Chapter 1

I’ve never woke up with my head in a horse’s feed bucket but then again, I’ve never had a night like that one in Alabama.

I was making an Ocala run, heading down to Leprechaun Farms with two mares and a foal. The boss down there, Marcus Denton, is one of the few who doesn’t subcontract out his trucking so he keeps three of us drivers on staff to haul his horses to the racetracks and other farms. Marcus and I had a thing when we were in our early twenties, lasted about a year, but he got mighty tired of me being on the road twenty-five days of the month. And hell, I was a horny kid back then, and didn’t see any harm in popping what I could on the road. Had nothin’ to do with Marcus being at home, waiting for me.

Ah well, I can’t lie. They don’t call me Robby the Knob for my good looks.

That Wednesday morning, I had a load-up at Rockstar Farms, one of those “boutique” horse operations that’s so fancy you’re nervous to spit on the ground. There were orange traffic cones set up a half mile from the loading area. A groom ran out, waving his arms and made me park way out from the barn.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked Mitch, the head groom after a damn long hike up the drive.

“Mrs. Pelland has decided she wants a goddamned burgundy and yellow color scheme,” he answered in between chews on his toothpick. “So, guess what? She’s getting a goddamned burgundy and yellow color scheme.”

“In a horse barn?” I said.

“And we get to move all the horses out, repaint every stall on the property, then move the horses back in.”

“Maybe she’ll want you to dye the horses burgundy, too.”

Mitch smiled. “Maybe I’d dye them yeller. It’d be a helluva surprise to see palomino horses show up to run the Kentucky Derby.”

Horse operations have a weird mix of people in them. You got your owners who are so rich I swear they have someone else wipe their butts. You got your barn managers who are frazzled as shit trying to keep the owners, the staff andthe horses happy. There’s the grooms and barn help who actually do the scutwork and there’s the occasional walker. Walkers are what we call those guys (they’re almost always guys), who hitchhike the circuit, picking up cash at one barn or another and crashing in a spare horse stall.

We watched the grooms do a final brush-out of the two mares I was picking up. The one mare’s little foal jittered around, tugging at its purple halter, antsy.

“You got the big rig today. More pick-ups to do on the way back?” Mitch asked.

“Naw, just these two. I dropped off eight horses over to Aiken.”

“Cold front coming down.”

“I think I’ll outrun it. Stay on 65 all the way.”

“Nice drive.”

The horses and their—no shit—bottled water got loaded and we said our good-byes.

I’d let the mares load after checking their lip tattoos. I learned that lesson early. Once, I grabbed a bay stallion that a farm groom led out to me—and shoot, what a pisser he was to load and unload, twelve hundred pounds of hormone-addled fuckheadedness—drove him eight hundred miles back home and then Marcus told me I’d brought the wrong damn horse. Felt like an idiot. Thoroughbreds look an awful lot alike, especially the bays, so now instead of trusting the grooms to bring me the right horse, I always check their lips before I let ‘em load. And foals’ll only follow their mamas the first few months anyway, so I wasn’t worried about the baby.

I-65 cuts through west Kentucky, a hilly, gorgeous part of the state where the grass really does have a blue tinge to it, something to do with the nitrogen content or something. My CD player cranked out Green Day and Lighthouse and just for old time’s sake, a little Aerosmith. Good driving music.

I seen the kid the first time at a rest stop just past the Alabama state line. Four hours into the trip and it was time to feed and water the horses and take a piss myself. I’m sometimes tempted to just unzip in the trailer and let the hay on the floor suck it up but unless there’s snow to slog through, I go into the men’s room. Interesting places sometimes, men’s rooms, especially after midnight if ya know what I mean.

Anyway, this kid’s going from rig to rig, blonde, shaggy hair blowing in the breeze. He’s slender, maybe five-six, and looks to go about a buck twenty. Jockey wannabe? He’s wearing a denim jacket that’s got a big hole on the left arm, torn, like someone has tried to rip it off him. His jeans are scruffy and match the dirty backpack he carried.

A walker, I decided. Or a hustler maybe, trading blowjobs for cash.

He’s at the rig next to me, talking to the driver, the breeze carrying over bits of their conversation. Something along the lines of how far you going and Miami and can you help unload in Orlando?

Now that he was closer, I saw the kid is early-twenties, maybe. Okay, technically not a kid, but a kid to me. Turning thirty-five in March bothered me a lot more than turning thirty had; weird but true. Not that I’d fallen to pieces but I sure feel the long days now: my legs and back stiff as hell climbing down from the rig after a trip, the headaches I got if I drive into the sun too long, my legs and feet aching most nights.