Don't Mess With Texans

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—

“—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.