The Next Sure Thing (5 page)

The day dawned bright and sunny. Hardy wanted to make an event out of it and arranged to pick me up and take me to the track with him. They picked me up at noon, and we drove to the track. It was crowded, and there was a buzz you could feel in the air. The crowd was alive with it, and the tote board for the second race reflected their excitement. The odds changed every minute as bettors laid down their money on five favorites. Each of them got bet down low. Falmouth Circuit sat unchanged at forty to one for a long time. Hardy kept his eyes on me. I could feel him watching me.

“We gonna do this thing?” he asked finally. There was a rumble of anger in his voice.

“Wait,” was all I said.

“Wait for what? You brought me here to play the odds and he’s there. He’s been there all friggin’ day.”

“Wait,” I said again.

Hardy fumed. Jerry and Vic shrugged their huge shoulders at the same time and rocked on the balls of their feet. We were standing in the throng and leaning on the rail as I watched the tote board, and I could tell that Hardy didn’t like being so visible. It was the first hint I got of him being rattled. It was three minutes to post time when the board flickered and the numbers changed. Falmouth Circuit shot up to fifty-five to one.

“Now,” I said and turned and headed for the window. The three gangsters fell in behind me. We got our bets down just as the horses were at the gate.

We walked quickly up the stairs to the second balcony, where we could watch the action in the backstretch. The field had already made the first turn and were bunched tightly coming onto the straight. Our horse lagged a good ten lengths behind. The whole grandstand was in a tizzy. The favorites raced shoulder-to-shoulder, and the pace was wild. When they plunged into the third turn, Falmouth Circuit was eight lengths behind. Hardy gave me a hard look. I shrugged. He glowered.

Then the magic happened. It was like the horse found an entirely new set of gears. He closed the gap on the last horse in the pack by the middle of the turn. He was flying. Then he exploded to the outside and began passing horses like they were standing still. The announcer screamed out, “Falmouth Circuit makes a strong bid on the outside.” The crowd went nuts.

He caught up to the lead horses five yards into the homestretch. There were four of them spread out in a tight row across the track. Neither gained an inch. Hardy was slamming his rolled-up form against the railing. His face was red with excitement. Everyone was in a frenzy. Time slowed to a heartbeat. The horses closed on the finish line. There was no leader. It looked like it was going to be a photo finish. Then, with scant yards to go, Falmouth Circuit kicked it up another notch. He leaped ahead by a yard, held it and flashed across the line with a narrow victory. There was bedlam around us. Hardy was leaping up and down, hugging me and punching at Jerry and Vic, who had made bets of their own.

Hardy won over fifteen thousand dollars.

“Damn, that was fun,” he said on the way out of the grandstand. “Fun to watch and a lot more fun to win. But I gotta admit, you had me worried when you made me wait so long, Cree.”

“I just wanted the best numbers for you.”

“Well, we got that.” He walked ahead of us toward the car and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He talked into it as he walked.

“Seems happy,” I said to the goons.

“You’d be happy too if you’d loosened a noose,” Vic said.

“What do you mean?”

“He owes a bunch to Solly Dario.” Jerry elbowed Vic hard in the ribs, and the big man flinched and gave him a hard look. Jerry gave him a harder one back, and Vic put his head down and walked silently. Jerry gave me the same look of stone, and I shut up. But as I watched Hardy talk on the phone, he’d lost the excitement he’d had after the win. He spoke in low tones, grave, and I could sense his seriousness. He was giving deference. He was reporting. Whoever Solly Dario was, he clearly had Hardy’s utmost attention. When he closed the phone, he stepped into the car without looking at us and patted his chest pocket where the counter check was. I felt on the verge of a great discovery.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A
shton was a whiz with the Internet. He wasn’t much for games or the whole chat thing, but he could find any information that he wanted. His setup was amazing. He had three monitors hooked up to a system that was blazing fast. He showed me the community of info nerds that he belonged to. He searched out everything from the mating habits of the red kangaroo to the latest developments with the space telescope while I sat and watched. Then he typed in
Solly Dario
.

Dario was a street punk who’d worked his way up the criminal ladder with the Ricci crime family. He sat as one of their top lieutenants and also ran his own show. He’d been arrested a number of times but none of the charges had stuck. Somehow key witnesses either changed their minds about their testimony or just failed to show up for court. In his younger days, Dario had been mean and violent and fearless. Now he lived on a big country estate where he raised champion wolfhounds and was a patron of the arts who sponsored museums and libraries. He even had a foundation that awarded bursaries for inner-city kids to go to college.

But he still had his hand in the game. Ashton found references to ongoing investigations with a number of agencies focused on Dario’s influence in boxing and a handful of Las Vegas casinos. He was slippery. No one had been able to pin him down on anything, and he lived unthreatened by the law. He was something of a criminal legend.

When he cross-referenced Dario with Winslow Hardy, we found an association that went back a long time. They’d been street kids together. Dario had been the one who brought Hardy to Leo Scalia. While Scalia’s ventures never gained the prominence that Dario’s did, the two families worked closely with the Ricci organization. And Hardy carried a lot of weight. But his weakness was that he loved to gamble. Ashton found references to a big loss in a Ricci casino that Dario had covered for him.

“That’s what Vic meant,” I said. “Hardy owes Dario for bailing him out of a mess with the Ricci family. That’s why he wanted me in his grips so bad.”

“You’re the closest thing to a sure thing he’s ever found,” Ashton said. “Every winner that pays off for him means he can slip the bucks to Dario and take the pressure off. He needs to keep winning.”

We looked at each other silently.

“You know what this means then?” I said finally.

“Yeah,” Ashton said. “You get him out of debt with Dario, you might be able to walk.”

“It means that I just have to keep on winning too.”

“You know the odds are against that?”

“It’s the only game in town, Ash.”

“It’s no game when you absolutely have to win.”

“That old devil drives a hard bargain,” I said.

“Always has,” Ashton said. “Always will.”

I found Blackberry Ramble by accident. I was studying another horse that had caught my interest and began to notice his name regularly in the same lines. He seemed to never be able to get beyond fourth. Judging by what the line said, he ran good races in good company but had never been able to win. “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride” was the line that best described this horse. Until now. The horse that caught my interest was called Upton, and he was a stalker. That meant that he laid off the pace in about fourth position until the homestretch and then outran horses at the very last. Blackberry Ramble ran the same kind of race. What tipped me off was the speed. The two favorites in the race liked to run wire to wire. They were pure speedsters. But this race was longer than they generally ran. It meant that stalkers like Blackberry Ramble could tuck in and let them run and then knock them off in the stretch run more easily. With the presence of Upton in the same race, it meant that my horse would likely go off at really good odds. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it certainly was intriguing.

I watched Hardy’s eyes light up when I told him. “Likely twenty to one by post time, you figure?” he asked.

“Yeah. Not much more.”

“I’ll take that any day of the week, hands down,” he said.

He went in hard.

There are moments in your life that come to define you. Most times you don’t even know that’s what they are. They’re just moments. Just living. Just what you normally do. It’s only later when you look back that you discover how big they were. That’s what Blackberry Ramble and the eighth race were that day. Everything stayed the same and his numbers sat right where they were supposed to. But something told me to stay off. I didn’t risk any of my own money. I didn’t say a thing to Hardy. He put his money down like I’d advised. But I couldn’t shake the queasy feeling in my gut. I stayed away from the track that day too. Maybe I’d grown a sixth sense. I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t feel right, and I laid off. As I walked around that afternoon, the feeling of disaster kept churning in my mind.

Blackberry Ramble stumbled coming out of the gate. It took him precious long seconds to recover and get back into stride. By that time he was at the far outside of the track, and the field was charging through the first turn. He never got back into it. Didn’t even come close.

The cell phone went off in my pocket. Hardy told me what happened. “It’s what you can never predict,” I said.

“Yeah? How much did you lose?” he asked. I could hear the rage in him.

“I didn’t lay out a bet,” I said.

“Oh yeah? Why’s that? It was your pick.”

“Gut feeling,” I said.

There was a long silence. I waited. I could hear him breathing.

“We need to talk,” he said. “I’m picking you up at your place. Be there.”

I walked home with slow heavy steps.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
he beating I took was vicious. I didn’t even know it was coming because Hardy didn’t say a word. They picked me up, and as soon as I sat in the backseat, Vic slammed a fist into the back of my head and I crumpled forward. I felt Jerry punch me three times in the ribs before the breath went out of me. Then Vic’s big fist crashed into the back of my head again, and I blacked out.

When I came to, I was in a chair at the back of the loading dock at Hardy’s warehouse. He pulled on a pair of light boxing gloves, lifted my chin with one hand and smashed a punch into my jaw with the other. Then, as Vic and Jerry held me up, he hammered me in the torso time and time again. The scariest part was the silence. None of them spoke. Hardy kept hitting me, rearing back and punching, and his face didn’t change at all. It just stayed cold and hard and bitter. He beat me like a boxer beats a heavy bag. His eyes were dark pits that gave off no light. When he tired, he just waved his hand at the goons, and they let me slump back into the chair.

Hardy leaned against the wall, breathing hard through his mouth. He looked at me through the top of his eyes and sneered. “You cost me ten grand, you useless punk.”

The room was spinning. I tried to open my mouth to speak, but it was full of blood. I spit it out at the floor. “Sorry” was all I could get out.

“Sorry? You leave me to carry a bad bet and all you can say is you’re sorry?”

“Wasn’t a bad bet. Was a good horse.”

“So why did you stay out?”

“I don’t know. Gut feeling, like I said.”

He walked over and pushed my head back with one hand and slammed the other into my belly.

“How’s that for a gut feeling, you piece of crap! Give me his hand.”

Jerry lifted up my left hand and held it out. Hardy peeled the gloves off and grabbed my first two fingers and bent them back as far as they would go. He leaned forward and glared into my eyes and pushed them back farther and farther. I could feel the tendons stretch, and the pain was incredible.

“I got a gut feeling about you now too, Cree,” he said. “I got a feeling maybe a one-handed blues player ain’t ever gonna amount to much.”

“I didn’t know,” I gasped.

“You knew enough to stay out without telling me. You knew enough to look out for yourself. You’re a player too, Cree. You read it, but you didn’t let me know. You let me take a friggin’ fall. Big-time.”

“I made you money.”