RED, GREEN, OR MURDER - Poisoned Pen Press (UK)

4 Steven F. Havill
thousand-pound hammer with Dale caught against the hard,
smelly anvil of the creosoted oak.
A heifer jostled the big gelding and doubled his panic. He
danced hard to the left, losing Dale in the process. The youngster
went down with a crash, a flail of arms and legs in the dust.
The sorrel, brain empty, inadvertently planted a hoof squarely
on Dale Torrance’s right knee and then rocketed off to mix it
up with the cattle. The kid’s scream was shrill and chopped off
abruptly.
Herb dove into motion. He raced toward his son, his own
lame knee turning his sprint into an awkward, skipping shuffle.
With a deft snatch, Pat Gabaldon caught the loose horse and
eased him back to reality, the gelding’s eyes wide and nostrils
flared. The cattle drifted into a confused, milling bunch across
the way. Socks, the blue heeler, yapped his excitement without
a clue about what to do next.
By the time I had crossed the corral, Dale’s face was a pasty
gray. He had squirmed under the bottom rail of the arena and
now lay flat on his back, fists clenched and beating a tattoo on
the hard dirt. His breath hissed through clenched teeth, coupled
with whimpers and tears. It didn’t take an orthopedic surgeon
to see that his right knee was a wreck, with the lower half of his
leg at a grotesque angle. Another bolt of pain bent Dale at the
waist, and he clawed at his leg with both hands.
“Easy now,” his father said, and dropped to his knees in a
fashion that any other time would have been funny, his own bad
leg crabbed straight out to the side, boot heel dug in for support.
“God damn, son,” he observed. “That’s sure as hell broke.” He
glanced up at me.
I looked around for options. This wasn’t the sort of injury
where we could just shoulder him to his feet and hop-a-long
to the house for an ice pack. We had pieces of bone where they
weren’t supposed to be, and an orthopedist was going to have
to do some reassembly.
If we tried to fold Dale into the cab of one of the pickups,
he’d have to bend the wreckage of that knee, and that wouldn’t