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“—and my sister,” she added in a mutter, not looking up.
Wonderful. “All right, I want you to toddle straight out that door and tell her—”
“She’s already gone in to work. Her shift starts at six.”
Carol Anne’s sister was a waitress at the best place—the only place—in town to get an early breakfast At six this morning the diner’s counter would have been lined elbow to elbow with newsmen, sucking down coffee and local gossip. “Cripes. Then I want you to call her and—”
“Call—ha! I unplugged the phone. Somebody’s got an automatic dialler locked in on us. You can’t call in or out.” She rubbed her nose and looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “And you know what’s on our answering machine from last night? Loonytunes calling in from all over, threatening to burn us down, or blow us up, or do to you what you did to that stupid nag!” She snatched a tissue from her pocket. “If you’d only listened to me...”
All right, forget the ring. By now that horse was out of the barn. “What did Higgins say?” He’d not been able to face the old man last night. Nor call, not with his own line jammed with incoming viciousness.
“He said you should’ve listened to me.”
Tag counted backward from ten, then slowly up again. “What else?”
“He said you’d better get yourself a good lawyer and it better not be on his dime.”
“I was going to phone Glassman at nine. Guess I’ll have to go see him, first break in the schedule I get.”
That break came earlier than expected. The first appointment of the day was a no-show. Simply forgot, or something more ominous? The second, Mrs. Wiggly and her cat, Sherman, arrived on time, but after they’d run the gauntlet of newshounds, Mrs. W was near tears and Sherman was doing a Persian variation of the Saber Dance.
When the third and fourth appointments were no-shows, it began to look like a trend. The fifth was an overweight dachshund, who bit a newsman on his way in the door. The reporter threatened to sue. Tag came out and offered to punch his nose for him, which seemed to cheer the reporter and his photographer no end, after which Tag completed Bismarck’s exam, then declared the clinic closed for the morning. He hung a sign in the window and left Carol Anne trying to phone out to cancel the rest of their appointments.
Because even more than loyal patients Tag needed a good lawyer.
He took the long way into town, which was down a logging road, then up over a rocky hillside pasture, thankful that his new truck had four-wheel drive. By the time he reached Main Street he’d lost his pursuers. Shutting the outer door to Glassman’s office behind him, Tag breathed a sigh of relief-Ollie, Ollie oxen free—then grimaced as he remembered who’d said that last.
Glassman’s receptionist looked up with a smile. It froze on her face.
“Hi, Barbara. I know I don’t have an appointment, but...” He gave her his best grin. They’d had a flirtation going while Glassman had been drawing up his contracts to buy into Higgins’s practice. He’d considered asking her out, but somehow couldn’t see himself ever telling Barbara about the car collection he’d started at age thirteen. Barb believed in The Law, not the unbearable beauty of Porsches.
“I’m afraid—”
“Barb, if he could see me for even a minute. I’m in the soup. I guess you know, if you saw—”
“I did.” She shot a glance over her shoulder toward the inner office. “But I’m afraid we—he—can’t help you.” She lowered her voice. “He took a retainer this morning. The other side.”
Tag stared at her blankly.
“Colton. Stephen Colton,” she hissed. “He’s retained us.”
Colton? Here? “To do what?”
“I’ve no idea, Tag, and if I had, I couldn’t tell you. Colton’s man showed up waving a check for five thousand half an hour ago. They’re in there now, so if you don’t mind...”
“Yeah. Sure.” Just like that, wave a check and he was the enemy? Well, hell, there were other lawyers.
THERE WERE THREE OTHERS in town—and Colton had retained all three. For a pretty boy, he played dirty. Outside the office of the third and last, Tag stopped to rub his aching neck. Okay, so now what? Drive to Bennington?
But would a small-town lawyer do the job, if Colton intended to go for blood? Maybe he should hire a Boston heavy?
But a big-time legal shark would do his own bloodletting, and Tag had zip to spare. He’d used every dollar he’d saved since graduation to buy his first slice of Higgins’s practice.
And surely it was too soon to be talking lawsuits? First he should talk to the guy. Colton might be a snob, but he hadn’t looked stupid or unreasonable. And his real quarrel was with his crazy wife, not an innocent bystander. Find a phone then, that was next. Once Colton had heard Tag’s side of the story...
It took him eighteen tries to get past a busy signal. When someone picked up the phone at last, Tag drew a thankful breath.
“May I speak to Mr. Colton, please?”
“I’m afraid he’s not available just now.” Another pattering Kentucky drawl—a woman’s, sweetly professional. “But may I take a message?”
He wasn’t leaving his apologies and regrets with a secretary. “Yes, um, would you tell him Dr. Richard Taggart called and that I urgently need to talk with him? I’ll keep calling on the hour, every hour, till we connect.” No use giving his own number, since the line was jammed with crank callers.
That done, and maybe a call was all it would take to straighten this nightmare out, Tag headed back to his clinic.
Where Carol Anne’s car was no longer parked in front of the building. Gone home to lunch, he supposed. But like piranhas gathering, the number of reporters had increased. They turned as one when he parked, beamed as they recognized him, but rather than rushing to meet him, they held their ground by his front door.
As Tag reached the steps, he saw why. A burly stranger was screwing something into the clinic’s doorjamb—a steel hasp. “You! What d’you think you’re doing?” He jabbed an elbow in someone’s ribs, shoved another aside, gained the top step—just as a second man snapped a padlock in place.
Locking him out of his own clinic! For a roaring moment, the world went bloodred. Tag grabbed the lock man’s collar with both hands. “You bastard!” He hauled him up on tiptoe.
“I wouldn’t!” squeaked the man. His helper loomed at Tag’s shoulder. Laying a hand on Tag’s biceps, he dug in stubby fingers and breathed meaningfully in his ear, “I really wouldn’t, Dr. Taggart. You’ve got trouble enough already.”
So what’s a little more? Still, Tag let go of .Squeaky. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing, locking my—”
The other man—a lawyer, who else would wear a threepiece suit in this town?—shook his head. “Not anymore, it isn’t. Dr. Higgins sold out.”
Sold out? Tag stood, sucking for a breath that wouldn’t come. Sold, just like that? That fast? “To...to whom?” But that was obvious. How many millionaires had he pissed off this week?
“The FYA Corporation of Delaware.”
Colton’s cover. Had to be. “Higgins didn’t own it all to sell! I own—”
“One-fifth of the goodwill—and none of the property. Yes, we know that. And you’re welcome to take your share of the patients and practice anywhere else in this town, or any town you please.”
Right, practice small-animal medicine without a clinic? Without supplies, instruments, exam rooms, a phone? Using what for money in the meantime?
Higgins’s accountant had divided the business that way for some arcane tax reason that Tag had never bothered to follow. The deal had required that Tag first buy the clinic’s patients, its goodwill, while he rented use of the facilities from Higgins. Once he owned a hundred percent of the goodwill, they’d agreed that then he’d start buying the property, using his share of monthly earnings to do so, while the old man phased out of the business. In five years he’d have owned it all.
The lawyer turned to his heavy. “Leo, if I may have that box?” The thug scooped up a box that had been sitting on the stoop by his size fourteen feet and passed it over. The lawyer presented it with a tiny smile. “We cleaned out your desk for you. And your diplomas. When you wish to pick up your share of the patient files, and one-fifth of the Rolodex, then please call my office.” He placed a business card on top of the box Tag had automatically accepted. “We’ll be keeping the books for a few weeks while they’re audited. But once that’s done, then—”
“Sure.” Oblivious to the flashes going off as cameras recorded the awful moment, Tag watched the pair go. Just like that, they could chop him off at the knees?
He could feel a howl rising in his throat. Could see himself tossing the box aside—all that remained of his hopes in one pathetic box?—and hurling himself on the departing shyster’s back. Dragging him down. Ripping and tearing and gouging as he’d learned long ago on the street....
What d’you think this is for, Taggart my man? Knuckles gently rapping his forehead. Tag blinked, the words drifting back over the years one more time when he needed them. Jake talking, the big young counselor at the reform school, been-there smile, words that could cut through Tag’s rage when no one else could reach him. You use that to think with, kid. It’s not decoration. Fists are for fools and losers, and that’s not you, Taggart.
So Tag drew a breath and nodded to someone not there. Fists jammed in his pockets, he stood by his padlocked door while the cameras probed his face. While his bright future drove away in a shiny blue BMW. Blinking hard, he looked up at the lowering sky. Once upon a time, he wouldn’t have been able to resist a car like that. But he was somebody else now.
At least, as long as they’d let him be, he was.
A flake of snow drifted down...then another. Winter.
CHAPTER FIVE
A PHONE CALL to Carol Anne, Tag told himself, as he strode up the walk to his cottage. Remind her to feed the stray tomcat while he was away. Presumably Higgins could get her past that padlock. Then throw together a couple of days’ change of clothes. It might take that long in Boston to find the right lawyer.
Once he’d hired his big-city shark, he’d worry about shark feed. Somewhere in Boston he’d find a jeweler to buy Susannah’s ring. Because if Colton had given her that rock, it wasn’t zirconium. With any luck—if there was any luck left anywhere in the world—he’d get enough to pay his lawyer. And no, Susannah, I won’t be sending you back your change, care of Fleetfoot Farm. Her bill was higher than she’d dreamed and mounting by the minute.
And if he couldn’t salvage his career, then her ring would be just the first installment on all she owed him.
A letter was taped to his front door. Tag took it inside with him, ripped it open, then wadded it as he cursed aloud. A notice from the FYA Corporation, terminating his tenancy in their cottage, effective a month from today. Teeth clenched till they ached, he stalked to his TV. He’d set the VCR to record the noon news before he left the house that morning.
The twelve o’clock lead came as no surprise. The cameras showed Susannah Colton, sometime earlier that morning, coming down the Boston courthouse steps with a grimlooking suit—her lawyer, according to the voice-over. Besieged on all sides by reporters, she looked tiny and dog tired. More teenager than woman in her jeans and a man’s leather bomber jacket that hung down to her slim thighs.
Tag growled as he recognized it, but still, something twisted inside. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday when he met her. She’d spent the night in jail, after all?
The newscaster confirmed it as reporters blocked the couple’s way. With one arm draped protectively around her shoulders, seeming almost to hold her up, Susannah’s lawyer was doing the talking. As for his client, a night in a cell seemed to have knocked the stuffing, all that Texas grit and sass, out of her. She looked fragile, stunned. Less like a desperado horse thief or a vindictive wife than a scared little owl, staring out from shelter with those wide, haunted eyes and her feathers all ruffled.
A woman having second thoughts was what she looked like, and unpleasant ones. A little revenge seemed like a good idea at the time, huh, Tex? But now she was realizing. Bit off more than you could chew, did you, darlin’?
Or maybe she only needed a good night’s sleep to regain her spunk—and her spite. Looking at Susannah, Tax had missed most of the lawyer’s statement. He rewound the tape and this time focused on her designated knight.
“Mrs. Colton has no statement at this time,” that gentleman said grandly if predictably.
The surrounding pack resumed their yelping. Susannah put her head down and allowed her companion to steer her to a waiting car. The anchorman switched back to the studio.
He interviewed an expert on equine insurance, who hemmed and hawed and finally hazarded a guess that Lloyd’s of London would decline to pay out on Payback’s policy because, one, the horse had not been killed but only altered, and two, that horrendous act had been instigated not by some crazed outsider but by Stephen Colton’s own lawful wedded wife.
Tag attempted a whistle, but his lips were too dry. Sixty million dollars irretrievably washed down the drain? Even a millionaire might miss a sum like that! If Colton wasn’t the forgiving sort, and it looked less and less as if he was...
The question was, once he’d had time to cool down, who would Colton blame?
BY THE TIME Tag checked into a Boston hotel the tabloids had the story.
Revenge of the Century! shrieked the one in his hotel lobby, in two-inch type above a picture of Payback and one of the Coltons, kissing at the altar.
Payback, Texas Style! blared one of the rags he saw in a drugstore, walking back from supper at a cheap fishhouse down near the docks.
Don’t Mess with Texans! warned another.
By morning the Boston Globe had dug deeper. $30,000 Payoff to Geld Payback! yelled its banner headline. Ice in his guts, Tag told himself that at least now he knew what to ask for Susannah’s diamond. Assuming the jerks hadn’t made up that sum along with the rest of their facts.
By the time he’d hired his lawyer, the evening papers were out and somehow they’d dug up his juvenile records—which his lawyer had spent the past two hours assuring him were sealed. Buried forever. Not to worry.
Ex-Car Thief Took $30,000 Bribe to Ruin Payback! was how one headline put it.
Why bother with lawyers and the courts? He’d been tried and convicted already, and he could guess the sentence.
SHE SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT an umbrella. The collapsible one she’d bought in Paris was up at the big house along with the rest of her stuff. Her lawyer was still working on retrieving all that.
She should have bought, at least, a raincoat, one of those cheap plastic things. But she’d be counting her pennies from here on out. So the bomber would have to do. Leaning back against Brady’s pickup, Susannah Mack Colton tipped her Stetson to let the rain run off, folded her arms and snuggled her nose below the collar of Doc Taggart’s old jacket. She sucked in a breath of cold, damp Kentucky air, savoring with it the scent of man and leather, oddly comforting on this comfortless day.
Beyond the white board fence, a hundred yards up a low hill, the crowd was still gathering. A good-sized group, Brady would have been pleased. Black umbrellas, dark clothes, like a bunch of mushrooms sprouted in the rain.
She wondered suddenly what they were burying Brady in. Should have been his old jockey silks, the ones he wore winning the Derby on Payback. But they’d never fit. He’d put on the pounds since he’d quit the track and stepped down to stallion groom.
“Never mind. They’ll give you fresh ones upstairs,” she drawled softly, and dug in her pocket for his flask.
One swallow left since the night he’d given it to her. “That’s for warmth, not for whoopee,” he’d warned as they parted. “You save me a drop.”
He’d never come for it. She hadn’t had a sip since she’d found out why, that awful night in a Boston jail.
The crowd was bigger now. A wall of darkness ringed the grave. She tipped her brim to hide all that and looked down at his name on the flask. Brady, engraved in curly letters on old silver. A fine, fancy gift from a grateful British bettor, that time Brady won the Epsom on a five-to-one shot.
She had to struggle with the cap. Last closed by Dr. Taggart’s big, capable hands, she remembered with a rueful grimace. She held up the flask to the dripping sky. “Here’s to you, Brady.” Something warmer than a raindrop ran down her cheek and she brushed it away. “If they have horse races in heaven, then you and Daddy must be runnin’ neck and neck ’bout now. God bless...and Godspeed.” She held the last taste on her tongue, fire and sweetness, then welcome warmth around the heart. G’bye, ol’ friend. She buried her nose in the jacket again and breathed deep.
When she heard the sound of a car stopping behind the truck, Susannah didn’t look up. God give me strength! If it was more reporters... One more stupid question, just one more, and it’s Katy, bar the door!
“Miss? I’m afraid you can’t stop here, Miss.”
Oh, one of them. Eyes narrowed, shoulders squaring for a fight, she turned her head slowly. This was a public road even if Stephen would never admit it and had convinced the county he had the right to patrol outside his own fences, bully anybody who dared look at his farm.
Her muscles eased as she recognized the approaching guard. “Hey, Randy.” Randall was one of the few decent ones who didn’t give her the creeps. Most of the security guards her husband hired seemed to be angry, disappointed men. As if life didn’t give them enough opportunities to use those guns that dragged down their belts.
“Miz—!” The guard yanked off his hat from long habit, then stood there twisting it. “Mrs. Colton, ma’am! I didn’t recognize—”
“Hardly surprisin’.” Stephen had always insisted she dress her part around the farm. If she must wear pants, then it had to be jodhpurs with a silk shirt or a tweed jacket. Hair up in a snooty French twist. Only when she rode out with the exercise boys at dawn was she allowed to wear jeans and let her hair fly free. Funny that Stephen fell for her, looking like that, then had to change that first thing once he got her.
The guard glanced from her to the distant ceremony. “Oh. I guess he wouldn’t let you...?”
“Nope.” She’d had her lawyer ask, since Stephen wasn’t taking her calls. Word had come back promptly from on high. Translated from Houlihan’s tactful legalese, the word was, “Not in this lifetime, sugarbabe!”
Funny how little you could know a man in two years. She’d known Stephen was tough. Kentucky hardboot, they called a shrewd horseman hereabouts. But just how hard his boots were, she’d only begun to learn these past few days. She had a feeling the lesson wasn’t done yet, either.
“Sure was a shame,” Randall observed, putting his hat on and coming to stand beside her, facing uphill. “Surprised the heck out of me when I heard. That old man was so tough I’d have said Brady’d bury us all.”
“Yeah.” She’d thought so, too. But then, her own father had gone in seconds—one horse stumbling in front of his own, then the pileup from behind. Winged hero to smashed cripple in less time than it took her to scream and rush to press her hands to the TV screen, as if she could lift those tiny, flailing bodies off him. For horse folks, life usually happened fast, and it happened hard.
“But that plate in his skull, a fall on that...” Randall heaved a hound-dog sigh. “And they say he must have knocked it more than once, tumblin’ down a whole flight.”
“Yeah.” And Brady wouldn’t have been hurrying so, ’cept for me. She swallowed hard and blinked at the distant funeral.
Movement up there, looked like they were almost done. Dropping red Kentucky clay on his coffin, one by one, then trudging off over the crest of the hill.
A tall man dressed in black stepped apart from the dwindling crowd and stood staring down at them, something ominous in his stillness.
“Oh, Jeez, is that the boss?” Randall took two long steps away from her, spun toward his truck, then back again. “If he saw I was talking to you...!”
