Dark Horse

14

Jill stood in front of the cheap full-length mirror wearing nothing but makeup, a black lace bra, and a thong. She turned this way and that, practicing her various looks. Shy, coy, sexy. She liked sexy best. It went with the bra.

The bra was too small by a couple of sizes and dug into her sides, but it made her boobs look all the bigger, which she thought was a good thing. Like the women in Hustler, her tits seemed to swell up out of the cups. She could easily imagine Jade burying his face in her cleavage. The idea gave her a tingle between her legs, which drew her attention to the thong.

It also was too small for her, the skinny little straps cutting into the fat on her hips. Pubic hair sprouted out on either side of the scrap of black lace at the front. She twisted around and looked at her butt, bare and white, wide and dimpled. She didn't like the way the thong felt going up her crack, but she thought she'd better get used to it. The thong was sexy. Men went for a thong. She just wished that bitch Erin hadn't been so fucking skinny. Maybe if the thong was for a normal-sized person it wouldn't be so uncomfortable.

Oh, well. It was free. And it kind of turned her on that it belonged to someone else. She was taking Erin's place-in the barn, in the world. With Erin gone, Jill could be the flirty one. Jill could be the clever one.

But she would still be in the shadow of Paris Montgomery.

That cunt.

Jill scowled at the reminder. It was not a pretty reflection that looked back at her.

She hated Paris. She hated her smile, hated her big eyes, hated her blond hair. She hated Paris more than she had hated Erin. And she had hated the two of them together more than anything. Together they had been like the popular girls in school: too cool to be friends with someone like Jill, full of private jokes and catty looks. At least she didn't have to put up with that shit anymore. But there was still Paris.

Men fell all over themselves for Paris. She could get anybody to do anything for her. Nobody seemed to see that she was just a big phony. Everyone thought she was so funny and sweet and nice. She wasn't nice at all. When people weren't looking she was bossy and bitchy and mean. She was always making snide remarks about Jill eating too much and Jill needing to exercise and Jill not knowing how to dress.

Jill looked at herself head to toe in the mirror and suddenly saw exactly what Paris Montgomery saw. Not a sexy woman in sexy lingerie, but a fat face with small, piggy eyes and a sour, downturned mouth; arms inflated with fat; fat legs with dimpled knees; a body she hated so much she often fantasized taking a knife and slicing off big slabs of it. Ugly and pathetic in her stolen, too-small underwear.

Tears squeezed out of her eyes and her face turned mottled red. It wasn't her fault she was fat. Her mother had let that happen when she was a kid. So she couldn't help it now that she ate the wrong things. And it wasn't her fault she didn't exercise. She was tired at the end of the day-never mind that bitch Paris was always accusing her of not working hard enough.

Why would she work any harder for Paris? Paris didn't give her any incentive to work hard, so if she wasn't getting as much done as Paris wanted, it was Paris's fault. And it wasn't her fault she didn't have nice clothes. She didn't get paid enough to buy nice things. She had to shoplift to get nice things. And she deserved them as much as anybody-more, really, considering people were so mean to her.

Well, she would show Paris Montgomery, she thought, digging through the pile of clothes tangled in the sheets of the unmade bed. She was going to take Paris Montgomery's place, just like she'd taken Erin's place.

Jill knew she could be just as good a rider as Paris if only someone would give her the chance. She had never had a good enough horse, that was all. Her father had bought her a crummy, cheap Appaloosa to ride. How was she supposed to get anywhere in the jumping world on that? She had once written a letter to her mother's brother to see if he wouldn't buy her a real horse. She couldn't see why he wouldn't. He was rich, after all. What was seventy or eighty thousand dollars to him? But she had never heard a thing from him. Cheap bastard.

She'd show him too. She'd show everybody. She was going to be rich, and she was going to ride the best horses and go to the Olympics. She had it all planned. All she needed was a break, and she knew right where she was going to get it.

She pulled a see-through white stretch lace blouse out of the pile of clothes Erin had left behind. Jill had claimed the stuff for herself. Why not? It wasn't even stealing if the other person just left it. She struggled into the top. Even with the stretch, the front gapped open between the buttons. She undid the top three, showing cleavage and black bra. That helped. And it was sexy. It was just the kind of thing Britney Spears wore all the time. That was why Erin had bought it. Erin always dressed that way: crop tops and hip huggers. And guys had always had their eyes on her-including Don.

Jill rummaged through another pile. She came up with a purple stretch miniskirt she'd stolen from Wal-Mart. It had been on clearance, anyway. The store wasn't out that much. She stepped into it and wriggled and pushed and pulled until she had it in place. She had a serious panty line from the too-small thong, but she figured that was a good thing. It was like advertising.

A pair of big hoop earrings and a necklace from the pile of jewelry that had belonged to Erin, and the bangle bracelets she'd lifted from Bloomingdale's, and she was set. She squeezed her feet into a pair of platform sandals, grabbed her purse, and left the apartment. She was going to show everybody, and she was going to start tonight.

L andry sat at his desk feeling like an asshole, scrolling through pages on the computer screen. Friday night, and this was what he had going on in his life.

It was Estes' fault, he thought, scowling. He had let that become his mantra for the day. Like a thorn, she'd gotten under his skin to irritate him. Because of her he was sitting at his desk reading old newspaper stories.

The squad room was mostly empty. A couple of the night-shift guys were doing paperwork. Landry's shift was long over, and the other four guys he worked with had gone home to girlfriends or wives and kids, or were sitting in the usual watering hole drinking and bitching, as cops are wont to do.

Landry sat at his desk trying to dig something up on the horse people. Neither Jade nor his assistant had a criminal record. The groom who was allegedly fucking Jade had been picked up a couple of times for shoplifting, and once on a DUI. She had struck him as trouble, and he'd been right about that. He didn't believe she'd been with Jade Thursday night, but she'd felt compelled to give the guy an alibi just the same. Landry had to wonder why.

Did the girl know Jade had been involved in letting Michael Berne's horses loose? Had she done the job herself, and by giving Jade an alibi, given herself one as well? Maybe Jade had put her up to it. He seemed too sharp to risk pulling a stunt like that himself. If the girl got caught, he could always deny knowledge of what she'd been up to. He could say it was a misguided attempt to gain his approval.

Michael Berne certainly believed Jade had been behind the incident. Landry had interviewed him in the afternoon, and he'd thought Berne was going to cry or choke as he blamed Don Jade for all the problems in his life. What had Paris Montgomery said? That Berne blamed Jade for everything except his own lack of talent. Berne seemed to think Jade was the Antichrist, responsible for all evil in the horse business.

Maybe he wasn't all wrong.

Estes had told Landry about Jade's past the first time she'd come in, the schemes to kill horses for the insurance money. No one had touched the guy for any of that. Jade had slipped out from under it all like a greased snake.

Insurance fraud, killing horses-what might Erin Seabright know about any of that, Landry wondered. And why wasn't she around to ask?

He had put a call in that afternoon to the Ocala authorities to see if they could locate the girl up there, and he had put out an alert for all law enforcement officers in Palm Beach County to be on the lookout for her car. She had probably split town for a new job or a new boyfriend, but in case she hadn't, it wouldn't hurt to cover the bases.

And if anyone asked him what the hell he was doing, he would say it was all Estes' fault, he thought irritably.

He sipped his coffee and glanced over his shoulder. The night guys were still into their paperwork. Landry tapped a couple of keys and brought up a newspaper account of the Golam brothers' bust, two years prior. He had read it earlier in the day, knew what was in it, knew exactly the paragraph his eyes would go to: the paragraph that described narcotics detective Elena Estes hanging on the door of Billy Golam's truck, then falling beneath it. She had been dragged fifty yards down Okeechobee Boulevard, and was hospitalized in critical condition at the time the story had been written.

He wondered what she must have gone through since that day, how many weeks, months she'd lain in a hospital bed. He wondered what had possessed her to jump on that truck and try to wrestle control of it from Billy Golam.

Narcs. Cowboys, every last one of them.

Two years had passed. He wondered what she'd been doing all that time, and why she'd come out of the shadows for this case. He wondered why her life was crossing paths with his.

He sure as hell didn't want the trouble that came with her. But there it was. He'd taken the bait. He was on the case now.

It was all Estes' fault.

J ill ran out the front door of The Players, huffing and hiccuping, fat tears spilling down her cheeks with a dirty stream of black mascara. She swiped the back of her hand under her running nose, then scraped a stringy strand of hair back out of her eyes.

The valets stood off to the side, staring at her, saying nothing. They didn't ask if they could get her car, because they knew by looking at her, she wouldn't have a car worth letting them park. They parked cars for beautiful people, rich people, thin people.

"What are you looking at?" Jill snapped. They looked at each other, smirking. "Fuck you!" she shouted and ran, crying, across the parking lot, falling off one platform sandal and turning her ankle. Stumbling, she dropped the beaded handbag she'd stolen at Neiman Marcus, and the contents spewed out of it across the pavement.

"Goddammit!" Crawling on her hands and knees, she broke a fingernail as she scraped at a tube of lipstick and a pack of condoms. "Fuck! Fuck!"

Spittle and tears and snot ran from her face onto the concrete. Jill folded herself over into a ball and sobbed, a wrenching, ugly noise. She was ugly. Her clothes were ugly. Even her crying was ugly. Pain swelled inside her like a blister and burst with another wave of tears.

Why? She had asked the question a million times in her life. Why did she have to be the fat one, the ugly one; the one nobody liked, much less loved? It wasn't fair. Why was she supposed to have to work hard to change herself when bitches like Erin and Paris just had it all?

She wiped her face on the sleeve of the white lace blouse, gathered her stuff together, and struggled to her feet. An elegant older couple walking away from a Jaguar stared at her with something like horror. Jill gave them the finger. The woman gasped and the man put his arm around her protectively and hustled her toward the building.

Jill opened her car and flung her purse and the things that had come out of it in the direction of the passenger's seat. She flung herself behind the wheel, slammed the door, and burst into tears again. She pounded her fists on the wheel, then against the window, then hit the horn by accident and startled at the blast of sound.

Her big plan. Her big seduction. What a fucking joke she was.

She'd gone into Players, knowing Jade would be there, thinking he would invite her for a drink, and she could flirt with him and let him know how she'd helped him out with that cop. He was supposed to have been thankful and impressed with her quick thinking, and grateful for her loyalty. And they were supposed to have ended up at his place, where he would fuck her brains out. Phase one in her plan to get rid of Paris.

But everything had gone wrong, because she could never get a break. The whole stupid world was against her. Jade hadn't arrived yet when she got there, and the maître d' had wanted to throw her out. She could tell by the way he looked her up and down, like he thought she was some cheap hooker or something. He hadn't believed her when she told him she was meeting someone. And the waitress and the bartender had put their heads together and snickered at her as she sat at a table, waiting like an idiot drinking Diet Coke because they wouldn't go for her fake ID and serve her booze. Then that creep Van Zandt had showed up, half-drunk, and invited himself to sit with her.

What a jerk. All the mean, rotten things she'd heard him say about her, and he thought he could just suddenly pretend to be nice to her and charm his way into her pants. He'd never taken his eyes off her cleavage for the first fifteen minutes. And when she told him she was waiting for someone else, he had the nerve to be offended. Like she'd ever want to have sex with an old guy like him. So what he'd slipped her a couple of drinks? That didn't mean she owed him a blowjob, which was what he had wanted. If she was going to suck dick tonight, it wasn't going to be his.

And then Jade had finally walked in. And he'd looked at her with such disgust, she had wanted to shatter like a piece of glass. His angry words rang in her ears as if he'd screamed them at her, when in reality he'd asked her out into a quiet hall and had never raised his voice above a near whisper.

"What were you thinking, coming in here dressed like that?" he demanded. "You're my employee. The things you do in public reflect on me."

"But I was just-"

"I don't want the words street whore associated with my barn."

Jill had gasped as if he'd slapped her. That was when Michael Berne had come into the hall. She had seen him from the corner of her eye, pretending to make a phone call, watching them.

"I see clients here," Jade went on. "I conduct business here."

"I j-just w-wanted to see you," she'd said, her breath hitching in her throat as tears welled up. "I w-wanted to tell you about-"

"What's the matter with you? Thinking you can come here and interrupt my evening?"

"B-but I have t-to tell you- I know about Stellar-"

"If you need to speak with me about something, we'll do it at the barn during business hours."

"B-but-"

"Is everything all right here?" Michael Berne asked, butting in like it was any of his business, the skinny freckled dork.

"This doesn't concern you, Michael," Jade said.

"The young lady seems upset." But when he looked at her, Jill had known he didn't care whether or not she was upset. He had looked at her the same way every other man had looked at her tonight-like she was selling it and she ought to be cutting her prices.

She had glared up at him through a wavy sheen of tears and said, "Butt out! We don't need you around here or anywhere else!"

Berne had moved away. "You ought to take your personal business somewhere private, Jade," he said like a prissy fruit. "This is really unprofessional."

Jade had waited until Berne was out of sight, then turned on her again, angrier than before. "Get out of here. Get out of here before you embarrass me any more than you already have. We'll talk about this tomorrow, first thing in the morning. If I can stand the sight of you."

He might as well have cut her with a knife. The pain had gone as deep inside her as if he had.

Fuck him, Jill thought now. Don Jade was her boss, not her father. He couldn't tell her how to dress or where she could and couldn't go. He couldn't call her a whore and get away with it.

All the hard work she did for Don Jade, and this was the way he treated her. She would have been his partner-in bed and out. She would have been loyal to him. She would have done anything for him. But he didn't deserve her or her loyalty and devotion. He deserved to have people betray him and stab him in the back. He deserved whatever happened to him.

An idea slowly began to take shape in Jill's mind as she sat there in her car. She didn't have to put up with being treated like dirt. She didn't have to stand for being called names. She could get a job with any stable she wanted. Fuck Don Jade.

She drove out of the parking lot and took a left on South Shore, heading for the equestrian center, paying no attention to the car that pulled out behind her.