Peggy Nicholson - Don't Mess With Texans

“That was your jacket she was wearing?” Carol Anne gave a cackling laugh. “Well, that’s the topper on a day to remember! You sure can pick ’em, Doc.” She turned toward the rack to pull down her own quilted overcoat.

“She pay with cash or a check?” If she’d paid by check, he could track her down through her bank. He wanted that jacket back, by God, and more than that, he wanted one last look at her face. Clearly he’d missed something the first time.

“Oh, no, something better.” Carol Anne shrugged into her coat. “She was fresh out of cash, is how she put it. And I told her we don’t take out-of-town checks.”

“You could have made an exception.”

“Ha! I said she could put it on a card, and she gave me a butter-wouldn’t-melt look and said something seemed to be wrong with her cards.”

“And so?” He wasn’t going to like the punch line if Carol Anne had stayed past closing to deliver it.

“So I said, let me try, anyway.”

“And she didn’t have any,” Tag muttered to himself. She drove around the country, ripping off gelding services from sucker vets? What kind of a con was that?

“She had an American Express and two Visa gold cards.”

But? Tag crossed his arms on the counter and waited for it.

“Every one of which had been canceled.”

“Right. Canceled.” He rubbed the back of his aching neck.. “So you told her goodbye and God bless?” She could have had his services for the asking. Could have had much more than that, if she’d wanted. There’d been no need to rip him off.

“You must be kidding. I asked Ms. Colton just how she intended to pay in that case—”

“Colton.” He was missing something here. Had missed a whole truckload of somethings. Must have left his brains in bed this morning, when he rolled out at 3 a.m. to take that call about the cat. “Colton? Her name was Mack.”

“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.