
Panic began to rise in Kate’s chest. “So, wait a minute, you’re saying that we actually can’t get out of here? We’re stuck?”
He looked as if he was ready to give some smart-aleck answer until he looked into Kate’s eyes. Then his expression softened and he said, “I didn’t say that. We haven’t exhausted all the possibilities yet. Not by a long shot.” But he looked doubtful.
She didn’t care, she’d take it. “I have a Swiss army knife, do you think we can do something with that?”
“Hand it over. Let’s see.”
She reached into her pocket, thinking what a good thing it was that she’d gotten a splinter earlier because she’d ended up pocketing the knife after using the tweezers in it.
But when she handed it to him, he looked at it dubiously.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Well.” He turned the knife over in his hand and opened the small blade. “I was sort of picturing something a little bigger. But this might do.”
He went to the door and started working at the lock.
Kate went up behind him and watched over his shoulder. “Guess those years of juvenile delinquency might just be coming in handy, huh?”
He shot a look at her. “I’d hardly say I was a juvenile delinquent.” He worked more on the knob and said, without looking back, “But yeah, I guess you could say so.”
There was a click and for a moment they both sucked in their breath in anticipation. But when he tried the knob, it was still unmovable.
He closed the knife and started to hand it back to her.
“You can’t give up,” she said.
“I’ve got to. This place is built with security in mind. They designed it exactly so that people couldn’t do what we’re trying to do now.”
“So that’s it? You’re just…quitting?”
He laughed softly. “Well, it’s not like we’re going to die here. They open the shop a couple of hours before post time. Someone will be here soon.”
Kate looked at her watch. “It’s six-thirty in the morning,” she said, her breath feeling tight. “Post time isn’t until seven o’clock tonight.”
