Read Hoofprints (Gail McCarthy series) for Free Online

should know, give me a call."
    It was the friendliest tone I'd ever heard from her, and I risked a smile. "I'll do that."
    "Thanks." She turned away abruptly and marched off down the corridor, leaving me to wonder if she really had ventured a smile in my direction or if it was just my imagination.
    I waited almost an hour before Bret came back from the interview room, my stores of patience wearing thinner every minute. Detective Reeder was with him, bloodshot brown eyes as impassive as ever. Bret walked up to me quickly. "Come on, let's get out of here."
    On the way back to the truck Bret recounted his interview sketchily, dodging, in his adroit way, all my questions. Once again, his mind seemed to be elsewhere. When we got to my office, he said he had to "see some people about some work." It was all vague, but he wanted to come sleep at my house. I didn't argue; Bret had done this before for brief periods, and usually he was no trouble. He left with a quick wave, Big Red booming away in the distinctive fashion of a truck with a broken muffler. Bret was in a hurry.
    I called Blue and got in my own truck slowly. Home would be empty and silent, and I felt the need of someone to talk to. Lonny Peterson, my boyfriend, steady date, main squeeze-whatever you want to call it-was out of town on business and wouldn't be back till tomorrow night. No use thinking of him.
    All in all, it took me only a minute. He might not provide conversation exactly, but I wanted to see Gunner. I pointed the truck toward Soquel.

FOUR
    Gunner and I both lived on Old San Jose Road, in an area south of Santa Cruz known as Soquel, a sheltered inland valley that is more rural and gets less fog than Santa Cruz itself-two of my principal reasons for choosing it. Old San Jose Road follows Soquel Creek up toward the distant blue ridgeline of the Santa Cruz Mountains, winding through narrow canyons full of redwoods and emerging into sunny meadows. Gunner lived at Kristin Griffith's place, in just such a meadow, at the end of a long driveway with a whiteboard fenced pasture running down one side of it. Kristin's horse, a dark brown gelding she called Rebby, raised his head to look at me as I drove in, then kicked up his heels and ran off across his field in an excess of joie de vivre.
    I smiled as I watched him. Rebby was a "running" Quarter Horse, bred for the track; he had a lean, breedy head and the long, flat-muscled, rangy look of a Thoroughbred. He also had big, soft, friendly eyes like an overgrown retriever, and he loved to be petted. Rebby was another "people" horse.
    Pulling into Kristin's barnyard, I parked my truck near the fence and Gunner came out of his shed and nickered. Gunner was my horse, a four-year-old Quarter Horse gelding by Mr. Gunsmoke out of an own daughter of King Fritz-breeding which, in the cow-horse world, made him royalty. Buying a horse like that would have been way beyond my means; Gunner had been given to me a year ago when he severed the suspensory tendons in his left front leg. His owner had been unwilling to wait out the yearlong period of enforced rest and inactivity that was necessary if the tendons were to have a chance of healing. I'd taken the colt, boarded him with Kristin Griffith, and waited.
    Luck had favored me. Gunner was a sound horse today, completely recovered from his injury, and for the last month I'd been riding him as often as I could. The rides were short-twenty minutes or so of light walk-trot-lope exercise in Kris's arena-because the horse needed to be legged up slowly and because I never had any time.
    Today, I thought, we'll go an hour. It was only four o'clock, and the summer afternoon and evening stretched well until eight. For once, I didn't need to be in a hurry.
    I caught Gunner without any trouble; he was a friendly horse who met you at the corral gate, anxious to do something, anything. Leading him to the barn and tying him up, I brushed his shiny red coat and combed his long black mane and tail,