It was the mention of money that clinched it for Annie, for the thought had yet to coalesce that there might be some connection between the life of this horse and the life of her daughter.
'I don't care what the hell it costs,' she snapped and she could feel the older woman flinch. 'You tell Logan if he kills that horse, I'll sue him.'
She hung up.
'Come on. You're okay, come on.'
Koopman was walking backward down the slope, waving the truck on with both arms. It reversed slowly down after him into the trees and the chains hanging from the hoist on its rear end swung and clinked as it came. It was the truck that the mill people had standing by to unload their new turbines and Koopman had commandeered it, and them, for this new purpose. Following close behind it was a big Ford pickup hitched to an open-top trailer. Koopman looked over his shoulder to where Logan and a small crowd of helpers were kneeling around the horse.
Pilgrim was lying on his side in a giant bloodstain that was spreading out through the snow under the knees of those trying to save him. This was as far as he'd got when the flood of sedative hit. His forelegs buckled and he went down on his knees. For a few moments he'd tried to fight it but by the time Logan arrived he was out for the count.
Logan had got Koopman to call Joan Dyer on his mobile and was glad the hunter wasn't around to hear him asking her to get the owner's permission to put the animal down. Then he'd sent Koopman running for help, knelt by the horse and got to work trying to stem the bleeding. He reached deep into the steaming chest wound, his hand groping through layers of torn soft-tissue till he was up to his elbow in gore. He felt around for the source of the bleeding and found it, a punctured artery, thank God a small one. He could feel it pumping hot blood into his hand and he remembered the little clamps he had put in his pocket and scrabbled with his other hand to find one. He clipped it on and immediately felt the pumping stop. But there was still blood flowing from a hundred ruptured veins so he struggled out of his sodden parka, emptied its pockets and squeezed as much water and blood as he could from it. Then he rolled it up and stuffed it as gently as he could into the wound. He cursed out loud. What he really needed now was fluids. The bag of Plasmalyte he had brought was in his bag down by the river. He got to his feet and half ran, half fell back down there to get it.
By the time he returned, the rescue-squad paramedics were there and were covering Pilgrim with blankets. One of them was holding out a phone to him.
'Mrs Dyer for you,' he said.
'I can't talk to her now, for Christsakes,' Logan said. He knelt down and hitched the five-liter bag of Plasmalyte to Pilgrim's neck, then gave him a shot of steroids to fight the shock. The horse's breathing was shallow and irregular and his limbs rapidly losing temperature and Logan yelled for more blankets to wrap around the animal's legs after they had bandaged them to lessen the blood flow.
One of the rescue-squad people had some green drapes from an ambulance and Logan carefully extracted his blood-soaked parka from the chest wound and packed the drapes in instead. He leaned back on his heels, out of breath, and started loading a syringe with penicillin. His shirt was dark red and sodden and blood dripped from his elbows as he held the syringe up to flick the bubbles out.
'This is fucking crazy,' he said.
He injected the penicillin into Pilgrim's neck. The horse was as good as dead. The chest wound alone was enough to justify putting him down but that wasn't the half of it. His nasal bone was hideously crunched in, there were clearly some broken ribs, an ugly gash over the left cannon bone and God knows how many other smaller cuts and bruises. He could also tell from the way the horse had run up the slope that there was lameness high up in the right foreleg. He should just put the poor beast out of its agony. But now he'd got this far, he was damned if he was going to give that trigger-happy little fucker of a hunter the satisfaction of knowing he was right. If the horse died of his own accord, so be it.
Koopman had the mill truck and the trailer down beside them now and Logan saw they had managed to find a canvas sling from somewhere. The rescue-squad guy still had Mrs Dyer standing by on the phone and Logan took it from him.
'Okay, I'm yours,' he said and as he listened, he indicated to them where to put the sling. When he heard the poor woman's tactful rendering of Annie's message, he just smiled and shook his head.
'Terrific,' he said.'Nice to be appreciated.'
He handed the phone back and helped drag the two canvas sling straps under Pilgrim's barrel, through what was now a sea of red slush. Everyone was standing and Logan thought they all looked funny with their matching red knees. Someone handed him a dry jacket and for the first time since he was in the river he realized how cold he was.
Koopman and the driver hitched the ends of the sling to the hoist chains and then stood back with the others as Pilgrim was slowly lifted into the air and swung like a carcass onto the trailer. Logan climbed up there with two paramedics and they manhandled the horse's limbs so that eventually he lay as before on his side. Koopman passed the vet's things up to him while others spread blankets over the horse.
Logan gave another shot of steroids and took out a new bag of Plasmalyte. He suddenly felt very tired. He figured the chances of the horse being alive by the time they got to his clinic were odds on against.
'We'll call ahead,' Koopman said. 'So they'll know when to expect you.'
'Thanks.'
'All set now?'
'I guess so.'
Koopman slapped the rear end of the pickup that was hitched to the trailer and yelled for the driver to move out. It started slowly up the slope.
'Good luck,' Koopman called after them but Logan didn't seem to hear. The young deputy looked vaguely disappointed. It was all over and everyone was going home. There was a zipping sound behind him and he turned to look. The hunter was putting his rifle back in its bag.
'Thanks for your help,' Koopman said. The hunter nodded, swung the bag over his shoulder and walked away.
Robert woke with a jolt and for a moment thought he was in his office. The screen of his computer had gone berserk, quivering green lines racing each other across ranges of jagged peaks. Oh no, he thought, a virus. Rampaging through his files on the Dunford Securities case. Then he saw the bed with its covers neatly tented over what remained of his daughter's leg and he remembered where he was.
He looked at his watch. It was nearly five a.m. The room was dark except for where the angle-lamp behind the bed cast a cocoon of soft light over Grace's head and her naked shoulders. Her eyes were closed and her face serene as if she didn't mind at all the snaking coils of plastic tube that had invaded her body. There was a tube into her mouth from the respirator and another up her nose and down into her stomach through which she could be fed. More tubes looped down from the bottles and bags that hung above the bed and they met in a tangled fury at her neck, as if fighting to be first into the valve slotted into her jugular. The valve was masked by flesh-colored tape, as were the electrodes on her temples and chest and the hole they had cut above one of her young breasts to insert a fiber-optic tube into her heart.
Without a riding hat, the doctors said, the girl might well be dead. When her head hit the road, the hat had cracked but not the skull. A second scan however had found some diffused bleeding in the brain so they had drilled a tiny hole in her skull and inserted something that was now monitoring the pressure inside. The respirator, they said, would help stop the swelling in the brain. Its rhythmic whoosh, like the waves of a mechanical sea breaking on shingle, was what had lulled Robert into sleep. He had been holding her hand and it lay palm up where he had unwittingly discarded it. He took it again in both of his and felt the falsely reassuring warmth of her.