Roadside Rescue Read online

  ROADSIDE RESCUE

  Caitlin Ricci

  Roadside Rescue

  I saw the sign for Dove Creek, population 291, and snorted as I drove past it. With a town that small, was there really a point in even putting up a sign? I didn’t think so. I glanced in the rearview mirror to check on the two-horse trailer I’d already pulled through two states. Inside, and hopefully not having too much of a shit fit, was my mustang gelding, Shoni. He didn’t travel well at all, and before last week, I’d never asked him to trailer for more than just a mile or two to make sure he could in case there was an emergency where I had to take him somewhere. Thankfully I’d never had to, but all that practice had paid off when I’d loaded him up and asked him to go for a ride with me.

  He was handling it though. As well as could be expected anyway. We were due for another roadside stop soon, so I hoped that somewhere in the Colorado mountains I could find a bit of a rest area for us to take a break in. Otherwise we’d be pulling over in a grocery store parking lot, which we’d done a few times already. I liked to stop and let him out about every three hours. I figured he’d be less crazy like that, and it helped me think too, since I really didn’t have a good idea where we were actually headed. Away from Missouri was my best plan, and with the flip of a coin, we were going west on I-70 instead of east.

  Stupid, I know. But the whole thing had been pretty ridiculous, and I had my ex-girlfriend Monica to thank for it. I wasn’t thinking about her though. I’d deleted her favorite stations off the stereo in my truck before Shoni and I had even reached the state line. It was better this way. I was sure of it. As soon as I found a place I thought would work for us to settle down at, we’d be just fine.

  I was still in Dove Creek, probably anyway. I wasn’t sure since I hadn’t actually seen a house or a store yet. But I was pretty sure that’s where we were when I heard a loud screeching noise, and my truck suddenly lurched to the right.

  “Shit!” I shouted as I grabbed for the steering wheel and clutched it tightly. Behind me I could hear Shoni throwing a fit as he screamed and banged against the sides of the steel trailer. He had every right to panic, and I didn’t blame him one bit as I got control of the truck again and pulled over to the side of the road.

  With my heart pounding wildly in my ears, I got out and started walking around the truck and the trailer to see what was wrong. “Fucking A,” I grumbled as I found myself staring at a blown tire at the rear of the trailer. The wheel was bent too, probably from Shoni throwing the trailer around in his fright. I had extra tires for both the trailer and the truck in the truck’s bed, but I didn’t have an extra wheel, so I’d have to call a mechanic and get a tow. In the middle of the mountains, in a town that barely seemed big enough to be called one, I had no idea how long that would take. Or if anyone would even come to help me way out here. I was afraid every mechanic would think my problem wouldn’t be worth their time to drive out here.

  I tried to push back as much as I could on my mounting frustration as I went to the back of the trailer to make sure Shoni was okay. He stared back at me with huge wide eyes. His whites were even showing, a sure sign that he was scared and upset.

  “It’s okay, baby,” I said as I climbed into the back of the trailer with him. “I’m sorry. It was just a stupid tire.” He kept his head high and his ears forward as I approached him. He was a mustang and had grown up running free on government land. He’d been captured later in life, which for some horses would have made them hard to train, but Shoni wasn’t a crazed wild mustang by any means. He didn’t fit the stereotype that people had of a mustang at all.

  It was times like this though, when he was spooked, that I could see how he must have been in the holding pens when he’d first had contact with humans. They must have terrified him, just like being in the trailer was doing for him right now. I’d been pretty scared too when the truck had suddenly jerked to the right, but I’d known that I could fix the problem. Shoni had no idea what had gone wrong.

  “Good boy,” I said. I rubbed his neck and offered him some hay, which he refused. He was too stressed to eat. I needed to get him out of the trailer so he could walk off his panic, but we were on the side of the road, and if he decided to jerk out of my hands, I had no way of controlling a fifteen hundred pound animal. Until he was calm enough that I could walk him out of the trailer without him bolting on me, I needed to keep him in there.

  “You’re my best boy. My calm boy.” I rubbed his chest and scratched him under his throat. He usually liked that. Today not so much. Instead of calming, he quivered and stomped his hooves. He was agitated for sure. “You’re going to have to relax, Shoni. Can’t untie you and take you outside until you do.”

  It took another ten minutes of constant petting and reassurance for him to lower his head to my shoulder. Another five minutes and he was willing to take food from me. “There’s my smart boy,” I praised as soon as I felt comfortable untying his lead from the ring in the trailer where he’d been connected. He wasn’t as calm as he normally was, but I wasn’t worried about him taking off on me either. If I was on his back and he bolted, I could just bring his neck down and pull his nose against my toe with a tug of the reins. Horses had to go where their faces were pointed, and he wasn’t able to get any kind of forward movement when he was like that. It was the easiest, and simplest, way to stop a runaway horse.

  But on the ground, I didn’t have any techniques like that. It was just me versus a horse, who outweighed me by a lot and had fright going for him to propel him forward and make him lose his mind. That’s why I watched him closely, checking for any signs that he wasn’t as calm as I’d thought he was. My plan was that if I did see him stop short or put his ears back or something, I’d quickly tie him to the nearest tree to let him calm down again. It wasn’t a perfect solution. If he fought hard enough and I left him tied there, he could break his neck. But he was less likely to break his neck while being secured to the tree than he was to run out into the street and get hit by a car, possibly killing himself and whoever was in the car that hit him. Neither option was great, but I was just trying to think of anything to keep him safe at that point.

  I took my phone out of my pocket and glanced at it while making sure I had a tight hold on him to let him know we’d be leaving the trailer soon. I had one bar, which wasn’t enough to even pull up a webpage and search for a mechanic to tow me. With a sigh, I untied him and eased him out of the trailer. He was eager to leave and went faster than I would have liked. But I knew the signs of him getting ready to run, and he wasn’t there. Not yet at least. He wasn’t far off either though, which as a big problem. I took him away from the road and tied him to an aspen tree while I tried to get a signal. Beside me, Shoni lowered his head to start grazing, and I ran my fingers through his long blond hair that fell over his shoulder and swept into his eyes. I’d considered cutting his hair once, just because it would have made it easier to keep burrs and nettles out of his mane and tail, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. His mane was so long and beautiful, and his tail was down to his ankles. I decided I’d trim it once it touched the ground, but there was no reason to cut it off completely.

  While I was standing there, glaring at my phone and holding it above my head as if that would do anything for my internet connection way out here in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, I heard rocks being kicked nearby, like someone was running on the shoulder of the road. Putting my phone away, I turned to see a girl who couldn’t have been much older than twenty, wearing bright pink shorts and a matching tank top, jogging along the road.

  “Hey!” I shouted to her. Shoni lifted his head and put his ears back, clearly not happy with me and my outburst. I figured it would be a while before he forgave me for the stress he’d be
en through the past week. I headed toward the road in case she had her headphones on, and once I was within a few feet of it, she stopped running and smiled at me.

  “Is that your trailer?” she asked me as she came to a walk. “Oh my God! Is that your horse? He’s gorgeous.”

  She was gushing, and I smiled at her. “Yeah, he is. Any chance you know of a mechanic around here? I blew a tire, which I could have changed myself, except that the wheel got damaged too.”

  She walked around me to go crouch in front of my busted wheel. “Looks crappy. But yep, we’ve got someone who can fix that up for you. My sister, Brigid, has a shop just a mile down the road. I’m Connie by the way.” She stuck her hand out to me, and I gave her a firm shake before I switched my attention over to Shoni for a second to make sure he was still okay. He was grazing in the shade, so he was doing just fine. A lot better than my trailer was for sure.

  “Kelly,” I remembered, belatedly, to introduce myself.

  “Wait here for just a few minutes, and I’ll go get her. I’d call her, but my phone doesn’t get any kind of reception up here, which is nice, except when you need to call someone for reals.”

  Yeah, I’d noticed that. “Sure. We’ll be right here.”

  “Great!” Connie put her headphones back on and took off running in the same direction she had been going before. I went back to stand beside Shoni in the shade of the clump of aspen trees. I really hoped Brigid was older and more mature than Connie. She seemed like a nice girl, but she was pretty much a kid, and I was used to people closer to my age working on my truck and trailer. As long as Brigid was over thirty, I had hope.

  It took about ten minutes for Connie and Brigid to come back with a tow truck, and by then I was sitting on the ground a few feet away from Shoni so that if he decided to get wild with new people being around us, he wouldn’t accidently step on me. I got up when I saw the tow truck coming toward us. It was covered with more rust than paint, but as I listened to the engine, there wasn’t any squeaking or other sounds that would tell me Brigid didn’t know how to do her job, so I figured my wheel would be fine.

  They got out of the truck and started heading toward me. I remembered that I knew manners somewhere around the time that Brigid was five feet away from me. She had deeply tanned skin that was close to olive, so it had to be at least somewhat genetic instead of from years spent out in the sun. There were plenty of dirt and grease smears on her skin, which I could see a lot of because she had her jumpsuit wrapped around her waist, leaving her in just a black sports bra. Small, firm breasts, a great smile that was already half a smirk, dirty fingernails, and I was struggling not to sound like an idiot when she came up and stuck her hand out for me to shake.

  “Hey, I’m Brigid.”

  “Kelly.” I wanted to hang on to her hand, but she pulled it away and wiped it on her pant leg.

  “Sorry. I was working on an old beater.”

  I didn’t mind in the least.

  “Looks like you could use a new wheel. I’ve got one that should work. If not, I can always order the part from Denver. Are you in a hurry?”

  I quickly shook my head. I had no plans to be anywhere, and the way she smiled at me made me think I didn’t want to be anywhere else for a while either. It was nice to be smiled at like that again. Monica had looked at me like that when we’d first started dating, but three years later I’d stopped paying attention to the signs smack dab in the middle of the road. If I thought about it now, I knew she’d been cheating for a while. All the hints had been there. I’d just been too wrapped up to notice. I tried not to think about her, and I pushed all those awful Monica thoughts aside and relaxed into the warm glow of an attractive woman smiling at me again.

  “Well, I can get your trailer loaded onto my bed, but it’s not nearly long enough to fit your truck too. Do you want to leave your horse and drive your truck down to the shop and then walk back for him, or are you okay with Connie driving it? She does that a lot for people in town who are too busy, or too lazy, to drive to the shop themselves.”

  I looked from my truck to Shoni and knew what my decision would be. Maybe I could be at the shop and back within ten minutes, but I wasn’t willing to leave my horse alone for that long, tied up next to the road where anything could happen to him or anyone could take him. If Connie wrecked my truck, that was one thing—I had insurance on it—but I wasn’t willing to risk my horse.

  “I’ll walk my horse down to the shop,” I told Brigid. I handed Connie the keys and stepped back to let them get to work putting my trailer on the bed of Brigid’s tow truck. Shoni was looking at us with interest, and I walked over to him to reassure him that everything was fine.

  They had my trailer loaded up within ten minutes as I stood there running my hands over Shoni’s neck and chest. He was much calmer now, even with the noises of the trailer being moved and the truck starting up. He only lifted his head as Brigid came over to us, but she stopped a good five feet from him.

  “If you just continue down this road for about a mile, the shop will be on the left,” she told me.

  “Thanks. We’ll be right there.”

  She hesitated and looked from me to my horse and then back again. “Is he nice?”

  I smiled at her. “Yeah, he is.” Or at least he could be. But she wasn’t going to be asking him to walk over a bridge or next to a car while some teenagers blasted their music at him either, so I figured he’d be just fine with a little love from her. I would have been too actually, but she seemed to only have eyes for him as she came up and let him sniff her hand.

  “He’s gorgeous. I thought he was an Appaloosa at first, but he seems too heavy to be one.”

  Not many people knew what Appaloosas looked like, so that impressed me about her right there as Connie drove off in my truck. “He’s a mustang, but a lot of people think he’s an Appy because of his pattern.” My Shoni boy was a rich red with white speckles over his shoulders, legs, and neck that made him look like someone had dusted him with powdered sugar. On his back and over his hips, the white became more pronounced, almost completely blocking out his chestnut hairs in some places.

  “He seems way too sweet to be a mustang. I’ve heard they’re all wild and uncontrollable,” Brigid said as she ran her fingers over his cheek, and Shoni, the ham that he was, leaned into her touch like he was just a big dog.

  I lifted up his mane on the left side of his neck to show her the white markings that were his freeze brand. Every mustang had them as a way for the Bureau of Land Management to keep track of and identify them. I kept his covered up most of the time since that’s how his hair naturally lay. “He’s smart, and he has his moments where he really doesn’t want to do anything productive, but overall, he’s a great horse. What’s nice about mustangs, compared to some of the other, more domesticated breeds out there like a quarter horse or an Arabian, is that they know they don’t need you in their lives. He’s ten, and he was captured at six. He knows he would be just fine without me. He’d eat whatever he wanted to, go find water, and probably find a place in a herd somewhere on his own. So when he chooses to be with me instead of making life miserable for me, it’s a pretty special thing.”

  Brigid was grinning at me as she stepped back away from us. “You sound like you really love him.”

  I laughed. “I do.” I liked that she noticed how much I cared about him. He wasn’t just a horse to me, and her ability to see that meant a lot to me. And she liked him too. That was pretty special.

  Brigid looked over at the tow truck and then back to me. “See you at the shop in a little bit.” She pulled a card out of her back pocket. “Call me if you get lost somewhere between here and there. Though, I gotta warn you, our reception up here is pretty much crap.”

  I sighed and wished I had better a better carrier. Maybe that wouldn’t have even helped though. Maybe the only way to get good reception up here was with a SAT phone like people had in movies when they were in the jungle. I really hoped I wasn’t in that kind
of a place here. “You can actually make calls sometimes though, right? Like if you actually needed to?”

  “More or less. Everyone in town is so close though that you’d have better luck just walking down the street if you needed something.” She kept grinning as she gave me a wave before heading back to the truck. She was gone within a few minutes, and then it was just Shoni and me. I untied him, and we began walking slowly as far away from the road as we could manage without running into the trees. I wanted to have some distance between him and any vehicles that happened to get too close to us. “She was gorgeous, wasn’t she, boy?” I asked him as if he could give me an opinion on how good Brigid looked.

  Her looks made her seem as if she had a hard edge to her, and maybe she did. I would be the first one lined up if she was letting people see if she was hiding any tattoos under that awful baggy jumpsuit that was stained with grease and oil. But when she smiled, she looked like she was all sweetness and nice. Like she’d bake me cupcakes with buttercream frosting and rainbow sprinkles on them one minute and then go give my truck a new brake job in the next. Hell, since she was a mechanic, maybe she could. My mouth watered at just the thought of being with a woman like that.

  Maybe it was too soon to start thinking about dating someone again. For some people it probably was way too soon for such thoughts. For me though, thinking about moving on from the feelings I’d had for my ex-girlfriend was fine. Monica and I were history. She was back with her ex. And me, I was a few states away from her and doing just fine. If Brigid went my way even a little bit, I was going to put this day firmly in the win category, despite the hassle of having to get the wheel and tire replaced and the hit it was going to put out on my wallet.

  I walked Shoni into town, and I still had no idea how it even qualified as one when it looked like little more like a ghost town with only a few houses, most of them attached to the businesses that lined the one main street. I found the mechanic shop easily enough, since it had a big sign on top of the steel roof. But what made this place interesting, compared to every other store or business on the street, was that it had a large chunk of land behind it. The fence was not horseproof, which was the first thing I always noticed when looking at a plot of land, but it was dog safe since it was solid chain link all the way around. I guessed that it was about an acre in a narrow strip that stretched to the tree line.