The Next Sure Thing (6 page)
He laughed. It was harsh and bitter-sounding. “You made me squat! You’re nickel-and-diming me to nowhere. The big money I want? You ain’t coming close to getting that, Wonderboy.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Oh, believe me, my friend. You haven’t even started being sorry.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? What do I mean? I mean I friggin’ own you! You, your family, your friends. I friggin’ own them too. You cause me to lose, you cause them to lose. Are you getting me now, Cree? Are you?”
I leaned back in the chair and let my arms slump down. “No one else had anything to do with this.”
“When you came in, they all came in. That’s how it goes, schmuck.”
“So what are you gonna do? None of them has any money.”
“They can all feel pain.”
“They’re not responsible for this.”
“You’re responsible. Call it whatever. Guilt by association if you want.”
“So what is it you want me to do?”
“I want my ten grand back. Plus I want what I should have won. You put me in a big hole here, Cree. I need out of it. Fast.”
“I can’t conjure up a win for you,” I said and immediately regretted it.
He knelt down in front of me and looked straight into my eyes. It was his utter stillness that scared me now. I’d never seen someone stay so still, so silent, so threatening without having to move a muscle.
“You’d better. You’d better get to work and pull a friggin’ rabbit out of the hat, or people are gonna start to bleed. I promise you that. You got one week.”
“One week? For what, twenty thousand or so?”
“Or so,” Hardy said. “Call it the upper end, closer to thirty. And that’s just for starters.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can. And you will.”
“If I can’t?”
He smiled, but it was more like just pulling skin up over his teeth. There was no humor in it, no feeling. It was eerie. Haunting. Disturbing. He reached up and gripped my jaw with one hand. “If you can’t, things are really going to go downhill. I don’t have the time or the need to carry a bum who doesn’t get me what I need. One week, Cree. One week.”
He stood up and walked away. Vic and Jerry scowled at me and walked away shaking their heads. The pain I felt all through my body was nothing compared to the sheer terror I felt grip at my belly. It was a long time before I could move.
T
hey say revenge is a dish best served cold. I never really got that, but I do know that I never took pain very well at all. My father was a strict churchgoing man. He had no problem with bringing out the strap whenever any of us kids would get out of line. There was always a lecture on how much we had failed him and his god. Then we were walloped, and walloped good. I remember walking away from each of those encounters with his anger and his strap feeling hot, like my skin was burning. It would take me forever to calm down. I think the reason I took to guitar and the blues so eagerly was because it gave me a place to vent. I would slam power chords. I would wrestle notes off the fret board. I would tear through twelve bars. The white-hot heat of my anger fueled my music. Without it, I wonder how much more trouble I might have gotten into. But the pain I felt from Hardy’s beating had no such easy outlet.
I churned for days. While my face healed and the stiffness in my ribs and belly eased off, I felt that huge heat I’d felt as a kid. I was hip to the fact that he was too big and bad and mean for me to ever imagine taking him on physically. Plus there were Vic and Jerry to consider. So I focused my thoughts on how I could hurt him as much as he’d hurt me. I felt a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt tears burning at the back of my eyes, and I walked around my room with my fists clenched so hard my forearms ached.
There didn’t seem to be any answer for my need for revenge. There didn’t seem to be any easy answer for how to get out of his hold either. But I wanted both of those things more than I’d wanted anything. At that point it didn’t matter to me if I lost out on the studio and his big promises of a video and connection to music biz movers and shakers. What mattered was that I got free of him. I was bluesman enough to resent the idea of being any man’s slave. Finding a way out became my prime focus.
It came to me as all the best things do— unexpectedly and without stress. It just sort of fell from the sky like a great song lyric does or a fragment of melody that you hum and know in your gut that it’s awesome and right. When it came to me. I sat up straight in my chair. It was a simple enough idea, but there were a ton of things that could go wrong. Still, it felt good knowing there was a road to take.
“Play both ends against the middle,” I told Ashton.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What does that mean exactly?”
I smiled. “It’s a player’s trick,” I said.
“Okay. But I still don’t know what it means.”
“It means you put out risk on purpose to get your needs met. Like when you want a certain thing to happen, you play the win side and the lose side together so that they cancel each other out and you get the result you want anyway.”
“So you put your head in the noose and hope no one kicks the chair out from under your feet?”
“Sounds about right.”
“In terms of Hardy, though, what do you mean?”
“I mean I play him for the money, not the horse.”
“Is this some kind of Indian thing, Cree? Because I’m really not following you at all.”
I laughed, and he looked worried. We ordered ourselves another round of coffees, and after they arrived, I leaned close to him and told him the details as they had come to me. It was complicated and took a long time. When I finished, he sat back in his chair and stared out the window. Then he looked at me and nodded. But he looked a hell of a lot more worried.
W
e used Ashton’s computer. When I found horses that interested me, we researched them. In a few days we learned more about bloodlines, breeding, sires, dams, thoroughbred farms, the structure of racetracks, horse anatomy, how they run and the science of racing horses than I ever thought I’d know before. Everything I knew had come from firsthand experience. But the technology gave me a university degree in understanding the math and the science behind it all. When it came to plotting odds, it sure helped. My head felt stuffed with information.
Hardy only called once.
“Time’s getting short, Cree.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m just making sure I put you onto a sure thing.”
“You’d better.” He’d hung up abruptly, and Ashton gave me that grave, worried look again.
I knew that a good horse could run anywhere from eight to twelve times a season. At smaller tracks like the one we had in town, they might go more often, so we narrowed our search to include only those who looked like their owners were priming them for a climb up the ladder to major tracks. It meant they ran fewer races, but they were better contests. We also focused on horses that worked out very well and steadily but had no wins in races against good competition. We wanted speed. We wanted endurance. We wanted a late move in the final stages in the race. It meant that we wanted a router. In track talk, a router is a horse that runs routes or races of a mile or more. The sprints, those short races where blinding speed separates winners from losers, are harder to gauge and play. But routers give you more laps, more time and more room to gather information on their past efforts. So we narrowed our search to longer races and the routers that ran them.
It was important that we have a longer race to play. It was vital that we had as much information on the field of horses that would run the race we chose. It was also critical that we knew the layout of the track as closely as possible. On smaller tracks like the one we went to, the turns are sharper. It means horses on the outside aren’t as far off the lead as it looks from the grandstand. It also means front-runners, horses who use their speed to get out fast and try to hold it, are less likely to put up a huge lead because they have to negotiate the turns with more care.
Ashton showed me how to research all of it. I admired him for his computer knowledge. He was impressed with my inside scoop on racing. Together we put together a “book,” a list of horses with numbers we liked and that fit our preferences. In the end we whittled it down to three. When we compared the numbers, we liked our list. Then we checked the racing schedule of each of them and found that one had been raced hard very recently, and we cut our list to two. Then we headed for the track.
A horse by the numbers is just a shadow. You have to get out in the stink of the barn and the backtrack where they live and work to really see them. I had enough connections left from my days as an exercise groom to get back there with no problem. It was an awesome world. The barns were long and low and cool. They were filled with impressive animals. When you’re in the stands or watching on tv, you never really get a sense of how big and powerful a thoroughbred horse really is. To get the full-meal deal on that, you have to stand next to one. You have to touch one and feel the ripple of muscle under your palm, hear the breath huffed out like a bellows and hear the stamp of one hoof that clumps like a ton of cement on the straw bed of their stalls. You know then how powerful they are. When they look at you with those huge bottomless shining eyes, you get a feel for how smart they are, how much they know about you just from looking at you.
“Wow,” Ashton said. “These guys are enormous.”
“When you stand near the starting gate and they all fire off at the same time, it’s like the ground explodes,” I said.
“I want to do that.”
“We will. As soon as we finish here.”
The horse we’d come to see was named Deb’s Wild Fancy. He was a big, rangy-looking chestnut gelding. When we found him, he was being led to the track for a workout. He pranced. The groom leading him was laughing as Deb’s Wild Fancy literally danced sideways and then back the other way as though he were in a choreographed dance routine. He had a lot of energy. The groom turned him over to the exercise rider and came and leaned on the rail beside us. His name was Ralph, and he was eager to talk. He told us the gelding would run in three days in a mile-and-a-half race to earn a step up the ladder. The field had been chosen for him. A pack of good strong horses with good reputations, but whose finishes lacked the burst that Deb’s Wild Fancy had. He was placed to win. Then he was being transported to a senior track in California where he’d run against some of the best two- and three-year-olds in the country. It was everything we wanted to hear.
Then we saw him run. It was like watching ribbon unfold time after time. He was so smooth, it looked effortless. The rider held him back with two hands. Breezing, it’s called. Then, just as they passed us, the rider dropped his hands an inch with the reins, and Deb’s Wild Fancy became everything the computer numbers said he was: a charging, relentless ground-eater with speed to spare. And my ticket out.
“S
o we have the horse. What do we do now?” Ashton asked. “There’s no way we can influence what the odds on him will be.”
“True enough,” I said, looking out the window at the street from our favorite table in the coffee joint. “But we won’t mess with his odds. We mess with the others.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the form comes out the day before. Everyone who’s a serious player gets it as soon as it hits the street. The line on Deb’s Wild Fancy is going to show his lack of wins and fades at the finish going into a race with proven horses. He’s an underdog.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So we let him stay that way. Our job is to influence the other numbers and keep action off our ride.”
“How do we do that?”
“Hardy,” I said.
“Hardy? How is he going to help us?” Ashton looked worried, and I grinned. I was starting to get a plan on the rails. It felt good to be in the game again.
“We don’t tell him that he is,” I said.
“Oh, that’s just great!” Ashton said, slapping the table with his palm. “The last time you didn’t tell him about something almost got you killed.”
“Yes. But he showed me something. Something that we needed to know.”
“And what might that be?”
“Desperation,” I said. “He wasn’t angry that I didn’t keep him in the play. He was hot because he lost—and he can’t afford to lose.”
“So?”
“So we put him on a different horse.”
He gave me a look of utter disbelief.
“You want to get him to put money down on a horse that you know isn’t going to do anything? How is that going to help?
“When there’s a sudden drop of loot, it shows on the odds board right away. The amount in the win pool goes up, and the odds go down. Every player worth his salt watches how the pool is being affected. It tells them where the action is.”
He thought for a moment.
“So you get Hardy to lay down a bundle on this other horse. That makes the players react and the odds change. So the numbers on our horse go up?”
“You’re a born handicapper, kid.” I grinned.
“I just want to live to see thirty,” he said. “Hanging with you sometimes makes that feel like a challenge.”