Forging Fire Read online

  Other books in The Horseshoer Mystery Series:

  The Clincher

  Dead Blow

  Other books by Lisa Preston:

  The Ultimate Guide to Horse Feed, Supplements, and Nutrition

  (Skyhorse, 2016)

  Alternative Treatments for Animals (Skyhorse, 2020)

  Copyright © 2020 by Lisa Preston

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

  All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Arcade Publishing® and CrimeWise® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photo credits: © Kamaga/Getty Images (horse rider); © Matthew Palmer/Getty Images (dog)

  ISBN: 978-1-950691-76-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-950691-77-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 1

  THE KIDNEY-BUSTING DRIVE DOWN THE GRAVEL road to the Buckeye is extra rough in a diesel with stiff suspension like Ol’ Blue’s, but rolling closer to the ranch always makes me smile. My teeth air-dried by the time I eased the truck under the gate header. Charley got up from his snooze, shook his furry, yellow self, and did a chortle-woof in appreciation of our destination.

  “No herding today,” I told him.

  My dog didn’t look best convinced. The second I opened the truck door, which bears the decal DALE’S HORSESHOEING along with the house phone number, Charley bailed out with hope in his heart, staring at the faraway rangeland like anyone with a working soul does, before he got busy with his sniffing.

  “No good, no good.” Manuel, the guy who works seasonally for the Nunn Finer Hay Company, was muttering under the hood of the pickup between the main barn and the all-quiet ranch house.

  “Hey, Manny.” I don’t know if he heard my greeting as he continued to commune with the innards of his engine, but I reckoned Skip and Harley, the geldings I planned to shoe, were in the corral at the run-in shed on the other side of the house. Soon as I found the horses, I’d move Ol’ Blue so I wouldn’t have to haul my anvil too far.

  “Miss?”

  “Miss”-ing me—instead of calling me by name—is one of Manuel’s things, but I try to have the kind of faith my dog does and gave him another chance.

  “Rainy,” I reminded him.

  “Miss, you know a phone number for the Mister?”

  I always enjoy when anyone makes the mistake of asking Hollis something about ranch plans and Hollis directs them to Donna, who’s Hollis’s new wife and the real owner of the Buckeye ranch.

  “Mister Hollis, he gave me money to take the bull to the sale down in California, but today my truck, it has problems, and I cannot do it.”

  “Oh.” I sort of got it now. Not due in ’til after this weekend, Donna and Hollis. Ranch folk don’t often get to get away. “They’re kind of out of town.”

  “Yes, but you have a way to talk to them?”

  “They’re not cell phone people.” No way, no how was he going to reach the honeymooners. Their wedding was last November. With spring around the corner, the old newlyweds were more than ready to ride off into the sunrise. They’d gone so deep in the back-country with four horses, they’d probably slipped back in time a full century.

  Manuel spun his eyeballs a lap like I was the one a little deaf or half-stupid. “The bull is supposed to be at the big sale tomorrow.”

  “Oh!” Now I got it extra good. Donna’s killer bull was supposed to go to the Black Bluff bull sale, down California way, and Manuel was supposed to haul the blasted beast there. Suggesting Manuel to Donna and Hollis as a ranch hand had been my doing. They’d needed help, didn’t need to be breaking their backs as hard as they did. Donna has given me all the pull to shoe her horses when and how I thought best. Plus, her stock are so well-handled, they stand like a dream, no fussing or yanking away while I work on their feet. I even shoe the ranch geldings in the pasture sometimes. Real well-behaved, old-style Quarter Horses. With most clients, I require a person be there to handle the horse, but I trust Donna and her stock, and she trusts me. I just about love Donna. She’s become like another mother to me, and her horses behave so well that I shoe them when my schedule’s open.

  Fact is, the horses I’d planned to end my afternoon shoeing, they could wait a couple days just fine. Twisting my ponytail around my thumb made the idea come quicker. I’ve always wanted to go to the Black Bluff bull sale, even though Hollis has said a time or two, kind of weird-like, that I ought not visit there. Now fate was handing me a great excuse to go. I’d be helping out Hollis and Donna by getting a bad-news bull off the Buckeye ranch. It’d get me to the best-of-the-West sale I’d long wanted to see—horses, cattle, and herding dogs worth big bucks would compete and change hands at the Black Bluff sale. Tonight, my Guy was going up to Seattle to buy special food at a big market for our wedding, which was slated for Wednesday.

  Rare is the night and day I’m alone, but right now I could make the free time to do Manuel’s hauling job. All kind of good could come from me hitching Ol’ Blue to Hollis’s stout stock trailer, loading that bull, and hitting the road.

  If I left right away, I could be back before Guy had a chance to miss me.

  My boot heel ground the dirt as I turned for the barn to call home off the landline. I let the phone ring ’til the message machine came on, hung up, thought hard, then called the restaurant. This road trip idea of mine was coming together. I’d put the diesel charges on my debit card, sort it out later with Donna and Hollis. Tomorrow was Saturday. I had no clients scheduled until Monday afternoon. The last day of the bull sale was tomorrow, and I could maybe send Charley on cattle at the sale, which everybody knows is cooler than ice. I mean, herding at the Black Bluff bull sale, for mercy’s sake? Everyone in the world wants to work their herding dog there someday, it’s the cream of—

  “Cascade Kitchen,” a gal’s voice said, sounding rushed over the clink of coffee cups and plates and whatnot.

  “Guy still there? This is Rainy.” This last bit of information would make sure she didn’t just put me on hold. My husband-come-next-week always takes my calls.

  “No, he left like a half hour ago. He thought he wouldn’t go ’til five or six, but he made it out of here
earlier even though he thought he’d have to get the dinner rush moving before he could go, but he didn’t.”

  Yeah, that was Sissy on the phone, that server-and-dishwasher Guy hired. She talks in funny circles, always. I thanked her and called our house again, this time leaving Guy a message that I was going to take an all-of-a-sudden road trip to get that bad bull Dragoon to Black Bluff since Manny couldn’t do it. I promised to call him later and be back tomorrow night. The big thing on the list—getting my horses taken care of while Guy and I were both out of town for a night and a day—would need more than a phone message left on an answering machine, but my best friend was probably working right then. I left a message on Melinda’s cell. I’d call her again later, go ahead and hit the road now.

  It was that simple. Manuel and I got the stock trailer hitched up to Ol’ Blue, checked the lights and brakes—the left signal flickered, but mostly worked—then opened the trailer and backed it to the pen gate. That big Brahma gives me the heebie-jeebies. We didn’t need to risk getting into the pen with him. We swung the gate open to the inside then hollered and waved around the outside until Dragoon decided the hay in the trailer looked like a better deal than a bare pen being circled by a couple of shouting idiots.

  So what kind of an omen is it that as I pulled off the ranch road onto the two-lane highway that would take me to the interstate, a marked deputy’s car with a man and woman in the front seat was coming in the opposite direction? I flashed my lights, then eased Ol’ Blue and the stock trailer onto the highway’s shoulder. The cop car activated the spiffy, rotating up-top lights, did a one-eighty, and came up behind me. The male cop stayed in the patrol car as the uniformed woman left the driver’s seat.

  Charley thumped his stubby tail as she sauntered up.

  “Hey,” I said, when probationary Deputy Melinda Kellan stuck her nose in my window just a hair. Ever since she went to police school, Mel’s got all these weird habits, like the way she stood just back of my truck’s door post and leaned to talk to me.

  “Hey, yourself.” She nodded at me, then gave Charley a proper howdy. “You being good as gold, pretty boy?”

  It’s like Melinda thinks she’s the funniest thing ever, every time she says that about Charley being gold. True, his long coat is all shades of yellow—not super-common in Aussies—but he’s no beauty queen, he’s a worker. As though to prove he’s come from some school of tough knocks, his ear tips are missing, though the long fringe pretty well covers the flaw. Charley’s a fine example, considering he’s a stray I picked up along the interstate on my way to Oregon.

  When they got done nuzzling each other, both glanced at me. Charley’s eyes said I was really the only girl for him. Melinda asked, “What’s up?”

  “Wondering if you could maybe swing by tonight and tomorrow to feed the horses and Spooky, too, if the spirit moves you. Guy’s gone ’til tomorrow afternoon-ish and now I’m going to take Donna’s bull down to a sale. I’ll probably make it back late tomorrow night.”

  She swung her head the quarter turn it took to squint at the swaying stock trailer Ol’ Blue was towing, and wrinkled her nose.

  Bulls have a more than manly scent, it’s true. Dragoon smells like the bad news he is. Manuel and I had put plenty of hay in there and a water bucket tied up that I could fill without having to open the escape door. Not one to turn your back on, Dragoon. I planned to rest the bull’s legs by stopping on the three-hundred-plus-mile drive, but I wouldn’t let Dragoon out of the trailer until I backed up to a waiting pipe corral at the Black Bluff sale grounds.

  Melinda stood with her arms folded across her chest, then shifted to rest one elbow on her pistol, the other wrist across a couple of extra magazines in her gun belt.

  “You know,” she said, “the only reason I ran from that son of a—”

  “Bull,” I put in, doing my part to keep her from cussing all the damn—oops—all the daggummed time. “Son of a bull, Dragoon is.”

  She glared at the trailer. “I didn’t have a gun on me at the time. Now, I could drop him at a hundred yards with a twelve-gauge slug. Or six of them, if that’s what it takes.”

  Carries a grudge, my friend Melinda does.

  “At this sale you’re going to,” she asked, “will there be mules?”

  “Not officially. It’s a stock dog thing and beef cattle thing, mostly. Replacement females. And some real nice geldings will be sold. But I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for your mule.”

  She nodded. “You said you’d find him.”

  One thing that’s a little annoying about this buddy of mine is the way she remembers everything. There’s that, and the block on her shoulder she packs around.

  Melinda glared at me good and hard, up one side and down the other. “Do I still have to wear a dress next Wednesday?”

  “Well, yeah. Since I do.”

  “But you’re the one—”

  I waved her off. Best she not get started and dig too deep. “I’ll find your mule.”

  “You’d better.”

  Melinda is sometimes a bit of a jawbone.

  Guy says we could be sisters.

  ***

  I made good time crossing the state line not too many hours after dark. It’s a border I hadn’t touched since I found my way into Oregon looking to get back my childhood horse, Red, nigh two years ago. Touching the northern edge of California then had been lucky, as it’s how I acquired—and named, come to it—good old Charley.

  He’d watched me as I relieved myself at an unofficial interstate pull-off, wary and tired, though he wasn’t in too bad of shape, just alone. I’d known his feeling purely. He’d needed someone. Back then, I wanted to need no one.

  “Sorry, Charley.” That’s what I’d said, crushing the half hope glimmering in his gold-ringed brown eyes. But then, as I’d opened my truck door, something in my soul made me pause, changed my mind. I’d waved the stray into Ol’ Blue’s cab.

  Within a few miles, Charley and I had started calling each other by our first names. What and all with him having no collar, I took that “sorry, Charley” and made it something we could both live with.

  Charley wasn’t sorry as a dog, and he never seemed sorry to have joined me. He’s loyal and a good judge of character. He had Guy figured for a keeper way before me. And his herding’s solid, fun, and a time-saver. When a killer loosed Dragoon on Melinda and me last fall, Charley was a genuine lifesaver.

  ***

  At a spot along the dark interstate with an extra-wide shoulder, I pulled Ol’ Blue over for a snooze and wrapped myself in the familiar scent and creak of my worn leather jacket. I prefer this kind of rest stop to something full of truckers and tourists and weirdos and what-not. It swerves on the nerves something fearsome, a lack of space. Here, the interstate is bordered by real ranch land. Charley stared across the freeway, up the steep hill that angled down to the northbound lanes. Stock dogs always want to work, but my good old boy finally settled, curled against my ribs, and we kept each other warm.

  Being on the road, on my own, was a good rinse for my brain. I’m trying not to get too clutched up in the throat about what’s going to happen next week. Until the last year of my life, I’d figured I was best off with a good dog as my hot water bottle and general nighttime warmer.

  This Friday night alone, my first in forever, was the reason I was able to jump in and get this blasted bull gone for Donna and Hollis. Guy had taken as much time off as he could for the coming celebration and would be back tomorrow night, cooking up a storm. My coming wedding would be followed by a lazy, married weekend, which would make two Saturdays in a row with no horseshoeing scheduled or even contemplated.

  ***

  Dragoon woke me in the dark, rocking the truck with his motion in the trailer, but at first, I didn’t remember where I was or why. My brain’s transmission was stuck two years back, when I’d driven north in search of my horse Red. The warm breath on my neck made my hand reach to feel Charley’s fur, remember I had a dog, had alread
y found Red and established myself as a horseshoer up in Cowdry, and had fallen in love, for real.

  “Look how far we came in two years,” I told Charley as I redid my ponytail.

  He wiggled and stared at Ol’ Blue’s condensation-coated windows. Four a.m.

  We went out in the dark to do what comes natural. Dragoon was fine, as was his hay and water. I called Charley back from too much nosing at the hill across the northbound lanes, and we got gone.

  Interstate 5 is blessedly calmer after midnight. The easy driving gave me thinking time. I need plenty of pause to chew on things, and I don’t often get it. Miles zinged past.

  The famous Black Bluff bull sale had a canvas banner across the main entrance. The red-haired cowpoke with a gray-flecked mustache at the main check-in gate looked right across Ol’ Blue’s cab, eyeing my dog instead of me. I like that real well in a person. Given where we were, the attention wasn’t unusual. This yearly sale is not just about the bulls and other cattle on the offer. No, the running of the working dogs, one right after the other, moving rough stock with reason, is the other big draw of the Black Bluff sale.

  I leaned toward the man to be heard over Ol’ Blue’s diesel engine. “Got a bull here from the Buckeye Ranch up in Cowdry, Butte County, Oreg—”

  “Bring it over there.” He waved and jabbed his pointer finger toward the heaviest pipe corrals at the back of the sale grounds. He was already making a phone call as I pulled away.

  Trucks and trailers of all sorts lined the acres of open fields beyond the many pens surrounding the huge main arena, but I couldn’t gawk, had to pay attention to backing in where I was directed. The way it is, is the bull’s my responsibility ’til it’s out of the trailer, then the salespeople have the charge of moving him and handling the auction. But if Dragoon didn’t sell, it’d be my job to get him home again. After I backed the stock trailer to a stout corral, the receiving stockman complimented my driving and asked if I minded unhitching the trailer, so he could get Dragoon out when he had a couple more hands at the ready.

  “Makes sense,” I agreed.

  Clear of the trailer, I parked, let Charley out for air and a pee, then hupped him back into Ol’ Blue’s cab and opened the rear slider window for ventilation.