Dark Horse by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page B

little booth between traffic lanes before the main gates, reggae music blasting from a radio on the counter. I waved at him. He waved me past without a question, his attention on the eighteen-wheel commercial horse van pulling in. I could have had a trunk full of stolen saddles. I could have had a body back there. I might have been anyone, may have done anything. An unsettling thought for the ride home.
    I turned right on Pierson. Van Zandt turned right on Pierson. I watched him in the mirror, wondering if he hadn’t believed me when I’d said I wasn’t an insurance investigator. I wondered what his reaction would be if he saw the photo in
Sidelines
and put two and one together.
    But people are funny that way, more easily fooled than the average person might like to believe. I didn’t look like the woman in the photo. My hair was short. I hadn’t given the name of the woman in the photo. The only real connection was Sean. Still, the words
private investigator
would set off alarms. I had to hope Sean was right: that only dressage people read the dressage section.
    I turned right on South Shore. Van Zandt turned left.
    I cut my lights, pulled a U-turn, and followed at a distance, past the polo stadium. He turned in at The Players club. Wining and dining. Part of a horse dealer’s job. A new best friend at the bar in a place like that could turn out to have deep pockets and no self-restraint.
    Van Zandt stood to make a tidy profit selling the Belgian jumper to Stellar’s owner, who stood to collect a fat insurance payoff on a horse with no real future. And Don Jade—who had trained and shown Stellar, and would train and show the next one—stood in the middle of them, taking money at both ends of the deal. They might have all been in Players together right then, drinking to Stellar’s timely demise.
    Erin Seabright hadn’t been heard from since the night Stellar died.
    I dismissed the idea of going into the club. I wasn’t prepared. I gunned my car’s engine, turned it around, and headed home.
    I was about to become a private investigator.

4
    I wonder why I’m still alive.
    Billy Golam had pointed that gun right in my face. In countless nightmares I have looked down the barrel of that .357 and sucked in what should have been my final breath. But Golam had turned and fired in another direction.
    Was living my punishment, my purgatory? Or was I supposed to have chosen to end it myself to pay for my recklessness? Or was I just damn lucky and unwilling to believe it?
    Four-thirty A . M .
    I was lying in bed, staring at the blades of the ceiling fan go around. The guest house had been decorated by a Palm Beach interior designer who had gone amok with delusions of Caribbean plantations. It seemed a cliché to me, but no one had ever paid me to pick out paint chips and pillow shams.
    At four I went out and fed the horses. By five I had showered. It had been so long since I’d had to introduce myself to people and care about what they thought of me that I couldn’t remember how to go about it. I couldn’t shake the idea that I would be rejected on sight, or if not on sight, on reputation.
    What a strange conceit to believe everyone in the world knew all about me, all about what I’d done and what had happened to end my career. I had been a story on the evening news for a couple of days. A sound bite. Something to fill the airtime before the weather came on. The truth was probably that no one not directly involved with what had happened, no one not living in that world of cops, had given the story more than the most cursory attention. The truth is that people seldom really care about the catastrophic events of someone else’s life beyond thinking, “Better her than me.”
    I stood in my underwear, staring at myself in the mirror. I put some gel in my hair and tried to make it look as if it had an intentional style. I wondered if I should attempt makeup. I hadn’t worn any since the surgery to put my face back