LITMIR.BIZ

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Sergeant Young, I presume?” he called cheerfully, and Young nodded. Khan trotted down the front steps and across the driveway to where Young was standing. His handshake was firm and dry. “My golly,” he said, “I thought I was tall.” Khan was an inch or two over six feet, but Young towered over him and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. Because of his size and his curly red hair, Young would sometimes remain behind the scenes if he was concerned that his appearance might queer a situation. At other times, to make a show of strength he would reveal himself early. He enjoyed watching the eyes of tough guys when they looked at him for the first time. Khan was still smiling, but his dark brown eyes looked like cold coffee. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll show you around.”

      As they walked, Young talked about horse racing, how much he loved it, how much he had admired Shorty, how his daughter had worked for him and was now, in fact, Khan’s trainer, information that clearly surprised Khan. “Ah, Miss Young,” he said. “Of course. I knew that Shorty was the nephew of the old gentleman next door”—and here he waved his hand in the general direction of Morley’s property—“but I would never have made the connection between Miss Young and yourself. It’s a small world, my friend. What is it they say about six degrees of separation?”

      Khan showed Young the rose garden, the pool, a drive shed behind the house with a brand new John Deere tractor in it as well as a baling machine and a hay wagon.

      “How many horses do you own, Mr. Khan?” Young asked.

      Khan said, “Well, there are the two in training with your daughter, and here at the farm I’ve got two brood-mares, both with spring foals at their sides, and a young stallion.”

      “A stallion? Do you breed him commercially?”

      Khan frowned. “I’ve been trying to attract outside mares, but so far I’ve not been very successful. When I bought him, I was assured he would be attractive to breeders.”

      “What’s his pedigree?”

      “He’s by Mr. Prospector out of a stakes-winning, stakes-producing Northern Dancer mare.”

      Young raised his eyebrows. “In the purple. What was he like on the track?”

      “He never raced. He bowed a tendon before his first start and never recovered his action. But he’s half-brother to two graded stakes winners.”

      “What’s his stud fee?”

      “Five thousand.”

      Young nodded. Pretty steep for an unraced, unproven sire, he thought. No wonder nobody’s knocking at the door.

      “I paid a hundred thousand for him at a breeding stock sale in Kentucky last September. He’s a beauty. Would you like to see him?”

      “Very much. How old is he?”

      “I bought him when he was five. He’s six now.”

      Khan led Young into the stable. Out of the sunshine, it took a few seconds for Young’s eyes to adjust. He could smell fresh hay and manure. “This is Angel Band,” Khan said, nodding his head towards a stall, “and her colt by Promethean.” Young looked through the bars and saw a dark bay mare looking straight at him. Her legs were black right down to the hoof. Her foal was hiding behind her, but he could see the foal’s legs were black, too.

      “And this,” Khan said, moving along to the next stall, “is Top of the Morning and her filly, also by Promethean.”

      A beautiful chestnut mare with a bay foal. Not a stocking between them.

      Young looked into the next stall, which contained a small black Shetland pony. “Who’s this guy?”

      “Ah, that’s Max,” said Khan, smiling. “He came with the farm when I bought it. My daughters love him. They’re too big to ride him, but they treat him like a pet. And he actually performs a useful function. He acts as teaser for the stallion.”

      “Teaser?”

      “We use him to determine whether or not the mare is in season before we bring in the stallion.”

      “In season means, like ... ”

      “Um, receptive, I guess you might say. Willing.” Khan indicated an empty stall. “The stallion’s not here. I guess Pat’s already turned him out.”

      “Who’s Pat?”

      “Pat’s the stud groom.”

      As they walked through the open doors at the other end of the stable, Young asked, “What’s his name?”

      “The stallion? Sam McGee.”

      As if on cue, the morning quiet and the birdsong were shattered by a piercing whinny, and Young looked up to see the stallion standing at the corner of his pasture, thirty feet away. Young walked towards him, and the horse sniffed the air. He was a rich blood bay, almost red. He held his head in regal hauteur, then snorted. When Young was only a few feet from him, Sam McGee turned and bolted away towards the far end of the pasture, neck bowed, head tucked under towards his chest, thick black mane and tail streaming behind him, the blinding white of his knee-high off-rear stocking punctuating his flight.

      “Bingo,” said Young.

      “I beg your pardon,” said Khan.

      “He’s fantastic.”

      “Yes,” Khan agreed, “but he’s also a money pit.”

      Young fingered the nail scissors in his pants pocket.

      “Come on,” said Khan, “I’ll show you the breeding shed.” He headed off in the direction of the building shaped like a school portable. “Both mares are bred to him for next year. It’s too early yet to tell if they’ve caught, but he certainly seems spunky enough. In fact, we’re breeding Angel Band back to him this morning.”

      “Mind if I hang around? I’ve never seen how it’s done.”

      Khan stopped. “Well, it’s different. Not like humans.” He laughed, embarrassed. “The stallion is all business, savage almost.”

      “Really?”

      “Oh yes. No foreplay, for one thing. And it’s over very quickly.”

      “Makes sense to me,” said Young.

      Young drove straight from Dot Com Acres to a phone booth in the little strip mall across the road. The phone booth was in front of an adult video store. While he waited for Desk Sergeant Gallagher to connect him with Wheeler, he read the blurb on a poster advertising a film called Pussies Aplenty: “Little did L’il Abner know when he planted those mysterious seeds he’d found in his uncle’s tool shed what a bumper crop he was in store for—”

      “Wheeler here.”

      “I got the hairs.”

      “What?”

      “I got about a dozen hairs off the only stockinged horse at Dot Com Acres. And it wasn’t just any horse, it was a stallion. And he’d just bred a mare. It was quite a show.”

      “Slow down, Sarge.”

      “I watched them breed him. It was something to see.”

      “I’ll bet. All that nature.”

      “One of Mahmoud Khan’s daughters, a very beautiful young woman named Cheyenne, brought the mare in one door of the breeding shed, and another daughter, not so beautiful, named Tiffany, brought a Shetland pony named Max in the other door. There’s this wall about four feet high in the middle of the shed. The mare and the pony looked each other over for a while, and when the mare showed she was interested, the pony was led out of the shed, and then the stud groom, an old Irishman named Pat, brought the stallion in.”

      “How did the mare show she was interested?”

      “It’s called ‘winking.’”

      “She

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