Gargantuan (7 page)

I said nothing. I was sick to my stomach too and all I could see was red. A violent horrible bloody red nothing like the rich red of Bethany’s chestnut coat. Sandman went on: “I waited till them people got home. Sat there waiting three hours and then when they finally got back, I gave ’em a piece of my mind. And you know what they told me? Told me it weren’t none of my business. They done gave me two thousand dollars for that horse and they could do with her as they see fit. I told ’em I was reporting them to the ASPCA and they just laughed in my face, telling me the lady’s brother is the sheriff and weren’t nobody gonna come around questioning what they did.”

Sandman’s yellow skin had gone very white and he was clenching his bony fists.

We hitched a trailer up to Sandman’s pickup that night just after midnight. When we got close to the people’s house, we turned the headlights off and pulled in their driveway, past the house and to the barn. There was a dog but the dog just looked at us and didn’t bark.

We got Bethany out of there though she was in such bad shape she had trouble walking up the ramp into the trailer.

We brought her back to our barn, gave her a nice clean stall and some alfalfa cubes and tended to her cuts and wounds for a few hours.

The people came around the next day making threats, saying they knew we’d stolen Bethany. Sandman chased them off his property. But that wasn’t good enough.

That night, after Sandman left the barn, I took one of the farm pickup trucks and drove it into town and out to the other side to where the dirtbags lived.

They were pretty careless for people who went around victimizing innocent beasts. Their front door wasn’t locked. I walked in the darkened house and took out my little flashlight. I saw some stairs
which I assumed would take me up to the bedroom. Sure enough, the first room I looked in, there they were, the happy couple, sleeping like bugs in a rug.

I propped Sandman’s shotgun on my shoulder and brought the nose of the thing right up to the guy’s temple. Must have been a sound sleeper, he didn’t even feel his death sentence resting there against his skin. It sort of made a horrible mess and a fair amount of noise. Woke the woman up but I didn’t even let a scream come out of her mouth before I blew her head off too.

On my way out, I checked around to see if they had any other victims. No kids but in the yard I found the dog we’d seen when we’d come for Bethany. He was skinny and his white coat was yellow from dirt and neglect. Dog growled but I talked to him a good while then undid his collar and coaxed him into the truck with me and drove off.

I
popped awake just after four
A.M
. Ruby and I had been up until close to midnight but nothing could have kept me in bed at this point. I hadn’t smelled a horse in a week.

Ruby was asleep, on her side, nightgown bunched at her hips again. I got up quietly and went into the kitchen, passing Stinky on the way. The large cat was on the couch, dozing, his immense belly spilling out from under him. He lifted his head to gaze at me, decided I wasn’t going to feed him, and went back to dozing.

Lulu, on the other hand, rubbed against my legs compulsively
as I made coffee. I ate a hard-boiled egg that Ruby had cooked the previous night when she’d suddenly decided she had to boil all the eggs in her fridge.

I took a quick shower and dressed then scribbled Ruby a note just as my cell phone chirped. It was Sal calling to tell me he was outside. I went into the hall and locked Ruby’s door behind me, taking a brief moment to savor the fact that she’d given me keys.

The neighbor, Ramirez, had his door open.

“Everything all right?” he asked, looking up from his giant mug of coffee. He was wearing a dirty T-shirt and boxer shorts. His thick arms were propped on his yellow kitchen table.

“Fine, thanks, Ramirez. Sal’s waiting for me downstairs.”

“Good,” Ramirez said, nodding then staring back into his coffee mug. The guy, as far as I could tell, never slept at all.

I went down the stairs and out onto Stillwell Avenue. It was still dark out. Here and there, fading stars punctured the sky. The air smelled salty and cold.

Sal had his truck pulled up to the narrow sidewalk in front of Ruby’s building. I got in.

“How you doin’?” Sal said. The guy looked wide awake and smelled freshly showered. His shaved head had a healthy pink glow. He had the heat blasting and was in a T-shirt that exposed his heavily tattooed arms.

“I’m good. Thanks for doing this,” I said. “It’s damned nice of you.”

The truth is, I wasn’t sure how much good Sal was going to do me if someone was really interested in ending my life. And the more hours that came between me and the incident on the beach the more I’d started wondering if it wasn’t just some strange coincidence. A random psychopath that maybe I should have reported to the cops. There was no way to be sure.

Sal drove. The day still hadn’t started for most people and the streets were empty. After asking if I minded, Sal put in a Beethoven CD, which he played at an earsplitting volume. Occasionally, he’d shout something at me over the insane roar of the music.

“You know that lady of yours got me into this. This Beethoven shit.”

“Oh yeah?” I had to scream for him to hear me. He turned it down a notch.

“I was feeling frazzled when I first met Ruby. The wife was giving me a hard time and my kid didn’t seem to like me and my back was going out and I was just a mess. First Ruby tried getting me to do that yoga crap she does,” he said indignantly. “Then, when she saw that was going over like a fireball in hell, she got on me to listen to classical. I gotta say, it helps.” Sal shook his big bald head and squeezed the steering wheel for emphasis. I nodded, then closed my eyes.

A half hour later, we were pulling into the backside entrance at Belmont. After peering into the vehicle and seeing me, Lazy Susan, the morning-shift security guard, waved us in, not seeming to care one bit that Sal’s truck didn’t have the proper stickers.

I glanced toward the training track and saw a half-dozen tractors, headlights glowing in the hard darkness as they worked to prepare the surface. I directed Sal to the horsemen’s parking lot where he nosed the truck into a spot. We got out and walked toward Henry Meyer’s barn.

The backstretch was alive and humming in the cold dawn. Grooms mucking stalls out. Hotwalkers hand walking horses. Radios blaring salsa as if it were high noon in Miami. Sal seemed dazed as he looked around, taking in the activity.

“This your first time on the backside?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Amazing back here,” he said, and I smiled to myself, remembering how I felt the first time I’d set foot here, how it seemed like I’d finally found my home.

We came to Henry’s barn where Pepe, one of Henry’s hotwalkers, was leading a bay filly around the shedrow.

“Attila,” Pepe nodded at me.

“Where’s Henry?” I asked, stopping to pat the filly on the neck.

“In his office, pulling his hair out.”

“Oh yeah? What happened?”

“What happened?” Pepe looked incredulous. “Snow, Attila. Canceled races. Horses high as kites. Henry’s got owners crawling down his back trying to figure out what races to put their horses in now.”

“Oh,” I said. Pepe, who is fiercely protective of Henry and the horses, eyed Sal. Sal stared back at the hotwalker. I didn’t offer any explanation for my bodyguard.

I stuck my head in Henry’s office. The man looked terrible. The crevices in his face were deeper than usual and the pouches under his large brown eyes were drooping down to his mouth.

“You okay, Henry?”

His head jerked up and he frowned. “Attila, there you are. I was wondering if you’d turn up.”

“Oh yeah? You need me?”

“Looks like they’re getting the track in shape, I’m gonna send one set of horses out and Layla is sick. I could use you.”

Layla Yashpinsky, an exercise rider, was a small muscular woman with an ass of iron and shoulders like a German swimmer. But, for all her apparent physical power, the girl had been out sick ten of the last twenty days. Rumor had it she’d taken up with one of Shug McGaughey’s assistant trainers, so maybe she wasn’t sick in the traditional sense of the word.

“This is my friend, Sal,” I said, indicating my bodyguard. “I’m just taking him around with me for a few days. Hope that’s okay. He’s interested in buying a horse.”

Henry glanced up briefly, grunted a greeting at Sal, and then gave me instructions on what to do with the two horses I was going to work for him.

“Just a very easy gallop with both of them,” Henry said, “and if that footing’s really bothering them, then use your judgment and just do as much as the horse is comfortable with. I’ll be up there in a few minutes to watch.”

I nodded at Henry.

Sal and I started heading away from the shedrow, over toward the training track. It was still inky and dark out and a numbing
wind was blowing snow everywhere. Sal was hatless, the bare skin of his shaved head exposed to the elements. He pulled his coat collar up closer to his ears.

“You okay? You need a hat?” I asked him.

“I’m fine. My head is always hot,” he said, grinning a little.

I was already cold to the bone but it didn’t matter to me much. I’d be on a horse soon.

As we came closer to the track, Sal started grumbling about how much he hated the idea of my riding out there, in plain view of anyone.

“It’d have to be a sniper to get at me when I’m on the track, Sal,” I tried assuaging him.

“Exactly my point.”

“I just don’t think that’s gonna happen,” I said quietly.

“And what, you thought someone was gonna try to take you out on the beach at Coney Island?”

“I’m starting to think that was an unfortunate coincidence.”

“Very unfortunate, I’d say.”

I just wasn’t worried. I was about to get on a horse. This thought was starting to warm me up good when I saw Tony Vallamara walking toward us. It looked like he was staring right at me and I felt my stomach knot up. Tony had been a jockey at some point long before my time. After a few unsuccessful seasons, he switched over to being a jockey’s agent. I don’t think that went too well either and eventually he turned crooked, orchestrating deals on the dark side of the horse business. His personal organizer was chockful of unscrupulous veterinarians, corrupt bloodstock agents, and down-on-their-luck trainers. Tony had been the first one to approach me about holding a horse back in a race. I had been surprised. That stuff went on all the time at bush tracks but it was the last thing you expected on the New York circuit, which seemed much too carefully monitored and scrutinized for anyone to pull off something as obvious as holding a horse back. At first, I just laughed, thinking it was a sinister joke. But it wasn’t. Of course the guy wouldn’t dream of approaching any name riders with such a
proposal and he probably wouldn’t approach
any
riders other than someone as low down as me. At the time, I’d been riding in New York for two months and hadn’t had a win. Ava and I were already on the skids with my lack of earning power generating a lot of the turmoil. When Tony approached me about holding back a horse named Razorskin in a little claiming race, it didn’t seem like the end of the world. The poor horse stood a raindrop’s chance in hell of running better than last anyway. I didn’t feel that badly. Took the money and rode the race same as I would have anyway. The horse came in second to last. It wasn’t always that easy though. Over the next few months, I took cash for holding horses that did have a chance. There was one horse, a big awkward gelding named Roustabout, that just didn’t want to lose. I was doing everything I could. Gave him a horrible start out of the gate, then got him stuck in traffic. But the horse went ten wide, trying to get to the lead. I had to lose my stirrups and even that didn’t do it. I waited till we were clear of other horses and fell off. The horse, relieved of his rider, crossed the finish line first by ten lengths and looked proud afterward. I felt sick. And I wasn’t the same after that.

When Tony had approached me about fudging my ride on a brave little claiming mare two weeks earlier, I’d refused. Tony had said I’d regret it, but I hadn’t taken the threat very seriously. The guy was crooked but I didn’t think he was a murderer. Now, I wasn’t sure. As Sal and I walked by, the small, ugly man looked at me and sneered. Sal didn’t notice. We kept walking.

We reached the rail of the track where the wind was gathering strength, chilling me so much I could feel my toes curling inside my boots. I was so stiff I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to ride, but once Sophie, the groom who was handling Jack Valentine, gave me a leg up, all the physical unpleasantness disappeared.

Jack was a sweetheart of a horse. He had trouble staying sound and, even though he was just starting to really get the hang of racing, he probably wouldn’t have a long career. Jack was an honest horse though and always gave me as much as he had. This morning that proved to be a lot. I guess that Jack, like all the rest of us, had
had enough with being cooped up. As I asked him to move from a trot to a comfortable canter, he got excited, bucked, squealed, and shook his head, which was pretty uncharacteristic for this horse. He was probably just feeling good though. Like me.