by Sasscer Hill
Bionic and I traipsed on until a bantam rooster, flaunting a fine set of glossy, blue-black tail feathers, interrupted our progress. Perched atop the wooden rail that enclosed the shedrow, his yellow feet and sharp toenails clutched the wood. Raising his red comb, he looked at us with disdain, then flapped his wings furiously. I tightened my hold on Bionic’s lead shank as the horse shied backwards.
The way the rooster pumped himself up with air as he prepared to crow reminded me of Mars. I glared at the arrogant bird. “Don’t you crow, or I’ll put you in a stewpot.”
Of course, there was no stopping him, and the raucous cry that burst from his open beak warranted earplugs. Bionic ripped the shank from my hands, rocketed down the shedrow, and reaching the far corner, disappeared from sight.
“Loose horse!” I yelled, breaking into a run. I hoped no one got hurt. I hoped Mars wouldn’t fire me.
Behind my pounding feet, I heard Maggie Bourne call, “Sorry! We’ve been trying to catch him…”
I assumed she was talking about the rooster and not the horse, but I didn’t respond, just kept running as a tight knot formed in my stomach. If Bionic blasted down Mars’s side of the barn, he could run down a groom, crash into another horse, or do something crazy like try to jump the rail and kill himself. What would anger Mars the most, though, would be if Bionic upset Ziggy and caused the trainer’s star horse to injure himself in his stall.
I streaked around the end of the barn and turning the last corner, almost fainted with relief to see Becky Joe clinging to Bionic’s shank, and Stevie grasping the horse’s halter. A quick glance down the shedrow showed no sign of Mars. I was lucky.
“Thank you, guys!” I gasped.
“Horse was in a full-tilt boogie, for sure,” Becky Joe said, her knuckles white on the shank.
I hadn’t heard that expression before, but it seemed appropriate.
“Bet it was that little shit rooster of Maggie’s,” Becky Joe said.
“That’s the one.”
“I got plans for that little man.”
I didn’t ask her what she meant. Might be one of those “the less you know” situations.
Stevie’s hand dropped away from the leather halter and his gaze traveled over the horse. “He seems all right.”
“Are you?” I asked, curious about his altercation with Mars.
His mouth tightened. “Yeah,” he said, staring at a point over my shoulder. “I gotta go.”
“Sure.” I took the shank from Becky Joe, who gave me a look beneath brows that hadn’t seen a tweezer in twenty years.
Without a word, Stevie hurried to where he’d parked his Motobecane bike, mounted it, and wheeled away. Becky Joe walked alongside me as once again I headed down the shedrow with Bionic.
“Stevie’s hurting,” Becky Joe said with a sidelong glance as if to study my reaction.
“Mars was being pretty hard on him before,” I said. “When I asked you what was going on, you said you couldn’t say. Would you like to say now?”
“Aren’t you the one with the questions? I can’t because I don’t know. But I can sense something bad. Mars took that boy under his wing a year ago, gave him better horses to ride and at the bigger tracks. Now it’s like he’s turned on him.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Couldn’t say.”
I rolled my eyes, clucked at Bionic, and moved ahead of Becky Joe. I’d had enough mystery for one day. After a few more turns around the barn, I was finally able to hand Bionic over to his groom.
Unfortunately, my work wasn’t finished. One of Pizutti’s men had been fired earlier that morning and the job of cleaning his three stalls had fallen to me. Stepping into the first one, I crinkled my nose with disgust.
I’d cleaned enough stalls in my life to know my predecessor had removed a minimal amount of soiled bedding, then covered it over with fresh straw. No wonder the guy had been fired.
With a pitchfork, I lifted pile after pile of filthy straw into a wheelbarrow as heavy lumps of manure increased the weight and charm of the job. Beneath the top layers, I found a web of older, crushed droppings woven into a moldy mat of urine-laden straw. Each time I crammed the barrow full, I trundled the stinking load off to the manure pile outside the barn.
Another hot walker led each of the three horses around the shedrow while I labored in their stalls. The ammonia from the urine burned my nose, and I was relieved when I’d scraped the stalls down to dirt and could sprinkle them with lime to neutralize the acid and cut the stink. With that done, I shook out bales of fresh straw in each stall.
The next job my predecessor left me was washing his horses’ dirty stable bandages before hanging them over the wood rail to dry in the sun. I finished my work for the day by dragging a heavy, rubber hose down the shedrow to top off each of the thirty-something water buckets. After turning off the spigot and coiling the hose, I collapsed on an empty, overturned bucket by the barn wall. I desperately needed a shower, but was too tired to move.
Closing my eyes, I lay my head back against the wooden barn wall, enjoying the sun that streamed into the shedrow and warmed my face.
At least while I slaved away with manual labor for Mars, it was comforting to know that the TRPB analysts in our home office in Fair Hill, Maryland, were sorting and filtering through the wagering data for Pizutti’s races, looking for the odd spike or other tell in the amounts bet. They scanned for red flags, which suggested the trainer had drugged a horse, causing the animal to run the race of its life. With me working the barn, and analysts working the computers, we hoped to put Pizutti out of business before the end of Saratoga’s six-week meet.
Footsteps approached, but I left my eyes closed, waiting for whomever it was to pass.
“Starbucks?” a male voice asked. The rich smell of hot coffee wafted under my nose and I opened my eyes, squinting at the silhouette standing over me. Calixto Coyune?
“What are you doing here?” I whispered, sitting up straight. He looked good for someone recovering from a gunshot wound. I wanted to ask him how he was. Questions crammed my mind, but cop instinct won out. “You’ll blow my cover!” My last words came out in a rush.
“A most unpleasant cover,” he said, waving his free hand before his nose. “You reek. But don’t worry, pequeña leona, I am also operating under the radar.”
I hadn’t seen him for months, but the sound of his voice calling me “little lioness” in that Cuban accent sent a thrill right to my gut. “What do you mean?”
“Do you want me to drink your coffee, Fia?”
“No,” I said, snatching the cup away from him, trying to ignore the snug fit of his leather chaps. I couldn’t, and if the container hadn’t had a lid, I would have spilled coffee all over myself. I glanced around hurriedly, but didn’t see anyone on the shedrow. As the most recent hire, I’d been given the longest, dirtiest job, and everyone else appeared to be long gone. Still, I whispered. “So, what are you doing here?”
“I’m the new assistant trainer for Maggie Bourne.”
So it was Calixto I’d seen in Maggie’s stall. “How will that work?” I asked, taking a sip of hot coffee. I almost groaned with pleasure as the sweet liquid rushed down my throat and rinsed the ammonia burn still clinging to every membrane.
“Gunny isn’t stupid, Fia,” he said, referring to our TRPB boss. “He’s known Maggie a long time. She’s one of the good guys, and she hates Pizutti. She’s delighted to play her role in this.”
“Seems risky to me, you showing up as an assistant trainer that no one’s ever heard of.” Had he really had time to heal? “Are you fit enough?”
He made a dismissive noise. “Of course I’m fit enough, and I was a trainer at Gulfstream for several years, Fia. People will believe I just decided to get back in the game.”
He’d trained racehorses? There were so many things I didn’t know about this man. We’d briefly worked a case together and though I’d trust him with my life, I knew very little about him. Except
that he was way too handsome and at the moment was giving me a long, assessing stare.
I tried to peel my gaze from this brown-eyed heartbreaker who’d saved my life. Damn those killer lips and cheekbones. The wide shoulders, long legs, and narrow hips. And, God help me, his—abruptly, I stood up and took a half step away from him.
“What?” he asked, his eyes bright with amusement.
I swallowed two more sips of coffee, grateful for the surge of energy as the caffeine and sugar kicked in. “So what will people think you’ve been doing since then?”
“I’m the wealthy son of a Cuban coffee mogul. I do what I like, train when I feel like it. And Saratoga is the place to be in the summer, right?”
I took in the large diamond pinky ring he wore and what appeared to be Lucchese ostrich boots beneath his chaps. He looked like a damn playboy, except his face was too hard and he had those cop eyes that gave away nothing.
“So,” I said, “I’m supposed to pretend I don’t know you?”
“No. I have a plan, and Gunny approves.”
Why hadn’t they included me when they put this together? I swallowed more coffee. “What?”
“You’re a natural for the role. At least, when you’re clean.”
“Calixto, I don’t want to play guessing games. I’m tired. What role? And for the record, it’s not smart for us to engage in a long conversation on Pizutti’s shedrow.”
“But that is the plan. I work for Maggie, we meet, and become, what is the expression you Americans use, oh, yes, we become an item.”
“Calixto, you are American.”
He gave me a palms-up shrug. “I’m more Cuban.”
“You seem to be whoever you need to be,” I said.
My comment caught him by surprise, then brought what might have been a smile to his lips. When I’d first met him, he’d been undercover at Gulfstream Park racetrack near Miami. I’d fallen for the subterfuge, and, convinced he was a bad guy, had done my own due diligence on the man.
He wasn’t Cuban. He was Cuban-American. Calixto’s father had fled Cuba in 1958, leaving behind a wife and two other children. The father, who’d divorced his Cuban wife within a year, must have arrived in Miami with a lot of money and connections. He’d started a lucrative coffee business and some years later, snagged a top Cuban-American fashion model. The resulting marriage had produced Calixto.
He still had the half smile as he said, “And you, leona, have a talent for becoming whoever a man wants you to be.”
“Deception’s the name of my game.” But my joke sounded flat. Truth be told, I suspected I could fall for him in a New York minute and was wary of this pretend game he proposed. I didn’t want to lose control of my emotions. I couldn’t read him. I’d never know when he was lying to me or when he was telling the truth. Not for sure.
“I’ve got to clean up before I asphyxiate myself,” I said. “Besides, in those six-hundred-dollar boots, no one will buy that you’re interested in a grungy hot walker.”
“True,” he said, his smile now unmistakable, “but there is beauty in my little lioness. Even if it is invisible at the moment. I know how nicely you clean up, Fia.”
“It’s Fay.” I tilted my coffee cup and found it was empty.
“I think I will call you pequeña leona to avoid the mistake.”
I crushed the coffee cup and searched for a change of subject. “Did you hear about the suicide this morning?”
His smile disappeared. “Yes.”
“I was close, Calixto. I heard the shot.”
He glanced right, left, and lowered his voice. “What did you see?”
“Nothing, the fog was too heavy, but I was the second one on the scene, and it looked like a straightforward suicide. If there is such a thing.”
His eyes drifted away from me. His gaze swept across the green grass next to the barn. I followed his glance through a gap between the two barns next to ours, and onto the Oklahoma Training Track and the path where the jockey had shot himself. The sun shone there now, and a blue canopy arched high above the large, leafy oaks, maples, and tight conifers that grew so profusely on the Saratoga backstretch.
“Gunny is here, Fia. He wants to talk to you.”
“Here, as in Saratoga?”
Calixto nodded.
Why hadn’t my boss called me himself? Then I remembered turning my phone off to free both hands for stable work. “Do you know what it’s about?”
“No. I do not.” He hesitated a moment, his eyes searching my face. “Possibly he wants to know how you are feeling now that you are out in the field again?”
“I’m not the one who got shot. I’d think he’d be more concerned about you.”
“Easy, pequeña leona. He has been checking on my progress. But what happened to you is less straightforward than a gunshot wound, no?”
I couldn’t argue with him—not after my hellish experience of being abducted by criminals and injected with mind-altering drugs. Flashbacks, and an inability to perceive what was real and what wasn’t, had haunted me for weeks. As a result, Gunny had confined me to desk work at Fair Hill.
“I’m doing okay.”
“I can see that, but I believe Gunny has a fatherly attitude toward you, yes? He needs to see for himself.”
“Fine. When does he want to talk to me?”
Calixto glanced at his watch. “Soon. I have some things to do for him. Call him. He did say there’s a question on one of Pizutti’s owners.”
What a surprise. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll call him.”
A hay dealer’s truck rolled up to the shedrow, and two workmen started to climb from the cab. Calixto gave me a curt nod and left. As he walked down Pizutti’s aisle, the heels of his ostrich boots left sharp prints in the sandy dirt.
My role at Saratoga was set up. It was running smoothly. Yes, a jockey had committed suicide, but I was an accepted worker in Pizutti’s barn and now I had Calixto watching my back.
As I sighed and stared out through the bright sunshine to where the jockey had shot himself, a sense of something dark and hidden touched me like a cold finger.
3
I headed for the room I’d found in a towering, four-story Victorian off Union Avenue, within walking distance of the track. The owner, an older fellow who’d inherited his family’s home but not the money to go with it, had cut the house into apartments to take advantage of the lucrative prices he could charge during the summer racing season.
The TRPB had subsidized my rental, but even so, I’d had to take the cheapest unit offered, a tiny room squashed in a corner of the attic. After climbing three long flights of squeaky, wooden stairs, I unlocked my bedroom door, and stepped inside. The cramped room featured a Victorian spool bed, a brightly colored comforter with a merry-go-round print on top, a fine old walnut dresser, and a night table.
I rolled my eyes at the mini refrigerator and chipped microwave wobbling atop a laminated counter bolted onto rusty legs—an adventure in kitchen design that belonged in a Dumpster.
After shedding my foul-smelling clothes, I stepped into the teeny bathroom with the requisite toilet, sink, and shower. The last was big enough to turn around in—if I turned slowly. Still, I almost purred when the shower’s hot jets of water hit my back and lavender-scented suds foamed over my skin and hair.
I rinsed and toweled off. Didn’t need a dryer, since I kept my hair short. In the past, as a Baltimore city cop, I’d kept it long and more feminine. That vanity had almost cost me my life, most recently during a domestic dispute call in West Baltimore. The meth freak who’d been beating up his girlfriend had grabbed a hunk of my pinned-up hair and slammed my head into the bedroom wall. Fortunately, a backup patrol car had responded, and that officer had zapped the meth-head with a stun gun. He’d cuffed him, while I reeled drunkenly, fighting a black hole of unconsciousness.
One CAT scan and a bottle of ibuprofen later, I’d taken a pair of scissors and whacked off my hair. Nothing to latch on to, nothing to blow-dry. Bu
t I have a streak of vanity and I’d kept the super short hair a hot, electric blond, at least until Gunny had told me about the Saratoga assignment. Knowing I’d be visibly back on the racing circuit with a different name, I’d let it grow into a gamine, pixie-like style, and dyed it black, a few shades darker than my natural brunette. To transform my looks further, I adopted a Goth look, wearing black eye makeup and a pair of skull earrings.
After toweling off, I pulled on clean jeans, a T-shirt with a silk-screened death’s-head moth, and boots, all black. Truth be told, I favored the color anyway. It never shows dirt, goes with everything, and has a tough quality that appeals to me. And it was the obvious color of choice for my latest adventure in camouflage.
When I’d reached Gunny earlier, he’d told me he’d be waiting for me at Congress Park. A glance at the clock on the walnut dresser told me I still had a half hour before our meeting, so before making the long descent to the front door, I walked to my dormer window and gazed out. Across the slate and shingled rooftops of neighboring houses, I could see Union Avenue and its handsome Victorian, Greek Revival, and Italianate homes. I knew Union Avenue eventually dead-ended at the park where I was meeting Gunny. My rental house was in the opposite direction, closer to the racetrack.
Through the glass, I could see Saratoga’s historic grandstand, the main track, and part of the huge expanse of backstretch stables. In the distance, the Adirondack Mountains rose to meet the skyline. As I turned from the window, my cell dinged, and I was surprised to see the caller was my brother Patrick. We’d been estranged for years, but had managed a partial reconciliation when I’d seen him in Florida the previous winter.