The vet’s heap-on-wheels wasn’t parked outside the medical clinic. And the main door was locked. I pressed the buzzer three times, then cupped my hands over the sidelight window. It was dark inside.
I walked down the side of the building, over an apron of rounded pea gravel. By the back door, two galvanized tin boxes waited, marked for laboratory pickups. Both boxes were locked. Farther down the back side, I saw two blue tarps. Under the first, I found an assortment of mechanical parts—pulley, chains, plastic rings. Replacement parts, it looked like, for the ceiling contraption that carried SunTzu to the exam table. I felt nauseous, remembering that morning. That strange, wet morning. It came back with vivid details. Ashley’s sodden hair and loving words, murmured into the horse’s ear. And Brent. I thought about his arrival at the track. The vet radioed him. Searching. He was late coming, and then he ignored the jockey lying broken on the ground. But something tingled on the back of my neck. Brent’s priority—and only concern—was the horse. Not the human being.
I lifted the second tarp.
There were three oil drums, just like the one Junior used to hide his joint. Each was marked with spray paint—Paper, Glass, Plastic. The paper recycling didn’t look that different from the mess blanketing the vet’s van and office, and the drum marked Glass held brown and green bottles with their labels dutifully removed. But the third drum, labeled Plastic, was almost empty. A half-dozen empty Gatorade bottles sat on the bottom. The clear plastic milky with age.
I turned a slow circle. Junior was insisting Brent wanted the smoke detectors disposed of properly. In recycling bins. If some Gatorade bottles later covered a bunch of plastic disks, who would have noticed? Not the vet, who left himself Post-it notes to remember his own glasses. And blue tarp had covered the drums, protection from the rain. Sixty yards to my right, the barns sat perpendicular to the medical clinic. But only the backs were visible. I couldn’t see any stables. Only one thing was certain. My first impression of Wertzer was dead-on. That guy was a bloodhound, an investigator who scoured a place for the smallest fire hazards. I imagined him finding this oil drum full of paper, sitting directly under a wooden building. Then discovering smoke detectors. He never would have imagined they were kept to make a dirty bomb.
But I might have missed it too. I couldn’t understand why, after I renounced lying, God would send Felicia Kunkel. All her whining and complaining seemed like punishment.
But I was wrong.
There was no such thing as luck. And there were no coincidences. And all things worked together for good . . .
Including Felicia’s sores.