Assassin Hunter

by August Palumbo

  I usually gathered a lot of useless intelligence every week at this game. Besides the constant bickering and knocking each other, the conversation consisted of tall tales about the week’s “sure thing” where a bundle would be bet on a horse that couldn’t lose. Tonight’s swag menu included fake Rolex watches, a couple of twenty-seven inch color TV sets still in shipping boxes, and an antique cameo ring probably stolen in a house burglary or purse snatching. The smaller stuff was passed around like a dessert cart for anyone interested, and the usual round of haggling over price triggered more arguments. The swag was mostly minor league, and none of it seemed important enough evidence for me to spend the government’s money to buy it.

  The game finally got underway, and four hours later T-Red was tapped out. Dottie, having lost her stake and borrowing another two hundred from D’Argonne, followed close behind. With only five players remaining, D’Argonne quit. Tanzini and I remained with Cabbage Boy and Penny, who had won about three hundred dollars, a week’s pay for him. “How about a showdown hand for the three croakers?” he asked to any takers.

  “You’re on,” Tanzini said, and they both stacked the money on the table. I shuffled the deck and had Penny cut the cards. I tossed five cards in rapid succession to each of them face up. Tanzini showed the highest hand with a mere Ace-Queen, but Penny’s highest card was a Jack with none matching. Tanzini scooped up the money, and Penny shrugged his shoulders. He had played for hours to get three hundred up, then blew it all on a fifteen second card flip that required no skill. When everyone got up to leave, Tanzini grabbed me by the arm and said, “Aspetta, paisano.” I waited.

  The teenager, who waited on the players and locked up the store, began cleaning up the empty beer bottles and ashtrays. Tanzini pulled a fifty-dollar bill from his roll and coiled his index finger at the boy. He folded the bill and dropped it into the kid’s shirt pocket and said, “Give us a few minutes.” The aspiring jockey bounced out of the back room and closed the door behind him. Tanzini and I remained, and Cabbage Boy hadn’t moved from his chair beside me. “We’ve got a score working you might want in on,” Tanzini said. Cabbage Boy leaned back in his chair and said nothing. I looked at Tanzini, and raised an eyebrow towards Cabbage Boy to ask if he should hear this. The Ice Pick nodded. “He’s in. We need another guy with some coglioni to pull off a score. Listen to the plan. If you don’t like the deal, just keep your mouth shut.”

  My brain went into overdrive with the possibilities. Did this involve the Duplessis murder contract? Why would Tanzini involve somebody like Cabbage Boy? The only thing I was certain of was that Luke Trombatore was involved. We had Tanzini on the securities buy, but needed something more to wrap up Trombatore.

  “I’m listening.”

  “We’re putting together a race for the boys in New Orleans. Tomorrow night.”

  “The only way I know to fix a race is to have all the jockeys in on it. Impossible. Getting ten pinheads to play along and keep their mouths shut is fool’s play.”

  “Shut up and listen,” he snapped. “The little burglars riding the horses won’t know shit. We’re gonna fix this race with hop.” He stopped to get my reaction.

  “It won’t work. I’ve been to the spit box. They’ll catch anything you use on a horse in the urine sample. It’ll come right back to the horse’s connections - owner, trainer, groom - with lots of digging around. No shot. Besides, some horses that are hit with stuff to make them hyper don’t run any faster.”

  “You’re a smart Dago,” Tanzini said. But we’re not gonna use hop on the winner. We’re gonna drug the losers.”

  “What?”

  “How many horses get sent to the spit box?” he asked.

  “Two. The winner and second place finishers.”

  “Right. Now what happens if we don’t try to speed up our horse, but we can slow down the rest of the field?”

  It clicked. His scheme was to drug the other horses to make them run slower, and one particular horse, which wasn’t drugged, would win and go to the test barn clean. “How in hell are you going to drug the entire field except for one horse?

  “We don’t have to,” he smiled. “We’ve been waiting for a race like this, a perfect setup. It’s for three thousand dollar claimers, the cheapest of the cheap horses. They’re only a step away from the glue factory. Half the field is cripple. Two others can’t outrun a fat man. That leaves only two possible horses that can win, in addition to our horse. We stop the other two, and Madonna! We got the only possible winner. Process of elimination.”

  It was now clear why, among other possible reasons, Trombatore and Tanzini had been in Lafayette for so long. “Are you sure the stuff will work?” I asked.

  “We’re hitting them with shit that will stop a freight train. Our horse wins, goes clean to the spit box, the two we drug go back to their barns without a test, and that’s it. We use exacta and daily double bets so the win odds don’t come down and draw the suspicion of the stewards and track security.”

  “Can they track the horse’s connections back to us?”

  “Fuck no. The horse is owned and trained by a local yokel Coon-ass who don’t know the war is over. He won’t be able to tell them shit because he’ll be the most surprised sonofabitch at the track.”

  “Maybe the second most surprised, behind the jockey.”

  Tanzini grinned. The scheme was quite clever. Racing commissions spent fortunes on devising drug tests for winning horses, and even sent the second place finisher for testing in case he came up just a little short after being hopped or given painkillers. The flaw in their system was that no other horses were tested. Drugging the front runners out of contention was ingenious. By the time the racing officials found out what happened, if they ever did, the drugs would be worn off and out of the horses’ systems. And, no matter how many questions were asked of the owners, trainers, and jockeys, they truthfully wouldn’t know a thing about what happened. Nobody would know how it was pulled off. Except us.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 25

  I ran all the scenarios through my head. The scheme would work unless it was botched in the administration of the drugs. “It’ll work if the right stuff is used on the right horses,” I told Tanzini.

  “We’re way ahead of you. Here’s where you come in.”

  “One of the two horses we’re gonna stop is shipping in from an off-track training center. I’m taking care of him myself. The other horse is stabled on the backstretch. I can’t be seen or caught anywhere in the restricted areas. Cabbage Boy knows the barn and stall number where he’s stabled. He’ll hit him with the shit, but obviously it’s a two man job. Waddaya say?”

  I wanted to ask him if Trombatore knew about the stratagem, but couldn’t. That question would be quite suspect, and besides, we both already knew the obvious answer. I turned my direction to Cabbage Boy and asked Tanzini, “You trust this little asshole?” Cabbage Boy remained cool and didn’t flinch in his chair.

  “Non con tutti,” he answered. “Not with everything, but we’ve used him before. He knows the horse, his location, and how to administer the shit. He’s also the guy who can get you in and out back there at night. He’s hit horses with joy juice before, now he gets a chance to make ‘em go in the opposite direction. He won’t bet. I’ll take care of him out of our end.”

  “If he’s okay with you, I’m in.” I wretched at the idea of working with the likes of Cabbage Boy, then thought about Tanzini, and figured I couldn’t get any dirtier than I already was.

  “This stuff maxes out after eighteen hours, so it’s got to go down tonight. Our horse is in the second race tomorrow night, post time around seven-thirty. It’s after midnight, so we’ve got to hit these horses in the next couple of hours.”

  There was no time for me to consult with Lyle or anyone up the ATF chain on whether or not to participate. Besides, it took only a minute to figure out that I couldn’t afford not to go along. Busting up the scheme would probably expose me as an undercover ag
ent and jeopardize the Duplessis contract. I went back to the Plantation and changed into jeans and a dark shirt. I secured a black leather ankle holster around my lower leg with the velcro tab and slid my snub-nose in place. I jotted some notes about my activities for the night in case something went wrong, and left them on the desk in my room. If I returned without incident they would probably be torn up and re-written. If I didn’t return, Lyle would have an idea where to look for me in the event I got arrested, or worse.

  I parked in a dark spot at the little-used end of a parking lot on the west side of the racetrack. There was only a slither of a moon and the usual humidity was replaced by drier, cooler air that signified rain was on the way. The large oak trees lining the parking lot shuffled from the breezes blown up from the direction of the Gulf of Mexico. I wore sneakers and quietly walked a couple hundred yards in the darkness around the outside perimeter of the eight-foot chain link fence that encased the stable area. The ground was marshy and in spots contained small pools of water. Cabbage Boy waited for me at a pre-designated, secluded location on the inside of the galvanized chain link fence, which was spiked every three inches at the top.

  “Psssst!”

  The sound coming from the other side of the fence startled me. Cabbage Boy pressed the button on a small penlight pointed at me, which flashed for a fraction of a second. He pointed up to the spikes on top of the fence, and threw a dark gray blanket over the top to make it easier for me to climb over the spikes. It became clear that I wasn’t the first person he had sneaked over that fence in the dead of night. I landed with a squishy plop next to him on the inside. I followed his lead as we crept along the fence to the edge of a barn, the first in a long phalanx of identical wooden buildings that each housed eighty horses, forty stalls facing each way back-to-back, with a covered shed-row wrapped around the building. One by one we passed through the shed-rows, darkened and amazingly quiet, considering the hundreds of horses stabled in the area.

  “Two more down,” he whispered, with a pointed finger.

  I was crouched behind him at the corner of a barn, and tapped him on the shoulder as a wobbly shape appeared in the shadows. The figure carried a glass bottle with only a couple of ounces of red wine swishing around the bottom as he staggered toward us. Cabbage Boy hit him with a beam from the penlight. Bloodshot eyes squinted through a wrinkled, reddened face. “It’s only old Bimmy,” he said quietly. “Gimme a hand.”

  I set the wine bottle down and we carried the old man to a tack room at the opposite side of the barn. Using only the light available from the sparse street lights at the end of the barn, Cabbage Boy removed a key from the end of a chain clamped onto Bimmy’s belt loop, and opened a padlock outside the tack room door. We laid him onto a cot sandwiched between two stacks of alfalfa, and he immediately passed out. A small supply of raggedy clothes and a hotplate confirmed that this was Bimmy’s home.

  We continued our slink along the buildings to the one with a large number six painted on it. We crept on hands and knees to the middle of the shed-row, and Cabbage Boy stopped short in front of stall number twenty-two. “This is it,” he whispered. A bay gelding at least seventeen hands tall, with red liniment bandages arranged neatly on his front legs, stood behind the upper half of the Dutch door. I slid the bolt securing the door and Cabbage Boy crawled into the stall. I followed behind, and shuffled the straw bedding under my feet. I grabbed the horse’s halter, which hung on a nail outside his stall, and slipped it onto his head and buckled it. Cabbage Boy handed me the penlight and pulled a plastic ten milliliter syringe from his back pocket, along with a ballpoint pen that was wrapped in a handkerchief. “Gimme some light,” he said.

  I held the horse in place by his halter when he let out a loud snort, and a spray of mucus landed on my chest.

  "Goddamnit,” I muttered. I was distracted only momentarily, then directed the light down on Cabbage Boy’s hands. He unscrewed the ballpoint pen, which was empty except for a needle. He screwed the needle onto the end of the syringe, which contained a thick, clear liquid.

  “Muscle or vein?” I asked.

  “Neck shot.”

  I pointed the thin beam of light at the upper side of the horse’s neck. Cabbage Boy placed his thumb deeply into the slight crevice of the neck, several inches below the jaw, and the horse’s jugular vein bulged from the pressure. He punctured the skin and stuck the needle upward and into the horse’s vein. He extracted a few drops of blood that appeared in the syringe and colored the mixture pink, then shot the entire contents slowly into the vein. We waited for a minute with Cabbage Boy’s thumb pressed against the puncture hole to prevent any blood spot. The horse’s coat easily concealed the needle hole. I removed the halter and we crawled back out of the stall. I hung the halter back on its nail, and the Dutch door creaked as Cabbage Boy slowly closed and bolted it.

  We began our way back to the fence, and crept through the darkness one barn at a time. As we passed one of the many large steel dumpster bins, placed parallel to each barn to collect horse manure and soiled bedding straw, Cabbage Boy tossed the syringe and needle into the bin. Several barns further, closer to the fence, a pair of headlights appeared on the road between the rows of stables. The shell surface crunched beneath the tires of the slow moving vehicle with Evangeline Downs Security painted on the door. We hunkered down behind one of the dumpsters and froze. A bright searchlight beam from the car panned our area slowly, then back again, then abruptly went out. The car made its way to the end of the road where it dead-ended at a locked gate, then turned around and headed back to the guard shack, occasionally shining its beam along the edge of the buildings.

  A few small raindrops came down on us as we reached the part of the fence where Cabbage Boy left the blanket. He threw it back over the spikes on the fence, and cupped his hands to give me a boost. The rain fell harder, and thunder rolled in the distance as I climbed back over to the outside of the fence. Cabbage Boy slithered back to his quarters in one of the tack rooms, and since I was now drenched, I didn’t hurry my walk back to the car. I threw my shirt, soaked with rain and equine snot, onto the seat and drove back to the Plantation. I dried off, scuttled the notes I had previously written and left on the desk, and replaced them with the shortest note I had ever left for Lyle in the garbage alley: MEET SOON.

  I arrived at the clubhouse early, knowing that Tanzini would get there in time to place Daily Double bets using our horse in the second race. Trombatore strode off the escalator with Tanzini in tow, and the maitre ‘d escorted them directly to a table. I waved them over to join me, but Trombatore shook his head negatively and sat down. He said something I couldn’t hear through the cigarette clenched in his mouth, and motioned Tanzini toward me. The Ice Pick sauntered to my table with an open-collared silk shirt under a tailored sport coat that matched highly polished brown leather shoes. He leaned over a chair across the table and grinned.

  “Va bene?” he asked.

  “Yeah, all is well. How about you?”

  “Smooth, a piece of cake. All set. Remember, don’t make a win bet.”

  “My action’s already down with a bookie. I might make a few daily doubles.”

  “Ciao.” He walked back to his table, where Trombatore hoisted a glass salute as the waiter brought me a drink with his compliments. He sent the drink to let me know he wasn’t snubbing me, yet remained careful not to talk to me. As the second race approached, I studied the Daily Racing Form and watched the horses as they pranced onto the track. Half the field had come over in cold water bandages, indicating their legs were sore puppies. The form’s past performances showed that only two horses, numbers one and six, had a chance to win, with our horse, number five, a possibility. The one and six horses were bet heavily from the open, and by post time they were co-favorites at short odds. The five horse was twelve to one on the infield board, a hefty price for a sure thing. The race was for a distance of a mile and forty yards, so the gate crew positioned the starting gate just before the finish line in
our line of view. The horses would have to run around the entire track and back again to the finish line. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary in the post parade, and the horses loaded well into the gate. I borrowed a pair of binoculars from a couple having dinner at the table next to me, and looked for stress or fatigue in the horses we had drugged. All seemed normal.

  “Il sont partis!” trumpeted from the track announcer as the horses made a slow start, normal for a distance race. Number nine, a gray long-shot, took the early lead along the rail. Numbers one and six, our drugged co-favorites, settled in a couple of lengths behind him, and our champion, number five, had only two horses beat around the first turn. Little positioning changed until, as expected, number nine tired after three-quarters of a mile. Numbers six and one, in that order, took the lead by default. In the final turn, number five kept running and broke from the pack of non-runners to ease up into third place. Our horse stormed down the stretch like a stakes horse as the depressants caught up with the front runners. He won by four lengths, and the co-favorites with the load on finished last. The shocked owner and trainer of number five danced and celebrated at the finish line, and glad-handed the jockey as he guided the horse into the winner’s circle. By procedure, the winner was sent to the test barn where we knew he would test out okay.

  Tanzini winked at me, and Trombatore watched with an uncharacteristic grin as the official results were posted on the tote board. “The results of the second race are official,” echoed from the track announcer. Then without warning, Trombatore threw a few bills on the table and they left. They, or rather we, had beaten the spit box, the elaborate drug testing procedure used by every racetrack in America. It was accomplished not by getting stimulants or painkillers past the screen, but by getting slow-down juice past the test to alter the outcome of a race. We had made a textbook score. We fixed a race, and I imagined the pain of every bookmaker and layoff man in New Orleans.