Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mystery series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

reins to him without comment, and slinging the saddle over my shoulder. Casey was walking as if he hurt badly. I wondered if he'd broken some ribs. Something in his remote gaze kept me from asking, though it would have been a natural thing to do. There was, always, a strange tension in Casey; sometimes normal comments or questions sounded odd-superfluous, foolish-in his presence.
    He put the sorrel colt in a stall without word.
    "Where do you want this saddle?" I asked him.
    "I'll take it."
    I refrained from offering to help him further, feeling it wouldn't be appreciated, and handed him the saddle. Still limping, he carried it into the tack room and slung it on a rack, stopping suddenly.
    "Look at that."
    I looked where he was pointing and saw that the off-side billet, a leather strap that attaches the cinch to the saddle on the right-hand side, had torn clean through.
    "See that." Casey's voice was tense. "Somebody cut it."
    For the second time that day I turned to him with the slack-jawed incredulous expression of a cartoon character. "What do you mean?"
    "Look at it. It's been cut." I peered closer at the billet. The leather had a smooth straight split that ended in a tiny jagged tear.
    Casey was still talking. "Somebody cut that son of a bitch up high, under the fender where it wouldn't show. Left a tiny little quarter-inch strip of leather to hold it. I cinch up, no reason I should check the off-side-and the first real stress that billet gives way. Same bastard did this that poisoned the horses."
    I was staring at the billet with the slow, cold realization that this was the saddle I'd ridden in to work Shiloh. If she'd made an especially hard turn, if I'd leaned too far ...
    My eyes met Casey's, the shock suddenly personal, and the look in his chilled me. "I'm gonna get that bastard."
    Abruptly he turned away, with one of those meteoric mood shifts I'd grown accustomed to. "Come on, I'll buy you a drink."

 
    Chapter FOUR
    I followed Casey up the hill to his mobile home in silence, still puzzling over the "cut" cinch. Paranoia or fact? I certainly couldn't tell by looking at the leather billet, though Casey seemed to think he could, but two disasters in one day did seem a little odd. Surely life on the ranch wasn't usually this exciting.
    Casey was in the kitchen pulling a Budweiser out of the refrigerator when I walked through the door he'd left open behind him. Melissa sat at the kitchen table, drinking a diet soda and painting her nails a sparkly bubble-gum pink. Her "Hi, Gail," was subdued, and she kept her eyes on her nails. Uh-oh.
    Casey looked inquiringly at me and held up a beer.
    "Sure," I told him. I wasn't crazy about Budweiser, but I liked it a whole lot better than diet soda, and I knew from previous experience that that was all they were likely to have on hand.
    Carrying a beer, Casey stomped off to the couch, hiding his limp, I noticed, almost completely. Wondering what prompted such an effort, I picked up my own beer from the table where he'd put it and sat down, taking in the familiar scenery.
    Casey's mobile home was furnished innocuously, providing little useful information to the curious visitor. Boring beige carpet and linoleum, beige corduroy furniture, white walls and ceiling. Casey and Melissa had put up no decorations at all and the lack of any sort of taste was so emphatic it was almost a statement of its own. Casey's house reminded me of the barn; everything was neat and of reasonably good quality but completely devoid of any interest or character. It made sense, after all. Both the barn and the mobile home belonged to Ken Resavich.
    "What's Ken doing these days?" I asked Casey, searching for a safe subject in what struck me as a touchy atmosphere.
    Casey's eyes lost their remote look for a second and he laughed, his old laugh, and cut it short with a wince. "Making more money. He told me he did real well with his lettuce this year-made another couple of million."
    "Sounds simple, doesn't