Murder at the Racetrack (40 page)

Remember I mentioned most barns don’t have night watchmen? And they’re never locked, because of the risk of fire. I slipped
into Moon’s at four-thirty that morning, before anyone else was at work, and dropped acepromazine into his water.

I’m about to follow up with some insurance of my own. I figure Rayf will have someone watching me in the test barn.

I pick up Big Easy in the paddock and lead him there, to walk in circles while he cools down. The way they work the water,
they attach buckets to posts and designate one for each horse. Big Easy’s has a great big “W” on it, for Winner. As I pass,
I open my hand over his bucket, as if I’m dropping something in—which I’m not—and I make sure Big Easy drinks.

It’s a near-perfect scam—I win, the Hatch loses, and I’ve had the pleasure of rubbing his nose in it.

But it’s not good enough.

We’re still not even, the Hatch and me. He broke my heart; I’m going to break his.

After I take Big Easy back to bis own barn, I make myself extremely scarce. I’ve already moved out of my apartment and into
a hotel, to which I return to wait till after midnight, when I know Moon’s barn will be good and deserted.

When I think it’s late enough, I grab my doctor’s bag and go to the Fair Grounds to see my boy Moon. Satan’s Moon and I go
back a long way. I wonder if he’ll be glad to see me. I hope so, because I have his best interests at heart. I’d never harm
an animal, and what I’m about to do won’t hurt Moon for more than a minute or two.

I know something about Moon, or at least I suspect something. Sam pointed it out to me. “See how his tail makes circles when
he runs?” It does, and then it stops, and then it starts up again, maybe two or three times during a race. But this doesn’t
happen when he’s exercising. I know what people say about those circles, but nobody can prove it.

“You’re saying Moon’s a machine horse?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “Hey, the old-timers say Seabiscuit was. He was still a great horse.”

“But everybody says Moon’ll be a great stud.”

“Oh sure. And maybe all his colts’ll run on the machine too. It’s cruel, Annalise. These horses love to run, you notice that?
They get the best of everything. The whip doesn’t even hurt ’em. But shocking them like that. That’s gotta scare the shit
out of ’em. Best thing for that horse is brain surgery—be a lot happier animal.”

Sam is a great believer in brain surgery, by which he does not mean a frontal lobotomy. He means Moon needs to be gelded,
to calm him down. But he thinks that’ll never happen because of Burt’s grandiose stud plan. That they’ll keep shocking him
and making his life miserable, and then they’ll sell his worthless sperm to a new crop of unsuspecting owners. I’m about to
prove him wrong.

Normally, no one would dare try what I’m about to do without a helper, but I know better than to try and recruit one: There
are no secrets on the backside. I’m going to have to work alone, but I’m running on adrenaline—I’m furious and I’m determined,
and Moon knows me, from Jersey. I really think I can do it.

It all depends whether Moon will stand for me. If he won’t, I could get killed.

First, Moon and I get reacquainted-—we didn’t really get a chance that morning. Yep—he’s glad to see me. I’ve got a shot at
this.

I set out a sterile surgical pack, put on a pair of gloves, and give him a couple of quick injections. First, some tetanus
toxoid. Then, in the jugular furrow, Dormosedan, a sedative, and a painkiller we call bute. Whether he’ll stand depends on
how he reacts to the sedative, and I’ve given Moon a little more than the normal dose. I wait to see if his head drops.

Yes! Moon’s calm and drowsy, but he’s still not going to like what’s coming. I move around to his left, inch him up against
the wall with my body. I’m tense and sweating, wondering if I can really pull this off. I’ve done it before, but not on a
racehorse—and certainly never alone. I can hear Sam’s voice the first time I tried. “You’ve got to move like a cat, Annalise.
If you’re fast enough, he won’t react.”

I reach under Moon’s belly and inject him with lidocaine, quick as a cat. Sam’s right. It goes smoothly. Then I step back
to my surgical pack for a scalpel.

The procedure requires that, and an instrument rather baldly called an emasculator, which resembles large gardening clippers
held together with a wing nut.

I make the necessary incision, and the horse cow-kicks, to the side. I duck and give him some love words, which seem to help.
I pick up the emasculator, heart pounding like hooves on the turf. My hands are sweaty, and so’s my forehead. This is the
dangerous part—dangerous for Moon, that is. Over and over to myself, I say the mantra they teach you in veterinary school:
“Nut to nut. Nut to nut. Nut to nut.” I keep saying it to calm myself and also as a reminder. If I do it wrong—hold the emasculator
nut-side up—Moon could bleed to death. It sounds like a hard mistake to make but given the tension of the procedure, it isn’t.

I place the instrument properly, nut to nut, and squeeze, crushing Moon’s left spermatic chord. After a moment, the horse’s
testicle drops into my hand. Just like that.

I put it on a glove wrapper on the ground. Then I repeat the procedure on the right. Moon tries another cow-kick, but his
heart’s not in it. I place the right nut on the wrapper, knowing I’ve lucked out with this horse—he’s very susceptible to
the drug.

Normally, I’d throw the testicles up on the roof for luck. This is the backside custom, and it’s the vet’s job to get them
up there. But I’ve got a plan for this particular pair.

Quickly, I transfer them into two little velvet-lined boxes I’ve brought along. I say good-bye to Moon and tell him I hope
we meet again.

And on the way out of town, I mail one of his nuts to Burt the Hatch (care of Rayford Burke) and the other to Sam with a note
that says, “Moon’s right moon enclosed herein. Guess who got the left one?” I sign it and add a postscript: “A story goes
with it.”

I am on the road by the time Sam phones. “Burt didn’t hurt him, did he?”

“Hell, no,” I answer. “He told Rayf to put him in a claiming race—you want him? I came into some money.”

Sam sighs with relief, but he ignores my offer. “Forget the money,” he says. “Let me hear the story.”

Give you odds he’ll be home in a week.

Scott Wolven

E
very night that June, from my cell window at Orofino, I watched the fireworks color-burn the midnight sky over the Indian
reservation across the road. The colors lit up fields and sometimes the sparks would drift to earth and the old horses the
Indians kept would scatter, faster than you would think they were capable of. Speed left from races they never ran, I told
myself. I knew horses when I was a kid near Saratoga, in upstate New York. Whole worlds had happened since then. Those horses
and fireworks were my only friends at the beginning of that summer.

I wasn’t in the race to win anymore. I’d fallen on some hard times in Eastern Washington and a gang that was a branch of the
Posse made a deal with me. They’d pay me to finish off another man’s time in Idaho. I don’t know how they rigged it up, who
they paid off. But one day they brought me into a hospital room in Spokane and the deputies that shackled me and took me to
Orofino called me by a different name. I was inside under a new name and eight years stood between me and the door.

The Idaho State Correctional Facility at Orofino was an old brick campus, housing twice as many men as it was built for. It
was a mixed classification facility, which is the worst, because the killers are in with the guys who forgot a child support
payment. The guys doing a decade don’t look very kindly on the guy who gets to go home in three months. I was a maximum classification
at that time, because the guy I was pretending to be had a record that began in the womb.

The guards came for me early one morning and cuffed me and shackled me for transport. I knew it couldn’t be good. Someone
had filed a writ with the Federal Circuit Court and the federal judge had ordered that I be brought to his temporary chambers,
in Boise. They were being forced to produce me, except I wasn’t anyone—I wasn’t the man they wanted incarcerated and I certainly
wasn’t going to tell anyone I was working for the Posse. In my own mind, they may as well have been driving a mute to Boise.
We passed south through the beautiful Idaho mountains and trees and blue sky. The deputies driving me didn’t say a word, just
stopped once for coffee and then drove on. We drove into the streets and city of Boise. I slept on a bench overnight in a
holding cell and they brought me upstairs into chambers in the morning.

The judge was in robes and seated behind a large desk, with an older woman stenographer in front of the desk. My brother and
an Asian man, both impeccably dressed in gray suits, stood in the back of the room. The judge addressed me.

“The court has been made aware of some unusual circumstances surrounding your case.” He pointed at my brother and the Asian
man. I nodded and the judge continued. “We’re convinced… the court has been convinced…” He paused. “The court is convinced
that a sealed record and immediate release is the only way you’ll be alive at the end of the week. The State of Idaho didn’t
seem inclined to let you go—so the appeal was passed up to me.”

I didn’t say anything. The court bailiff came over and unlocked my cuffs and shackles. I rubbed my wrists.

The judge stood. “I’m instructing one of my marshals to escort you to the Nevada border so we don’t have a problem. I can’t
help you if you re-enter this state. And you’re on your own with other problems—but we won’t hold you here as a stationary
target.” He handed me some paperwork. “You’re free to go, as long as you’re leaving the state.”

I looked at my brother, who spoke to the judge. “He’ll ride with us to Nevada, Your Honor.”

“Keep your head down,” the judge said. He looked directly at me. “And watch behind you.”

My brother shook hands with me, but we didn’t say anything, not a word. He drove the new sedan behind the marshal’s car, with
Mr. Osaka in the back and me in the passenger’s seat. It was a long ride, but finally we saw a sign for the Nevada state line.
We crossed it and the marshal pulled a U-turn and headed north, back into Idaho.

Mr. Osaka mumbled something and my brother spoke to me.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t warn you, but we had a heck of a time finding you. You got yourself in pretty deep.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

My brother nodded as he drove. “We’d been looking for you, to come help with Mr. Osaka’s operation. In looking for you, we
found out that the man you went as, the real man, just got arrested in Montana. It was only a matter of time before the Posse
tried to get to you on the inside.”

Mr. Osaka mumbled to my brother.

“What’d he say?” I said.

“Mr. Osaka doesn’t speak,” my brother said. “He understands English perfectly well and he probably speaks it, although I’ve
never heard him. I speak for him. Always, for the past five years. He talks in a kind of yakuza dialect—he and I speak it
to each other and that’s it. Nobody else.”

“Handy,” I said. I hadn’t seen my brother much at the beginning of the last decade and not at all in the past five years,
but years didn’t come between us. I just figured he had his own job going on, somewhere, and when my plans started to fail,
I didn’t want to bring him down with me. He was a couple years younger than me and maybe I felt responsible. He’d gotten bigger
since I’d seen him last.

“Do you want to work for Mr. Osaka?” my brother asked.

“What are we doing?” I said.

“Watching whales,” my brother said. And as we drove, he detailed the operation to me. In the end, I agreed.

Whales are a select group of Japanese businessmen, probably only two hundred worldwide, who come to the United States to gamble.
They’re called whales because they bet huge—they’re up seven million, they’re down thirty million. If one of these guys walks
into a small casino on a good night, he can bankrupt the place, or lose enough to let the casino build another club and a
hotel.

Whales like bets that other gamblers can’t get their hands on and sometimes it can be exotic—betting on street fights, illegal
car racing. But the yakuza control the horse racing and that means that the yakuza can sometimes control the whales.

Mr. Osaka bought seven hundred acres of land outside Reno, flattened it all out, put in a private horse-racing track and was
getting set to lay in a private airfield when some of his contractors thought they’d muscle him for more money. Those contractors
are gone and now my brother and I are in charge of the operation.

A private racetrack, with all the barns and stables. The whales own stuff all over the world and pretty soon, the private
jets are coming in, with the stallions and racehorses the whales have accumulated. A horseman’s field of dreams. We’ve got
the compound gated off and the whales pull up, with their limos and their drivers and their party girls. Every morning—the
races start at eleven and they walk around, drinking, looking at the horses.

Mr. Osaka has only two betting windows open, run by Asian men the same as him. Tattoos on their hands, one guy with a Japanese
character right on his throat. These are the honest men, bound to count the money, to take the verbal bets and always pay.
No slips, no tickets. These guys are taking bets in the hundreds of thousands and never sweating.

Mr. Osaka walks the compound with us and mumbles to my brother as we pass the honest men by the bet windows.

“As children, they are not taught about wanting. Then, when they learn about money, they are taught it is filthy. The combination
makes them honest,” my brother translates.

The favorite bet for the whales is the pinwheel. The pin-wheel lets the whale run his horse on Mr. Osaka’s track, but bet
against other horses running at other tracks that come in by satellite feed. Your horse can finish second here but if you’ve
matched it up against the right combo, say from Saratoga, or Pimlico, or Yonkers, you can double or triple your take. Or you
can throw your money in a bigger hole. Money is green paper, to these people. They give more money to the party girls to keep
them quiet than I’ve ever earned in my life. But that ended, too, once I got on Mr. Osaka’s payroll.