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“Susannah M. Colton, according to her cards. I wrote it down here, along with her address.”
Tag stifled an impulse to lean across the counter and strangle his assistant. Nothing was wrong, nothing really. Susannah had left him a way to reach her. Had no doubt been too flustered by Carol Anne’s evil eye to remember his jacket She’d drop it in the mail when she’d reached her destination. “May I have it?” He tried for exaggerated patience, but it came out closer to a snarl.
“You surely may.” The med tech plucked a sheet of paper from an under-counter drawer, then something shiny. “And here’s how she paid.” A cold, tiny object was dropped into his outstretched palm. “She said to send her the change care of this address—” Carol Anne waved her paper and smirked “—once we’ve hocked it.”
Tag lifted the ring to the light. Fire glimmered, then flashed. “A diamond!” he said blankly. Big enough to choke a goose. Engagement ring, he supposed. Married, but she didn’t like men, she’d said, not that way.
“And if you believe that, Doc, you shouldn’t be let outdoors alone. It’ll be zirconium, I guarantee, worth fifty if we’re lucky.”
Had she been wearing this ring when he met her? No. He’d have noticed. Tag snatched the paper from Carol Anne’s fingers and read:
Susannah M. Colton
Fleetfoot Farm
RR 1
Versailles, KY 36502
Fleetfoot Farm. It rang a distant, somehow ominous, bell.
“Five cancellations,” Carol Anne muttered. “Doc Higgins will have kittens when I...”
They both looked up as headlights swept the room, followed by a second pair, then a third. Brakes yelped in the parking lot. Doors slammed. Footsteps approached at a run.
Tag groaned. As Carol Anne had said, this was a day to remember. And clearly it wasn’t done yet. He dropped Susannah’s ring into his pocket and clenched his fingers around it. Three cars at once, so this wouldn’t be a run-of-the mill vet’s emergency—an injured cat or a puppy with fits. Another car roared into the lot. He drew a breath and headed for the door. You heard of such crises in vet school. They were every beginner vet’s worst nightmare, a what-if scenario that if you were lucky, would never happen to you: A car wrecks on a nearby road—something messy and terrible, a head-on involving a school bus or a motorcycle.
And the way the nightmare always plays out, the local M.D.’s away or falling-down drunk. So they turn to the next best thing, a veterinarian. So here we go. People were just big furless animals, at heart, and if there was one thing he did well in life, this was it. He could help.
As Tag threw open the door a fifth car wheeled in off the road... No, this was a van. With the logo of the local TV station emblazoned along its side. Lights flashed in his face—he blinked and took a step backward. Not a wreck—a media feeding frenzy.
With its prey in sight. “Dr. Taggart?”
“Dr. Taggart!”
“Sir! How does it feel to have gelded Payback, the finest racing sire ever bred in America?”
No. No way. Not possible.
“Doctor, were you aware that Payback was insured for some sixty million dollars with Lloyd’s of...”
Pookie. Pookums. Payback. He’d never been to a horse race, but even he had heard that name.
A brunette in a tailored suit stormed the steps, fluffed her hair and spun toward the onlookers. Red lights gleamed like weasel eyes as cameras rolled. “We’re talking tonight with Dr. Richard Taggart, small-town veterinarian in southern Vermont,” she declared, and thrust a microphone under his nose. “Dr. Taggart, when America thinks horse racing in the twentieth century, only three names come to mind. Secretariat. Ruffian. And greatest of them all, the stallion Payback, Triple Crown winner, five-time Eclipse Horse of the Year, sire of some nineteen millionaire offspring, crown jewel of worldfamous Fleetfoot Farm in Kentucky, who up until today commanded a stud fee of four hundred thousand dollars per mare! So would you care to explain to racing fans everywhere why you gelded...”
Voices receded into a yammering din of white noise. Tag stared blindly into the blaze of lights. As if she stood just beyond them, meeting his gaze—and laughing. Laughing at him with her honeyed, lying, beautiful mouth and her eyes like a Texas blue norther. Well, she’d sure blown his life away! Seventeen years of it, since the day he’d decided to become a vet, instead of a car thief
“Sir, Stephen Colton, owner of Payback, states that you were never authorized to perform this procedure, which renders his stallion utterly worthless. Would you care to explain why you—”
“No comment.” Not for you, bitch. He stared out past the lights. Not for any of you vultures! He’d save his comments and his own questions for the one woman who could answer them, once he got his hands around her lovely neck. He winced as another flash went off, then gazed steadily into the cameras. Because somewhere out there, she’d be watching. Read it in my eyes, Tex, wherever you are. You can run, you can hide, but I’m coming to get you. Gonna get you, babe, if it’s the last thing I do!
CHAPTER FOUR
PAYBACK WAS THE LEAD story on the eleven o’clock news that night, and the network anchor reported it with a stern, semisorrowful expression that failed to hide his glee in relating such a juicy scandal.
Phone off the hook and with emergency bottle of scotch near at hand, Tag shoved a tape into his VCR, gazed owlishly at all its buttons, then nodded to himself and hit Record. Facts could be weapons and he didn’t mean to miss a single one.
“In a bizarre and still-breaking story,” intoned the anchorman, “NBC News has learned that sometime late last night, Susannah Mack Colton, wife of bluegrass millionaire Stephen Colton, secretly removed the world famous thoroughbred stud Payback from his stable at Fleetfoot Farm in Kentucky. The former exercise girl drove the Triple Crown winner and five-time Eclipse Horse of the Year to a small town in Vermont, where she paid veterinarian Richard D. Taggart to... geld the famous stallion.” Brief pause to let the magnitude of this outrageous act sink in around the nation.
“Seen here in his unforgettable Kentucky Derby victory, headed home eighteen incredible lengths ahead of the competition—” the camera shifted to a clip of a chocolate-brown stallion covering the ground in gigantic, effortless strides, a jockey crouched high on his withers with whip hand unmoving, while in the background a grandstand seethed with silently screaming racegoers “—Payback has long since retired to stand at stud at Fleetfoot Farm, renowned racing stable in the Kentucky bluegrass.” The view shifted to an overhead shot, showing the rest of the Derby field laboring farther and farther behind, then Payback sweeping smoothly under the wire at the finish line, while the anchorman continued off camera, “As top racing sire in America for the last eight years, Payback commanded a stud fee of four hundred thousand dollars... per mare.”
The camera returned to the studio and the anchorman. “And in an average breeding season, the stallion serviced one hundred of the finest thoroughbred broodmares in the world.” The newsman lifted his craggy brows to fix his audience with a significant gaze. “Meaning, folks, that this equine Romeo’s earnings averaged out to some forty million dollars per year!”
The anchorman touched the tiny receiver in his ear and his smile broadened to a blissful grin, immediately stifled. “In fact, NBC has just learned that one of the holders of a lifetime breeding right in Payback is Qeen Elizabeth II of England, herself an ardent racing fan.
“According to owner Stephen Colton, Payback was insured by Lloyd’s of London for sixty million dollars. But with his gelding today, this stud of the century’s value has been effectively reduced to... zero.
“The question that racing fans everywhere are demanding be answered tonight is why? Why did Susannah Mack Colton, er...pluck this fow-legged golden goose?”
The camera shifted from the newsman’s wounded perplexity to a shot of Susannah, standing somewhere in a parking lot, gripping Payback’s halter. The camera lights made her eyes seem enormous, bruised by shadows, but her chin was tipped to a familiar angle of defiance. “When Mrs. Colton, Payback at her side, was asked that question during a press conference she called in Boston earlier this evening, she had only this to say...” The sound switched to a taped recording, and Tag winced at the hunting-pack yammer of four reporters shouting questions at once.
An insistent tenor rose above the others as a microphone was thrust into the picture. “But why, Mrs. Colton? Why did you have Payback gelded?”
The gelding’s ears flattened back and he lunged teeth-first at the encroaching mike. Susannah staggered, then dug in her heels and hauled his nose around. “Why don’t you go ask my husband?” she cried over her shoulder. Payback shook his head again, shaking her like a rag doll.
The view swung wildly, showing reporters scattering like a flock of panicked pigeons, then steadied on Susannah, who stood poised and alert, facing Payback as he reared. When his flailing forefeet touched earth, she closed in and caught his halter, backing him away from her inquisitors.
“Damn, Susannah!” Tag muttered. If the horse yanked her under his hooves...
But she had him under control again and she glanced back at the cameras. “Now that’s enough! He’s tired and ya’ll got what you came for.”
“Just one more question, Mrs. Colton!” called the tenor, a short, hatchet-faced man. “Who did the actual gelding?”
“I told ya’ll, that doesn’t matter. What matters is—”
“You phoned the Boston Globe this afternoon from the Green Mountain Clinic in Vermont.”
“H-h-how—” She stood, blinking in the harsh lights, mouth ajar.
“Caller ID, you nitwit!” Tag groaned and gripped a handful of his own hair. She’d set up her news conference from the barn phone—and obviously never stopped to think that any half-competent investigative reporter would surely have—
“So if you know-it-alls know it already,” she cried, then staggered as Payback sidestepped, “what are you asking me for? Oh, what’s the—” She wheeled her horse in a circle. The picture wobbled as the cameraman retreated from Payback’s wicked back heels, then the scene ended—to be replaced by Tag himself, scowling from the top step of the clinic.
“Good God!” Tag thought. He looked like that? Ax murderer at bay?
“We asked the same question of Dr. Richard Taggart. Why would a reputable veterinarian agree to geld the finest racing sire ever bred in America—and without consent of his owner?”
“No comment!” Tag’s image snarled at the camera.
Tag moaned and dropped his head in his hands. With a few final words promising to keep viewers informed of latebreaking developments, the anchor wrapped up—to be replaced by a cheery jingle assuring Tag that if he used a certain breath mint, all his troubles would be over.
Tag grabbed the remote, slapped the mute, groped blindly for his Scotch. Reputable vet! Funny how they could say one thing and mean precisely the other. And once they’d put their spin on the situation... Maybe he should have talked when they were hollering their idiot questions.
His stomach revolted at the thought of himself, pleading his innocence to those carrion pickers, while half the country gleefully watched. Don’t whine, and never explain to strangers was more his style.
“Tomorrow,” he consoled himself. He’d talk with Glassman, the lawyer he’d consulted when he’d bought into Higgins’s practice. And he’d talk to Higgins—if the old man hadn’t suffered another coronary tonight watching the news.
He looked up at the TV in time to see a hulking policeman palm the top of Susannah’s crinkled-silk head, then tuck her neatly into the back of a patrol car. “Crap!” He snatched up the remote, jabbed buttons.
“—on charges of horse theft,” concluded the announcer, while behind glass, Susannah lunged for a nonexistent door handle, then rapped furiously on the window. “Just one more twist in this bizarre tale about a legendary racehorse, a jockey’s beautiful daughter from Texas and a bluegrass millionaire,” observed a voice-over as the police car set off.
The camera closed in greedily on Susannah’s face. Her lips were moving—she was calling someone? Cursing someone? Her husband, her lawyer, God...all three at once? Her expression was angry and urgent and somehow forlorn. The car turned a corner, and the camera cut away to a hotel fire in Chicago.
“Serves you right, babe. Lock you up and throw away the key, for all I care.” Not that they would. Some five-hundred-dollar an hour lawyer would be getting her out on bail in no time. Millionaires’ wives didn’t spend the night in jail.
“More’s the pity.” Tag lifted his glass to take another swallow—then deliberately set it aside. What he needed tomorrow was a clear head.
Today he’d taken it on the chin, but tomorrow was his turn. Time to start punching back. Susannah Mack Colton might be a career wrecker—a walking one-woman demolition derby!—but he’d worked too hard these last seventeen years to go down without a fight. A street fight, South Boston style. He might have cleaned up his act since his teen years, but he hadn’t forgotten a move. “Messed with the wrong vet, Blue Eyes, I’m telling you.”
So to bed, then tomorrow.
TOMORROW WAS EVEN WORSE.
It started with The Today Show and an exclusive interview with Stephen Colton, Susannah’s husband. Hearing the intro, Tag dashed in from the kitchen where he was scrambling eggs. A wide-eyed woman, he couldn’t recall her name, leaned toward a man sitting at ease in the network’s New York City studio. She rested a commiserating hand on the sleeve of his perfectly tailored suit. “I understand that your marriage was an unquestionable love match, Mr. Colton. Oh, may I call you Stephen? Yes, well, I believe Susannah was an exercise girl in your stables, Stephen, when you first met?”
Colton shook his head. Razor-cut dark blond hair, shining and flawlessly parted, didn’t stir. The guy looked to be a few years older than his own age of thirty and Tag supposed women would think him handsome, in spite of those wirerim glasses. Pretty boy, would be the male opinion. Certainly it was his.
Colton’s smile was gently nostalgic. “In the stables of a business associate of mine in Texas. I flew down to buy a promising filly.” His eyes crinkled. “Came home with two, instead.”
“Self-satisfied ass!” Tag sat and turned up the sound while the interviewer chuckled appreciatively, then switched back to Deeply Concerned. “It sounds like Cinderella and her prince! A girl who loved horses and a man who bred and raced some of the nation’s finest. So what went wrong with this perfect fairy tale?”
Colton shrugged his pinstriped shoulders. “Why do people fall out of love? Who’s to say? We came from entirely different circumstances...”
“Different worlds,” crooned the woman.
He smiled sadly. “Mint juleps in silver goblets versus Lone Star beer in longneck bottles. I suppose I was a fool to think she could ever...” He shrugged again. “Anyway, we gave it our best shot for two years, but it was time to move on. At least...I thought so.”
The woman leaned forward, hanging on his every word, her expression avid. “You mean...?”
His good humor faded. “I mean, I asked Susannah for a divorce two nights ago.”
The interviewer quivered like a springer spaniel with a rabbit in sight. “The night that she...took Payback and drove away?”
“She stole Payback later that night. Yes.”
Tag swore softly, savagely. You used me for that, Susannah?
“So it was your asking for a divorce that triggered her...”
“That and the news—which I suppose I didn’t deliver as tactfully as I might have done. Perhaps that bit could have waited till later. I also told her that I planned to remarry. That I’d fallen in love with another woman.”
“Ohhh...” The interviewer sounded halfway to orgasm. “I see. Yes. So this was an act of...spite!”
“Spite, malice and revenge,” Colton agreed in his Kentucky gentleman’s drawl. It was quicker and more mannered than Susannah’s breezy twang.
“Payback, Texas style!”
“I’m afraid they do believe in getting their own back down there. Don’t mess with Texans, or however it goes. I certainly knew Susannah had a temper and I suppose I expected... some sort of tantrum. Maybe a few dishes smashed or possibly the whole table service, but...”
“But to...smash the finest racehorse you ever bred! That anyone in America ever bred! Payback was a national treasure. I think you could say he belonged to...all of us.” The interviewer held that thought for three beats of nationwide mourning, then cocked her head and wrinkled her charming nose. “You know, Freud’s somewhat out of fashion nowadays, but might one argue that there’s almost something... symbolic in a scorned wife’s gelding—” she giggled “—her husband’s most treasured stud.”
Colton’s eyebrows shot up, but apparently he decided not to take offense. His smirk was confiding. Merrily roguish. “Ah, but I have others!”
“And a spare set of gold-plated balls for dress occasions, rich boy?” Tag snarled.
The interviewer giggled. “Other stallions, you mean!”
What had Susannah seen in this...this... Tag’s head jerked around at the smell of—“Damn!” The eggs! He bolted for his smoky kitchen.
THE DAY SLID STRAIGHT downhill from there. Reporters were camped out at the back door of the clinic when Tag went in to work. He had to wade through the baying pack, hands jammed in his pockets to keep from punching the eager faces thrust into his own.
“Dr. Taggart!”
“Dr. Taggart, would you care to comment on—”
“Dr. Taggart, were you aware that—”
“Move it or lose it, pal.” He gained the back door and unlocked it, opened it wide enough to slide in sideways—
“Taggart, how much did Mrs. Colton have to pay you to get you to geld Payback?”
An ice cube slithered down his spine. They couldn’t think he’d—He halted, half in, half out the door. “We charged her our standard fee for—” His heart dropped a beat as he remembered. At least they’d tried to charge her the usual fee for that procedure. God, Susannah’s ring! Let it be zirconium, oh, please God!
He had a feeling God had gone south on vacation this week.
He slammed the door on his own aborted statement and locked it. Fists pounded, voices rose indignantly. Did they think they owned him? If Payback was a national treasure, then what was he? National whipping boy? He half ran toward the office. “Carol Anne!”
She sat behind her counter with a stunned and mutinous look on her face, her hair escaping its pins. Beyond the locked front door, he could hear more of the same mob. “Carol Anne, did you tell anyone about the ring? Her ring?”
“And good morning to you, too, doctor.”
“I’m sorry, good morning. The ring—did you tell anyone?”
Her glower turned to a blinking stillness. She sniffed, opened the appointment book and buried her nose in it.
Control, control. If he shook her she’d quit. “Who, Carol?” She flipped to the next page, as if today could simply be skipped over. He leaned above her, a silent growl vibrating deep in his throat. She hunched her shoulders. “Doc Higgins, okay?”
Higgins wasn’t so bad. Higgins was as stingy with his words as he was with his gauze pads. He wouldn’t—
