Triple Crown

by Felix Francis

  ‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ Bob said.

  ‘But we need that extra money if you’re going to divorce Angie and marry me,’ Steffi said. ‘She’ll take you for everything she can.’

  Good old Angie, I thought. I wished she’d take him right now.

  ‘I need to talk to you about that,’ Bob said.

  ‘About what?’ Steffi demanded.

  ‘Not now. We’ll talk later. Let’s find him first.’

  ‘Not changing your mind are you?’ Steffi was getting quite agitated.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Bob replied, but his tone suggested the completely opposite answer. He very clearly had changed his mind. ‘Come on. Let’s find him.’

  ‘What if he’s managed to escape?’ Steffi said, panic audibly rising in her voice. ‘Then we’re done for. You heard what he said about the death penalty.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Bob replied sharply. ‘He can’t have. He must be here. In one of these cupboards.’

  I heard him slide open one of the cupboard doors.

  ‘But what if he has escaped?’ Steffi’s voice had risen so that it was little more than a squeak. She was now in full panic-attack mode.

  ‘Shut up, woman,’ Bob said angrily. ‘And help me find him.’

  Perhaps he thought it was better for her to be occupied than standing by the door dissolving into jelly. But it was more bad news for me. With two of them looking, they were bound to find me now.

  ‘I think we should go,’ Steffi said suddenly. She hadn’t moved. I could still see her feet over by the door.

  ‘What do you mean, go?’

  ‘Go. Leave. Get out of here before the cops arrive.’ All her earlier bravado about wasting me seemed to have evaporated. My talk of electrocution and Bob’s change of heart over a divorce had clearly unnerved her.

  Bob was far more relaxed. ‘If the cops were coming they’d have been here by now. He was lying about that, and about everything else.’

  ‘I still think we should leave, now,’ Steffi said determinedly.

  Go on, Steffi, convince him.

  ‘No way,’ Bob said. ‘We finish this.’ I heard him slide open another cupboard door.

  ‘But I don’t want to get arrested for murder,’ Steffi said.

  ‘You won’t,’ Bob said. ‘He was lying, I tell you. We find him and kill him. And then we get out of here.’

  All the while they had been talking, I had been crawling until I found the empty shelf.

  Silently, I eased myself onto it so I was lying with my back to the metal, with my knees drawn up. Maybe Steffi would pass the end of the workstation and not see me. I would then be behind her again, and closer to the door into the restaurant.

  My plan almost worked.

  As I had hoped, she walked right past the end without spotting me.

  Now all I had to do was roll off the shelf in the direction she had come from. Then I’d be behind her. Easy.

  But it was at that point when things started to go badly wrong.

  In Jurassic Park, it was a falling soup ladle that gave away the children’s position to the Velociraptors. In my case it was a large metal saucepan lid.

  It had been standing vertically on its edge on the far side of the large saucepan to which it belonged. I only touched the pan fractionally with my foot as I manoeuvred myself back onto the floor but it was enough to upset the equilibrium.

  I watched in horror as the lid rolled gently off the shelf away from me and clattered to the floor, going round and round like a coin dropped onto a granite top, only ten times louder.

  ‘Get him,’ shouted Bob.

  I stood up and ran.

  A bullet zinged off the extractor hood next to my ear causing me to duck involuntarily. I reached the end of the line to find Steffi, but she was facing away from me and towards where the noise of the lid had come from.

  I grabbed her from behind, holding her tight to me with my left arm and placing the vegetable knife up against her windpipe with my right hand.

  ‘Drop it,’ I shouted into her ear.

  She wriggled and squirmed so I cut her neck. Only a little cut but enough to draw blood. She gasped and went very still, dropping her gun with a clatter to the floor. I used my foot to slide it backwards but I had no chance of bending down to get it because Bob was standing right in front of us, about ten feet away.

  ‘Drop your gun,’ I shouted at him, ‘or I’ll slit her throat.’

  He did nothing of the sort. Instead he took two steps closer and pointed the barrel straight at me, lining up his right eye with the sights.

  Steffi was shorter than me by a couple of inches so I ducked my head down behind hers so as not to give him a clear target to shoot at.

  ‘I said drop your gun,’ I repeated. ‘I will cut her if you don’t.’

  A strange look came over his face, almost one of indifference to the plight of his mistress. Was he thinking only of his own skin, or had he decided there was another way out of his matrimonial predicament?

  He took another step forward and shot Steffi from no more than three feet away in the chest.

  The force of the impact threw us both backwards off our feet, Steffi landing heavily on top of me.

  My first instinct was that I had also been shot but my mind and body were still operating normally.

  For some reason I remembered what Bob himself had said to me on that very first day in the FACSA offices in Arlington. Expanding bullets are less likely to pass right through suspects and into innocent bystanders behind them.

  How right he was.

  But I feared that my relief was likely to be short-lived. I would be next.

  I realised that I had landed on Steffi’s gun. It was sticking into my back. I grabbed it and dived behind the next line of workstations. Now things were a little more even.

  But why had he shot Steffi? It didn’t make any sense.

  And there was little doubt in my mind that she was dead. She hadn’t been wearing her FACSA bulletproof vest and her chest had been ripped apart by the expanding bullet.

  She lay there on the tile floor in front of me, a pool of bright-red blood spreading out beneath her, with non-seeing eyes still wide open as if in surprise.

  I crouched behind the workstation, gun at the ready, watching for the moment that Bob appeared.

  He didn’t.

  Where was he?

  I lowered my head down to the floor and looked under the cupboards. All I could see was his ankles and feet. He was standing just the other side of the worktop.

  He was a professional marksman, regularly practised, and I had only fired a gun once since I’d left the army, many years before. However, one never forgets how to aim and pull a trigger.

  I reached under the cupboard with my arms fully extended, holding the Glock 22C as still as I could. The end of the silencer was only twenty-four inches or so from Bob’s feet. Surely I couldn’t miss from here.

  I closed my left eye, looked along the sights with my right, and squeezed the trigger as smoothly as I could manage.

  The gun leaped in my hand with the recoil as the round went off. It all seemed a bit surreal without an accompanying deafening bang, the only sound being the mechanic clanging as the gun’s mechanism automatically ejected the empty cartridge and reloaded. However, the scream from Bob was amply loud enough to make up for it.

  I hadn’t missed. The bullet appeared to have caught him square on the right ankle bone and its subsequent expansion had almost torn his foot clean off.

  I didn’t go to his aid. He still had his gun and I was in no doubt that he’d use it.

  Instead, I ran for the door to the restaurant before he too worked out he could also shoot me at floor level.

  Logic told me that Bob couldn’t have run after me with only one functioning foot but, nevertheless, I sprinted across the deserted restaurant, through the empty cavernous betting hall beyond, and down the stairway towards the grandstand exits.

  Indeed, I didn’t stop running un
til I reached a lone uniformed guard at the security desk in the main lobby.

  ‘Call the cops,’ I shouted at him. ‘There’s been a murder.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘And the cops are already here investigating it.’

  I stared at him. He knows? How does he know?

  ‘So where are they then?’

  ‘With the body,’ the guard said somewhat matter-of-factly.

  ‘Whose body?’

  It was his turn to stare at me, as if I was the idiot.

  ‘The groom who was murdered. Over in the barns.’

  Did you deal with the groom? Steffi had asked.

  All done, Bob had replied.

  ‘No,’ I said to the security guard, finally understanding. ‘There’s been another murder. Here in the grandstand. In one of the kitchens. Call the cops again.’

  34

  Everything considered, it turned out to be quite a busy night for the Nassau County Police Department. Almost their total on-duty manpower ended up at Belmont Park for one reason or another.

  There was considerable confusion and I seemed to be the cause of most of it.

  Initially, in spite of my protestations that I was all right, I was dispatched by ambulance to the emergency room of a local hospital to have my arm dealt with. The bleeding had decreased to a mere ooze, but there was still a nasty gash that required treatment.

  It was while a doctor was cleaning and stitching the wound under local anaesthetic that more police turned up at the hospital to arrest me for the murder of one federal special agent, namely Stephanie Dean, and for the grievous bodily harm of another, viz Robert Wade.

  Try as I might to explain to them that it had been Robert Wade who had killed Stephanie and that I had been the one they had shot at first, I was eventually handcuffed and frogmarched out of the hospital and into a waiting squad car.

  At the police station, I was photographed and fingerprinted, plus I had a swab taken of my saliva for DNA. However, it was the discovery in my pocket of a groom’s ID card in the name of Patrick Sean Murphy that caused the greatest excitement, and not only because the photograph on it didn’t resemble me as I now was.

  It transpired that the said Patrick Sean Murphy, an Irishman, was being sought as the prime suspect in the murder of the dead groom.

  My repeated pleas to the lead detective that I was, in fact, one Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley, an Englishman, on loan from the British Horseracing Authority to the Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency, fell on deaf ears.

  ‘Call the Deputy Director of the agency,’ I told him. ‘He’ll vouch for me.’

  But the detective didn’t believe me and the discovery of an United States Permanent Resident Card in my wallet, also in the name of Patrick Sean Murphy and with my matching thumbprint, was all the proof he needed that I was lying.

  He kept asking me the same questions over and over again, and I gave him the same answers on each occasion.

  ‘Why did you kill a federal law-enforcement officer?’

  He clearly took a very dim view of that.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Why did you shoot at another?’

  The police had already done a powder-residue test on my hands. I was sure it had registered positive. And my prints would be on Steffi’s gun.

  ‘Because he was trying to kill me.’

  ‘And why would that be? Was it because you had already killed his colleague?’

  I told him the whole story from the beginning at least four times but it was quite clear he didn’t believe me. It sounded too improbable, even to my ears.

  ‘Go and look in the roof space,’ I said. ‘You’ll find the broken bulbs and a bullet hole in the stepladder. And who do you think shot me?’

  I showed him the stitches in my arm, which were now hurting again as the local anaesthetic wore off.

  The detective changed tactics.

  ‘Why did you kill the groom?’

  ‘I didn’t. I don’t even know which groom has been killed.’

  The detective consulted his papers.

  ‘Mr Ríos, a US citizen from Puerto Rico. Diego Manuel Ríos.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘His cousin, Miss Maria Quintero, says that you and Mr Ríos had an ongoing feud and she claims you killed him.’

  She was right. I had killed him.

  I had asked Tony to email his Deputy Director predecessor stating that he had a lead on how trainers were being tipped off: the groom who looked after Debenture was prepared to talk. That would normally have been me but, due to my feigned illness, Keith had detailed Diego to look after the horse instead.

  And because of that, Bob Wade had killed Diego and not me.

  ‘Where was he found?’ I asked.

  ‘Where you left him – in a barn, with a pitchfork stuck deep in his chest.’

  Bob Wade must have acquired that idea from Hayden Ryder, who had tried to do the same to him at Churchill Downs. But Diego hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest or a special agent badge as protection.

  ‘I’ve already told you, I didn’t see Diego Ríos at any time this afternoon. I was over at the racetrack, not at the barns.’

  ‘Can you prove that? Do you have any witnesses?’

  No, of course I didn’t. I had spent the afternoon trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

  ‘So why did you kill him?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘The murder weapon has your fingerprints all over it.’

  Hell, I thought. That wasn’t good.

  ‘All the grooms have used all the pitchforks at one time or another. They will have all our fingerprints on them.’

  ‘What was the feud between you and Mr Ríos all about?’

  I was not going there. It would sound far too incriminating if I told him it was over advances I had made towards his cousin. It was not a feud anyway. A true feud needed animosity in both directions. Diego’s had all been one-way.

  I decided it was time I asked for a lawyer. Probably well past time.

  ‘I want a lawyer,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is my right,’ I said.

  ‘Only guilty men ask for lawyers,’ he responded, and I’m sure he believed it. In his eyes, suspects were all guilty until proved not to be and, even then, he’d probably still have had his doubts.

  ‘I’d also like to make a phone call,’ I said, ignoring his remark. ‘I think I have a right to that as well.’

  He obviously didn’t like it but he shrugged his shoulders in acceptance. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘One call.’

  I made it to Tony Andretti.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked angrily. ‘There’s been a disaster at the track.’

  ‘What sort of disaster?’

  ‘I’ve lost two of my best agents,’ he said gloomily. ‘One is dead and the other is currently in surgery to save his foot.’

  ‘They were your moles,’ I said to him. ‘Not one mole, but two. Both of them. Bob Wade and Steffi Dean.’

  There was a long pause from the other end of the line.

  ‘Tony?’ I said eventually. ‘You still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied slowly. ‘I’m still here.’ He sounded shocked. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  He was not happy. ‘I wanted you only to find our moles, not kill them.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Steffi Dean was shot dead by Bob Wade from a range of about three feet. She didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘Bob Wade says an unknown assailant did it, a man with a black goatee.’

  No wonder the cops had come looking for me at the hospital. They would have readily believed a federal special agent. Who wouldn’t?

  ‘Check the ballistics. The bullet that killed Steffi came from Bob’s gun.’

  But I wondered if there would be enough of the expanded bullet remaining to test for barrel marks and scratches.

  ‘Can you get me out of here?’ I asked. ‘The Nassau County cops have arreste
d me for murder.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  He didn’t sound too hopeful or, indeed, particularly eager.

  What had he expected? Perhaps he’d thought that I would silently expose his mole, only then for the villain to be discreetly retired from the service, rather than to face the full force of the law. Something nice and quiet that would keep the reputation of his agency intact. Maybe even to accept the death of Jason Connor as the accident that the Maryland Medical Examiner believed it was.

  What he clearly hadn’t intended was having to wash FACSA’s dirty laundry in public. For the Nassau County detectives to be investigating the violent death of a special agent under the intense scrutiny of the intimidating New York City media, hungry for another fatal-shooting story, especially one tinged with more than a whiff of official corruption.

  ‘Can you at least find me a decent lawyer?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he repeated, without giving me much confidence that it would happen.

  The thought crossed my mind that maybe Tony Andretti would be perfectly happy leaving me to my own devices, at least for a while. The media scrutiny would then continue to be directed solely at me as the suspect in custody, rather than at him, asking difficult questions like, ‘Why had I been released without charge?’ and, if so, then, ‘Who really had shot Steffi Dean?’

  Part of me even worried that he might be quite happy to sacrifice me permanently, for the good of the agency. Steffi was dead and Bob could be declared medically unfit to continue. The cancer would have been excised from the body and no one need be any the wiser that it had ever existed.

  The only problem would be what to do with me.

  After his magic trick in getting me a Green Card from the State Department within twenty-four hours, I’d put nothing past the resourceful Deputy Director of FACSA.

  I spent a restless night in a hot and airless police holding cell, in which the bright overhead lamp never went out and the toilet in the corner flushed itself automatically every fifteen minutes.

  My arm throbbed and the stitches itched, but I couldn’t complain about the breakfast.

  A segmented metal tray arrived at six o’clock loaded with copious quantities of crisp bacon, scrambled eggs and fried potatoes but, thankfully, with not a single grit anywhere in sight. I ate the bacon with my fingers and the rest with a white plastic spoon – the officer who delivered it having explained that knives and forks, even plastic ones, were considered too sharp to issue to violent offenders.