by John Dunning
“Sandy will actually like that. It means he can show you how he wants things done and he won’t have to pay you much to start. Maybe you could do what Cliff does, walk hots.” He looked at me as if he couldn’t make up his mind what to say next; then he said it anyway. “Cliff’s not around half the time, he works strange hours, so if you’re looking for something to keep from going stir-crazy, that might be it. I hope you’re not scared of horses.”
“She’s not scared of anything,” I said.
Erin reached over and gave my ear a playful twist. “So, Robert. Do you think he’d hire me?”
“Hey, I’m just a working stiff myself. But maybe we can figure something out for you by the time we get to the racetrack.”
I asked him what he thought of Sandy’s arrangement with Barbara.
“It’s a pretty unusual deal,” he said. “Great break for Obie.”
“Barbara sure seems like a sport,” I prompted.
He took five seconds to respond to that; then he said, “Yeah, I’d say so.”
“I could cut a steak on that edge in your voice.”
“She is a sport,” he said, quickly now. “Why, did you hear otherwise?”
“Tell you the truth, I haven’t heard anything about her.”
“You will. But yeah, she plays it pretty close to the vest unless she likes you. She does like you, Cliff, so stay on her good side.”
A long minute passed. “Sounds like she keeps everybody on a short leash,” I said.
“Whatever makes you say that?” he said with a smile.
“Suddenly I’ve got a hunch Sandy’s gonna have a helluva time getting the space he needs to work with these horses his way.”
“Just remember, I didn’t say that.” Another stretch of time passed. Surprisingly, he said, “But I guess I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some of those same thoughts myself.”
“Why would that be?” I said in an innocent voice.
Then, like a shaded window briefly opened on a lighted room, he said, “Barbara can be short when you rub her wrong. She fired one crew just like that.” He snapped his fingers five times. “Trainer, ginneys, bug boy, everybody.”
“Obie said the trainer was incompetent.”
“I’m talking about the one she had before that, who was not incompetent, but it was the same kinda deal anyway. One day you think you’re doing great, the next day you’re all out on your butt.” He grinned. “Butts.”
“That would make for an uneasy shedrow.”
“If you’re Sandy, it probably does. Me, I can always go back to rubbing his horses, so I should be fine. Let me give you a tip, old buddy. Stay way the hell over on her good side. Talk nicely about her horses, and when she’s in one of those quiet moods, give her plenty of space, don’t say anything. And don’t ever cross Charlie. Her husband.”
“What’s he got to do with it, he’s never around.”
“But when he is around he’s always watching. He’s got eyes like a hawk, hell, he is her eyes. I heard he’s the one who had that first trainer axed. Some silly thing somebody said got his back up.”
“All I’ve ever seen him do is get out of her car and go off by himself. I’ve never even heard the man speak.”
“Don’t worry, he speaks plenty when he has to. Last month he was just full of opinions, you couldn’t pay him to shut up. And Barbara listens is what I heard.”
We arrived in Arcadia three hours later. The racetrack was beautiful in the warm noonday sunshine: the seafoam-green grandstand stretched out beyond an enormous empty parking lot, giving the illusion that racing was alive and well everywhere. I knew how the rise of easy gambling had taken its toll on this colorful old way of life. Centennial, Longacres, Ak-Sar-Ben; these were just a few of the casualties on the roster of lost racetracks around the country, but Santa Anita looked well and eternal. There was a man in the stable gate, though racing wouldn’t begin here for three weeks. Bob showed his license and said we were with Sandy Standish, and we all got in without a hitch. The stable area looked half-empty. We had been assigned to Barn 107, over in a far corner near a thick hedge that overlooked Baldwin Avenue. Sandy had called ahead and had a full bin of straw and hay delivered, and we set to work, bedding our stalls and getting ready for the horses. I brought up the straw and cut the bales open with a knife; Bob and Erin spread the stuff around with pitchforks, about eight inches deep, and slowly it began to look and smell like a living shedrow.
This went quickly and we finished before three o’clock. We set up folding chairs in the shedrow, and Bob went out and got us another Army cot and some more blankets. “Looks like we’re in business,” I said, and we sat in the yellow afternoon sun with the eerie quiet everywhere around us.
At some point I asked, “Will I get us in trouble if I jog around the racetrack?”
“Give it a shot,” Bob said. “If anybody stops you, we’ll say we never saw you before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I saw you hopping that horse over in Barn 98.”
I ran five brisk laps. My feet made solid thumping sounds on the fast track, which echoed flatly as I came past the enormous empty grandstand. I looked up at the thousands of vacant seats and felt strangely like I’d made a right turn and had come to the place I needed to be. No rhyme or reason: it just felt right. Sometimes you do things like that.
Bob and Erin stood at the rail and watched me go past. Bob cupped his hands over his face and shouted down the track. “It’s Janeway by two lengths, Cliffie J. is second by a length and one half, Brokedown Ginney is third, and moving up fast on the inside is Lop-Eared Hossman! And now with only a sixteenth of a mile to go, the crowd goes wild. It’s Don’t Gotta Prayer passing everything on the outside!” I heard them laughing as I went past, I pulled up a quarter-mile east and doubled over. I gave them a gesture, not quite obscene, not quite decent, and I walked past the stands cooling out. I skirted the jockeys’ room, the paddock, and walking ring, went past the statues of Seabiscuit and Georgie Woolf, turned and came slowly back to the rail where they still waited.
We took showers in the rustic bathrooms and congregated in the shedrow as night fell over the San Gabriel Mountains.
23
We left everything where it was and went looking for a place to eat. There was a restaurant called Henry’s, just across the parking lot near East Huntington and Colorado, and we staked out a table for three and had a good dinner. We took our time and laughed away an hour, had a walk through downtown Arcadia, and got back to the racetrack before nine-thirty. Tonight there was no urgency to get to bed: no horses to feed and muck at dawn, so we had a rare occurrence for a racetrack crew, a day off. I knew the routine now. Racetrackers work seven days a week: Christmas, New Year’s, the Fourth of July, they were all just workdays; the horses were always there to eat and poop, to be watered and brushed and taken care of. We still had no idea when Sandy might roll in: could be any time between later today and the end of the week, but we were tied to the spot; we had to be here whenever he arrived, so there was no time for sightseeing. We sat in the cool shedrow for another hour; then Bob retired to one of the tack rooms and soon turned his light off. Erin came past my chair and squeezed my shoulder.
“You look like a man with his thinking cap on.”
“I’m always thinking, Erin, I’m a pondering fool. But it’s like any case; the more I think the murkier it gets…until suddenly if I’m lucky I get a brainstorm that leads somewhere.”
“So what is the fool pondering tonight?”
“All of it. Who killed Cameron and why? Who cracked my head open and tried to turn me into French toast? Is this about the books, or does it go deeper, farther back to Candice and her time? Or is it all related somehow?”
She had no answers either, so we sat close for a time and were satisfied to hold hands. At some point she went into the end tack room and closed the door. I sat alone, still awake, still restless, gearing myself up for a long night.
I had
a hunch, not the first time that had happened. I’ll never know why: maybe something about a cop’s intuition when a situation gets ready to pop. I had been right enough times over the years to listen when that voice started. But another hour passed and nothing happened. I was tired after all, and soon I nodded my head and fell asleep on the chair.
When I opened my eyes I knew I had slept deeply for three hours. I knew it was early morning. There was no sound or light from either tack room, but I was sure that some noise, a sharp rap, an object knocked over, something, had caused me to open my eyes.
Within seconds I was fully awake. I heard it again, a faint clink followed by footsteps somewhere out in the black shedrow. I was well hidden, still sitting in the pitch blackness near the hay bin, where no light got in from any side. This was not like a stable area during a racing season, which could also be dark at midnight. This was more like an alien world with ghostly shadow barns all around it and no life anywhere. The City of the Horse-people: My stupid thought of the day, but it wouldn’t let go. I had come alive in a world where intelligent horse-people ruled, and I was under their thumb. My second stupid thought—horses don’t have thumbs—but somewhere, I knew, were real people with real feet and thumbs. They were not from this part of the stable area, and yet someone was walking. Somewhere. I heard the crunch of a foot wearing a real shoe, not the clop of a horseshoe. I still couldn’t see him, and for a time I couldn’t hear him either. Then, a sound: just a step, around the corner. A footstep. He was in this barn on the opposite shedrow. Drill a hole straight through the stall from where I sat and you’d knock him over. I felt my heartbeat pick up. During the season I wouldn’t think twice about it; I’d be accustomed to ginneys getting in at all hours, but now, at whatever hour this was, a footstep stood out like a Chandler first edition in a section of Goodwill dreck.
I didn’t move.
I thought it was two o’clock, maybe three. Suddenly I had a bad feeling about it and I sat frozen in my chair. He was still directly opposite me, moving slowly down toward the tack rooms on the end.
At last I got out of the chair. Stepped into the shedrow. I made no sound as I walked. Fresh in my mind was the vision of Cameron Geiger, draped over a river branch with his head blown open, not to mention my own brush with death at the hands of the same crazy man. I moved one short step at a time, keeping up with him as much as I could: a step then wait; step then wait; stop, listen, move again, wait. I could see the dim outline of the end of the next barn, lit up by a faint beam of reflected moonlight. Now I heard nothing. No more walking, no sound. I had a sinking feeling I had lost him. He was important, he was somebody real, and I had spooked him. I thought he had probably turned and hightailed it back up the shedrow, but I resisted the temptation to hurry. I eased past the empty stalls to the end and peered around the corner.
Nothing.
Still as glass.
The night brittle, cool, fragile as black crystal.
I moved slowly with my back to the wall. I was standing three feet from Erin’s tack room, straight across from her door, with the moon bouncing off the manure bin my only light.
I took a step. Another.
Quiet now.
I held my breath.
Peeked around the opposite corner…
…and there he was.
The shadow man stood ten feet away.
I flinched. He had a gun, and the gun went off in my face.
I was a dead man. I could feel the burn, I thought, like cayenne pepper, like sandblast, like kindling doused with gasoline and touched by fire.
I had been shot several times in my life and each time felt worse than the last. They’re catching up with you, baby, I had thought at some point. This time you really are dead meat.
But I didn’t feel dead. Except for the sandblast effect, I hadn’t been hit. I recoiled and tripped, falling back in the shedrow. My head was still there, I had enough brains to spin as I hit the ground, and I rolled away from him toward the tack room door. He rose up at the corner and fired again. I felt it rip through my shirt at the collar. I kicked the door, kicked off from the wall, and rolled back at him. He shot twice and missed both times as I twisted myself under his feet. I heard the door jerk open and Erin yelling my name. I shouted at her to get back, stay inside. That had as much effect as it always did. I saw her shadow bolt past and collide with his. She had him by the hair and was jerking him across the shedrow: they were in and out of the moonlight for less time than it takes to tell it, and the two of them spun crazily into the first stall. I charged in after them. He fired another round and I heard the pin click on an empty chamber. Erin must have smacked him: The collision had a distinctive jab-in-the-chops sound. I heard him grunt and saw him go twisting out of the stall, a pale figure like a fleeting ghost. He rammed into something, which turned out to be one of the posts holding up the roof; then he fell in the puddle of water under the spigot. I rolled toward him and got my legs tangled with Erin’s as she leaped out of the stall. She stumbled and fell as he leaped up and took off down the black shedrow, running like a deer.
By the time I got up and moving he was in the tow ring, crossing into the next barn. I stumbled across on this end and saw him briefly, running full-tilt along the fence at Baldwin Avenue. I’ll get him now, I thought: There’s no way he can get out of here. Then, just that quickly, I lost him.
I heard footsteps coming fast: Bob, running up and past. “Where’s Erin?” I said.
I trotted down the shedrow and crossed into the next barn. I went across the tow ring. Didn’t dare call out, didn’t dare not call.
“Erin!”
No answer.
“Erin!”
Nothing but the sound of the breeze.
I hurried to the barn across the way.
“Erin!”
Down a dark shedrow: across another tow ring into another shedrow. The tack room doors hung open, revealing the small, bare quarters, empty now in the moonlight.
“Erin!”
“Shh.”
I stopped moving.
“I’m over here,” she whispered.
I groped my way through the dark. She was standing just inside a stall, breathing heavily. I eased inside and put an arm over her shoulder. She was trembling and yet she had chased a crazy man down a dark shedrow alone.
“Where’d he go?”
“Don’t know…not sure.”
“Maybe he’s gone.”
“Uh-uh.” She squeezed my hand. No, he’s here. Don’t move.
“I’m going after him.”
“No!” I heard her take a breath. “That’s what he wants. He’s still got the gun.”
I moved my foot. We stood, watched, waited, and time passed. At least fifteen minutes.
“Erin,” I said: “We can’t keep standing here.”
“No.” She egged me on with her hands and followed me gingerly out into the shedrow.
Nothing. Nobody.
“He’s gone,” I said, but she still didn’t believe it.
We walked around a few barns and headed back to 107, looking over our shoulders.
Just a prowler, the cops said: Most likely someone who’d gotten past the gate and shouldn’t be here. A prowler with a gun for effect, they said. Most people who had a gun waved in their faces would come across with their cash. Unless it wasn’t cash he’d been after, I said.
I told them what had happened up at Golden Gate. What had happened to Cameron and to me. They listened then and they asked more questions. I told them about Candice, that I had been hired by her daughter in Idaho to find out the truth about her death. Bob sat through all this without saying much, but suddenly now he had been pulled into it and we all knew it.
The cops covered the stable area, talking with everyone they found. They made a list of people stabled here who had arrived early. Bob knew a few of the trainers and some of the ginneys on the list, but nobody with any reason to shanghai us.
They talked to the overnight stable-gate guard,
who swore he had been awake the whole time and nobody had come in without a license. The guard always kept the gate closed during the late hours, so anyone coming in would have to stop and state his business.
They would talk to the front office about putting an extra guard on. And it would probably make the newspaper. The Times guy was aggressive, he had heard the radio call and was already asking questions. “Lots of shootings in L.A.,” Erin said. “Surely he can’t cover them all.”
But Santa Anita was not Watts. Erin and I sat in the shedrow that morning. Sometimes we just sat; sometimes we talked.
“You were damned magnificent,” I told her.
She smiled wanly. “I didn’t feel so magnificent. In fact, I haven’t felt like my old fearless self since last year.”
“Don’t remind me.”
Last year we had both come much too close to cashing it all in.
“I’ve made a startling discovery, old man. I’m not quite ready to die yet.”
“Good thing to learn.”
“When you mess with bad people you never know. I do know that since last year I’m not as easy as I was. A feeling of real mortality has crept into my head.”
“Maybe you should get out of here. Fly off to Denver, get lost.”
“Do I look like someone who’d cut and run out on you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You were thinking it.”
“It’s not polite to tell a buddy what he’s thinking.”
“No, but…” She took a deep breath. “No.”
“I’m starting to think this flake may follow us now no matter where we go. Somehow we’ve become a threat to him, more than just a couple of yahoos looking in dark corners. And there’s another thing. He’s already killed one fellow—never mind that Cameron was a fairly worthless fellow, somebody ought to do something about it.”
“And that would be you.”
“You see anybody else applying for the job?”
She sighed loudly.
“And then there’s Candice, Erin. Somebody should do something about Candice.”
