Dark Horse

1

Life can change in a heartbeat.

I've always known that. I've lived the truth of that statement literally from the day I was born. I sometimes see those moments coming, sense them, anticipate them, as if they have an aura that precedes their arrival. I see one coming now. Adrenaline runs through my bloodstream like rocket fuel. My heart pounds like a piston. I'm ready to launch.

I've been told to stay put, to wait, but I know that's not the right decision. If I go in first, if I go in now, I've got the Golam brothers dead-bang. They think they know me. Their guard will be down. I've worked this case three months. I know what I'm doing. I know that I'm right. I know the Golam brothers are already twitching. I know I want this bust and deserve it. I know Lieutenant Sikes is here for the show, to put a feather in his cap when the news vans arrive and to make the public think they should vote for him in the next election for sheriff.

He stuck me on the side of the trailer and told me to wait. He doesn't know his ass. He doesn't even know the side door is the door the brothers use most. While Sikes and Ramirez are watching the front, the brothers are dumping their money into duffel bags and getting ready to bolt out the side. Billy Golam's four-by-four is parked ten feet away, covered in mud. If they run, they'll take the truck, not the Corvette parked in front. The truck can go off-road.

Sikes is wasting precious time. The Golam brothers have two girls in the trailer with them. This could easily turn into a hostage situation. But if I go in now, while their guard is down…

Screw Sikes. I'm going in before these twitches freak.

It's my case. I know what I'm doing.

I key my radio. "This is stupid. They're going to break for the truck. I'm going in."

"Goddammit, Estes-" Sikes.

I click the radio off and drop it into the weeds growing beside the trailer. It's my case. It's my bust. I know what I'm doing.

I go to the side door and knock the way all the Golam brothers' customers knock: two knocks, one knock, two knocks. "Hey, Billy, it's Elle. I need some."

Billy Golam jerks open the door, wild-eyed, high on his own home cooking-crystal meth. He's breathing hard. He's got a gun in his hand.

Shit.

The front door explodes inward.

One of the girls screams.

Buddy Golam shouts: "Cops!"

Billy Golam swings the.357 up in my face. I suck in my last breath.

And then I opened my eyes and felt sick at the knowledge that I was still alive.

This was the way I had greeted every day for the past two years. I had relived that memory so many times, it was like replaying a movie over and over and over. No part of it changed, not a word, not an image. I wouldn't allow it.

I lay in the bed and thought about slitting my wrists. Not in an abstract way. Specifically. I looked at my wrists in the soft lamplight-delicate, as fine-boned as the wing of a bird, skin as thin as tissue, blue-lined with veins-and thought about how I would do it. I looked at those thin blue lines and thought of them as lines of demarcation. Guidelines. Cut here.

I pictured the needle-nose point of a boning knife. The lamplight would catch on the blade. Blood would rise to the surface in its wake as the blade skated along the vein. Red. My favorite color.

The image didn't frighten me. That truth frightened me most of all.

I looked at the clock: 4:38 A.M. I'd had my usual fitful four and a half hours of sleep. Trying for more was an exercise in futility.

Trembling, I forced my legs over the edge of the bed and got up, pulling a deep blue chenille throw around my shoulders. The fabric was soft, luxurious, warm. I made special note of the sensations. You're always more intensely alive the closer you come to looking death in the face.

I wondered if Hector Ramirez had realized that the split second before he died.

I wondered that every day.

I dropped the throw and went into the bathroom.

"Good morning, Elena. You look like shit."

Too thin. Hair a wild black tangle. Eyes too large, too dark, as if there was nothing within to shine outward. The crux of my problem: lack of substance. There was-is-a vague asymmetry to my face, like a porcelain vase that has been broken, then painstakingly restored. The same vase it was before, yet not the same. The same face I was born with, yet not the same. Slightly skewed and strangely expressionless.

I was beautiful once.

I reached for a comb on the counter, knocked it to the floor, grabbed a brush instead. Start at the bottom, work upward. Like combing a horse's tail. Work the knots out gently. But I had already tired of looking at myself. Anger and resentment bubbled up through me, and I tore the brush through my hair, shoving the snarls together and tangling the brush in the midst of the mess.

I tried maybe forty-five seconds to extricate the thing, yanking at the brush, tearing at the hair above the snarl, not caring that I was pulling hair out of my head by the roots. I swore aloud, swatted at my image in the mirror, swept the tumbler and soap dish off the counter in a tantrum, and they smashed on the tile floor. Then I jerked open a drawer in the vanity and pulled out a scissors.

Furious, shaking, breathing hard, I cut the brush free. It dropped to the floor with a mass of black hair wrapped around it. The pressure in my chest eased. Numbness trickled down through me like rain. Calm.

Without emotion, I proceeded to hack away at the rest of my mane, cutting it boy-short in ten minutes. The result was ragged with a finger-in-the-light-socket quality. Still, I'd seen worse in Vogue.

I swept up the mess-the discarded hair, the broken glass-tossed it in the trash, and walked out of the room.

I'd worn my hair long all my life.

T he morning was cool, shrouded in a thick, ground-hugging fog, the air ripe with the damp scents of south Florida: green plants and the murky canal that ran behind the property; mud and manure and horses. I stood on the patio of the little guest house I lived in and breathed deeply.

I had come to this farm a refugee. Jobless, homeless, a pariah in my chosen profession. Unwanted, unloved, abandoned. All of it deserved. I had been off the job two years, most of that time spent in and out of hospitals as doctors repaired the damage done to my body that day at the Golam brothers' trailer. Piecing together shattered bone, patching torn flesh, putting the left side of my face together like a three-dimensional puzzle. They had been less successful with my psyche.

Needing something to do until I could make up my mind about reaching for that boning knife, I had answered an ad in Sidelines, a locally based, biweekly magazine for the horse industry: GROOM WANTED.

Life is strange. I don't want to believe anything is preordained. To believe that, one would have to accept the existence of a viciously cruel higher power in order to explain things like child abuse and rapists and AIDS and good men being shot dead in the line of duty. But the occasional twist of fate always makes me wonder.

The phone number in the ad belonged to Sean Avadon. I'd known Sean a hundred years ago in my riding days, when I was a spoiled, sulky, Palm Beach teenager and he was a spoiled, outrageous twenty-something spending his trust fund on horses and mad flings with pretty young men from Sweden and Germany. We had been friends, Sean always telling me I needed him to be my surrogate sense of humor and fashion.

Our families lived a couple of mansions down from one another on the Lake Worth side of the narrow island, Sean's father a real estate magnate, mine an attorney to the wealthiest crooks in south Florida. The slumlord and the shyster, each of them sire to ungrateful offspring. Sean and I had bonded in parental disdain and our love for horses. Wild child times two.

All that had seemed so long ago as to be a dream I could barely remember. So much had happened since. I had left Palm Beach, left that world. I had metaphorically lived and died in another life. Then I answered that ad: GROOM WANTED.

I didn't get the job. As bad a shape as I was in, even I could see the pity in his eyes when we met for drinks at The Players. I was a dark shadow of the girl Sean had known twenty years past, so pathetic I didn't have the pride to fake mental health. I guess that might have been rock bottom. I might have gone home that night to the apartment I was renting and tried to find that boning knife.

Instead, Sean took me in like a stray cat-a recurring theme in my life. He put me in his guest house and asked that I work a couple of his horses for the winter season. He claimed he needed the help. His ex-trainer/ex-lover had run off to Holland with his groom and left him in the lurch. He made it sound like he was giving me a job. What he was giving me was a stay of execution.

Three months had passed. I was still fantasizing about suicide, and every evening I took a bottle of Vicodin out of my nightstand, emptied out the pills, and looked at them and counted them and thought how one pill would ease the physical pain that had been with me every day since "the incident," as my attorney called it. (How sterile and neat that sounded. A small segment of unpleasantness that could be snipped from the fabric of life and isolated. How in contrast to my memories.) One pill could ease the pain. Thirty could end it. I had a stockpile of three hundred and sixty pills.

Every evening I looked at those pills, then put them back in the bottle and put the bottle away. I had never taken one. My evening ritual.

My daily ritual for the past three months was the routine of Sean's barn and time spent with his horses. I found both rituals comforting, but for very different reasons. The pills were a connection to death, and every night I didn't take them was a victory. The horses were a connection to life, and every hour spent with them was a reprieve.

Early on in my life I came to the conclusion that my spirituality was something uniquely and privately my own, something I could find only deep within a small quiet space in the very center of my being. Some people find that place through meditation or yoga or prayer. I find that place within me when I am on a horse. My Zen religion: the equestrian art of dressage.

Dressage is a discipline born on the battlefield in ancient times. Warhorses were trained in precision movements to aid their masters in battle, not only to evade enemies, but to attack them. Over the centuries the training went from the battlefield to the showring, and dressage evolved into something like equine ballet.

To the untrained eye it appears graceful and elegant and effortless. A skilled rider seems to be so quiet, so motionless as to virtually blend into the background. In reality, the sport is physically and mentally demanding on both horse and rider. Complex and complicated. The rider must be attuned to the horse's every footfall, to the balance of every inch of the horse's body. The slightest shift of the rider's weight, the smallest movement of a hand, the lightest tensing of a calf muscle will affect the quality of the performance. Focus must be absolute. Everything else becomes insignificant.

Riding was my refuge as a teenager, when I felt I had little control over any other aspect of my life. It was my stress release when I had a career. It had become my salvation when I had nothing else. On the back of a horse I felt whole, complete, connected to that vital place in the very center of me that had otherwise closed itself off, and the chaos within me found balance.

D'Artagnon and I moved across the sand arena through the last wisps of the morning ground fog, the horse's muscles bulging and rolling, his hooves striking the ground in perfect metronome rhythm. I massaged the left rein, sat into his back, tightened my calves around him. The energy moved from his hindquarters, over his back; his neck rounded and his knees came up into the stylized, slow-motion trot called passage. He seemed almost to float beneath me, to bounce like a huge, soft ball. I felt he might take wing if only I knew the one secret word to whisper to him.

We halted in the center of the ring at the place known as X. In that moment I felt joy and peace.

I dropped the reins on his neck and patted him. He lowered his head and started to walk forward, then stopped and came to attention.

A girl sat on the white board fence that ran along the road. She watched me with a sense of expectation about her. Even though I hadn't noticed her, I could tell she'd been there, waiting. I judged her to be about twelve. Her hair was long and brown, perfectly straight, and neatly held back from her face with a barrette on each side. She wore little round black-rimmed glasses that made her look very serious. I rode toward her with a vague feeling of apprehension that made no sense at the time.

"Can I help you?" I asked. D'Ar blew through his nostrils at her, ready to bolt and save us from the intruder. I should have let him.

"I'm here to see Ms. Estes," she said properly, as if she'd come on business.

"Elena Estes?"

"Yes."

"And you are…?"

"Molly Seabright."

"Well, Molly Seabright, Ms. Estes isn't here at the moment."

"You're Ms. Estes," she declared. "I recognize your horse. His name is D'Artagnon, like in the Three Musketeers." She narrowed her eyes. "You cut your hair." Disapproval.

"Do I know you?"

"No."

"Then how do you know me?" I asked, the apprehension rising up like bile through my chest to the base of my throat. Maybe she was a relative of Hector Ramirez, come to tell me she hated me. Maybe she'd been sent as a decoy by an older relative who would now pop out of nowhere to shoot me or scream at me or throw acid in my face.

"From Sidelines," she said.

I felt like I'd walked into the middle of a play. Molly Seabright took pity on me and carefully climbed down from the fence. She was slightly built and dressed neatly in sensible dark slacks and a little blue T-shirt with a small daisy chain embroidered around the throat. She came up along D'Artagnon's shoulder and carefully held the magazine out to me, folded open to an interior page.

The photograph was in color. Me on D'Ar, riding through thin ribbons of early-morning fog. The sunlight made his coat shine as bright as a new penny. My hair was pulled back in a thick ponytail.

I had no memory of being photographed. I had certainly never been interviewed, though the writer seemed to know things about me I didn't know myself. The caption read: Private investigator Elena Estes enjoys an early-morning ride on D'Artagnon at Sean Avadon's Avadonis Farm in Palm Beach Point Estates.

"I've come to hire you," Molly Seabright said.

I turned toward the barn and called for Irina, the stunning Russian girl who had beat me out for the groom's job. She came out, frowning and sulky. I stepped down off D'Artagnon and asked her to please take him back to the barn. She took his reins, and sighed and pouted and slouched away like a sullen runway model.

I ran a gloved hand back through my hair, startled to come to the end of it so quickly. A fist of tension began to quiver in my stomach.

"My sister is missing," Molly Seabright said. "I've come to hire you to find her."

"I'm sorry. I'm not a private investigator. This is some kind of mistake."

"Why does the magazine say that you are?" she asked, looking stern and disapproving again. She didn't trust me. I'd already lied to her once.

"I don't know."

"I have money," she said defensively. "Just because I'm twelve doesn't mean I can't hire you."

"You can't hire me because I'm not a private investigator."

"Then what are you?" she demanded.

A broken-down, busted-out, pathetic ex-sheriff's detective. I'd thumbed my nose at the life I'd been raised in, been ostracized from the life I'd chosen. What did that make me?

"Nothing," I said, handing the magazine back to her. She didn't take it.

I walked away to an ornate park bench that sat along the end of the arena and took a long drink from the bottle of water I'd left there.

"I have a hundred dollars with me," the girl said. "For a deposit. I expect you have a daily fee and that you probably charge expenses. I'm sure we can work something out."

Sean emerged from the end of the stable, squinting into the distance, showing his profile. He stood with one booted leg cocked and pulled a pair of deerskin gloves from the waist of his brown breeches. Handsome and fit. A perfect ad for Ralph Lauren.

I headed across the arena, anger boiling now in my stomach. Anger, and underlying it a building sense of panic.

"What the fuck is this?" I shouted, smacking him in the chest with the magazine.

He took a step back, looking offended. "It might be Sidelines, but I can't read with my nipples, so I can't say for certain. Jesus Christ, El. What did you do to your hair?"

I hit him again, harder, wanting to hurt him. He grabbed the magazine away from me, took another quick step out of range, and turned to the cover. "Betsy Steiner's stallion, Hilltop Giotto. Have you seen him? He's to die for."

"You told a reporter I'm a private investigator."

"They asked me who you were. I had to tell them something."

"No, you didn't have to. You didn't have to tell them anything."

"It's only Sidelines. For Christ's sake."

"It's my name in a goddam magazine read by thousands of people. Thousands of people now know where to find me. Why don't you just paint a big target on my chest?"

He frowned. "Only dressage people read the dressage section. And then only to see if their own names are in the show results."

"Thousands of people now think I'm a private investigator."

"What was I supposed to tell them? The truth?" Said as if that were the most distasteful option. Then I realized it probably was.

"How about 'no comment'?"

"That's not very interesting."

I pointed at Molly Seabright. "That little girl has come here to hire me. She thinks I can help her find her sister."

"Maybe you can."

I refused to state the obvious: that I couldn't even help myself.

Sean lifted a shoulder with lazy indifference and handed the magazine back to me. "What else have you got to do with your time?"

Irina emerged from the barn, leading Oliver-tall, elegant, and beautiful, the equine version of Sean. Sean dismissed me and went to his teak mounting block.

Molly Seabright was sitting on the park bench with her hands folded in her lap. I turned and walked to the barn, hoping she would just go away. D'Artagnon's bridle hung from the ceiling on a four-pronged hook near an antique mahogany cabinet full of leather-cleaning supplies. I chose a small damp sponge from the work table, rubbed it over a bar of glycerine soap, and began to clean the bridle, trying to narrow the focus of my mind on the small motor skills involved in the task.

"You're very rude."

I could see her from the corner of my eye: standing as tall as she could-five-feet-nothing-her mouth a tight little knot.

"Yes, I am. That's part of the joy of being me: I don't care."

"You're not going to help me."

"I can't. I'm not what you need. If your sister is missing, your parents should go to the cops."

"I went to the Sheriff's Office. They wouldn't help me either."

"You went? What about your parents? They don't care your sister is missing?"

For the first time Molly Seabright seemed to hesitate. "It's complicated."

"What's complicated about it? She's either missing or she's not."

"Erin doesn't live with us."

"How old is she?"

"Eighteen. She doesn't get along with our parents."

"There's something new."

"It's not like she's bad or anything," Molly said defensively. "She doesn't do drugs or anything like that. It's just that she has her own opinions, that's all. And her opinions aren't Bruce's opinions…"

"Who's Bruce?"

"Our stepfather. Mom always sides with him, no matter how asinine he is. It makes Erin angry, so she moved out."

"So Erin is technically an adult, living on her own, free to do whatever she wants," I said. "Does she have a boyfriend?"

Molly shook her head, but avoided my eyes. She wasn't so sure of that answer, or she thought a lie might better serve her cause.

"What makes you think she's missing?"

"She was supposed to pick me up Monday morning. That's her day off. She's a groom at the show grounds for Don Jade. He trains jumpers. I didn't have school. We were going to go to the beach, but she never came or called me. I called her and left a message on her cell phone, and she never called me back."

"She's probably busy," I said, stroking the sponge down a length of rein. "Grooms work hard."

Even as I said it I could see Irina sitting on the mounting block, face turned to the sun as she blew a lazy stream of cigarette smoke at the sky. Most grooms.

"She would have called me," Molly insisted. "I went to the show grounds myself the next day-yesterday. A man at Don Jade's barn told me Erin doesn't work there anymore."

Grooms quit. Grooms get fired. Grooms decide one day to become florists and decide the next day they'd rather be brain surgeons. On the flip side, there are trainers with reputations as slave masters, temperamental prima donnas who go through grooms like disposable razors. I've known trainers who demanded a groom sleep every night in a stall with a psychotic stallion, valuing the horse far more than the person. I've known trainers who fired five grooms in a week.

Erin Seabright was, by the sound of it, headstrong and argumentative, maybe with an eye for the guys. She was eighteen and tasting independence for the first time… And why I was even thinking this through was beyond me. Habit, maybe. Once a cop… But I hadn't been a cop for two years, and I would never be a cop again.

"Sounds to me like Erin has a life of her own. Maybe she just doesn't have time for a kid sister right now."

Molly Seabright's expression darkened. "I told you Erin's not like that. She wouldn't just leave."

"She left home."

"But she didn't leave me. She wouldn't."

Finally she sounded like a child instead of a forty-nine-year-old CPA. An uncertain, frightened little girl. Looking to me for help.

"People change. People grow up," I said bluntly, taking the bridle down from the hook. "Maybe it's your turn."

The words hit their mark like bullets. Tears rose behind the Harry Potter glasses. I didn't allow myself to feel guilt or pity. I didn't want a job or a client. I didn't want people coming into my life with expectations.

"I thought you would be different," she said.

"Why would you think that?"

She glanced over at the magazine lying on the shelf with the cleaning supplies, D'Artagnon and I floating across the page like something from a dream. But she said nothing. If she had an explanation for her belief, she thought better of sharing it with me.

"I'm nobody's hero, Molly. I'm sorry you got that impression. I'm sure if your parents aren't worried about your sister, and the cops aren't worried about your sister, then there's nothing to be worried about. You don't need me, and believe me, you'd be sorry if you did."

She didn't look at me. She stood there for a moment, composing herself, then pulled a small red wallet from the carrying pouch strapped around her waist. She took out a ten-dollar bill and placed it on the magazine.

"Thank you for your time," she said politely, then turned and walked away.

I didn't chase after her. I didn't try to give her her ten dollars back. I watched her walk away and thought she was more of an adult than I was.

Irina appeared in my peripheral vision, propping herself against the archway as if she hadn't the strength to stand on her own. "You want I should saddle Feliki?"

Erin Seabright had probably quit her job. She was probably in the Keys right now enjoying her newfound independence with some cute good-for-nothing. Molly didn't want to believe that because it would mean a sea change in her relationship with the big sister she idolized. Life is full of disappointments. Molly would learn that the same way as everyone: by being let down by someone she loved and trusted.

Irina gave a dramatic sigh.

"Yes," I said. "Saddle Feliki."

She started toward the mare's stall, then I asked a question for which I would have been far better off not having an answer.

"Irina, do you know anything about a jumper trainer named Don Jade?"

"Yes," she said casually, not even looking back at me. "He is a murderer."