Ranny's heart was pounding and he took a couple of deep breaths to calm down, then swung his car in through the gate behind her. If she'd been out on the street and done that, he'd have fixed her but good. In here, he'd better cool it or he'd be out on his ass, and he need to keep this job now that he'd moved out of his mother's house. He contented himself with a couple more expletives flung after the receding trailer, as he swung off to the employee lot and she continued on to the stable unloading area.
Had he but known it, Ranny's mood was not much darker than that of the truck driver. Cynthia had expected to be cruising in her big BMW up scenic 280 to get to the Cow Palace today, and to be doing it several hours later. She wasn't scheduled to show until 10, but at 6 AM her driver, Juan, had phoned and said that he was too sick to come to work and definitely too sick to haul horses up to San Francisco. Something he ate, he said. Furiously, Cynthia hung up on him before she could lash out at him - "Something you drank, more likely, or somebody you ate, and are still eating!" She was gaining a reputation as a hard person to work for, and she didn't want to alienate another worker just now. But she was convinced that Juan was another lazy Mexican trying to get out of a day's work. She wouldn't have believed that he would have given anything for a trip to the city, because his cousin knew a couple of girls they could see after the horses were put to bed for the night. He had been really looking forward to some action in San Francisco after the quiet of rustic Woodside.
With her groom already up in the city to tend to her other horse, Cynthia had had no option on such short notice but to drive the truck herself. She'd done that often enough in her younger years, but recently she'd distanced herself from almost everything but the actual riding. Her husband's software company had finally gone public last year, and there was so much money now that she didn't see why she should ever have to drive a truck, brush a horse, or even put a saddle on one. She did still enjoy riding, though. Even if she didn't win, she loved that feeling of mastery as she convinced an animal more than a dozen times her weight that it had to do what she told it to do.