Flamingo Road

by Sasscer Hill

  I spotted Primal. He looked like a wet, hungry rat compared to the other animals striding around the paddock, all of them well-rounded and muscular. Anyone could see Primal was out of his league. I felt sorry for him. A solid dark bay with no white markings, he looked thin, nervous, and slightly bug-eyed. Still, Morales wanted me to bet his horse, and if somehow Primal came in, I’d better have a ticket to cash.

  His odds had increased to sixty-to-one by the time I bought my usual cheap ticket and planted myself before the monitor to watch the race.

  Morales came back from the restroom, and I knew he’d hit himself up with something. Probably cocaine, seeing the way he wiped one finger under his nose. His eyes held a wild intensity, and with quick, impulsive strides, he headed for the betting window. When he and Calixto finished laying their money down, they joined me before the monitor, their attention on the coming race. The odds had dropped to thirty-to-one. My guys had thrown down some serious money.

  The broadcast’s audio came on. The bell rang and the gates crashed open. The horses broke evenly, with a gray surging to the lead, followed by two chestnuts. Primal lay fourth on the rail, another gray close on his flank, the rest of the twelve horse field crowded behind. Morales’s little rat scrambled to get his feet under him. He appeared confused, as if he wasn’t sure where the cheese was.

  As the field flew up the backstretch, Primal traveled with an alarming lack of consistency, his legs climbing in the air, losing precious ground. Suddenly, he pinned his ears, lowered his belly to the dirt, and took off like a rocket.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah!” Morales yelled.

  I stole a glance at Calixto. Motionless, he watched the race through narrowed eyes.

  Primal shoved his head between the hindquarters of the two chestnut horses and plunged through the hole, quickly leaving them in his dust. He drew even with the gray who dug in and tried, but was no match for the smaller bay. Primal scurried forward faster than a rat abandoning ship, opened up by five lengths, and hit the wire a clear winner.

  “If I hadn’t just seen that, I wouldn’t believe it,” I said.

  “Believe it!” Morales yelled. He let loose a high, wild laugh. “Come on.” He rushed through a door in the dining room’s glass wall, and dashed down the outside stairs to the track apron and winner’s circle below. He pumped his fist in the air, shouting and whooping the whole way.

  Reaching the apron, Morales busted through a crowd of racing fans, pushing one man to the side. Calixto hurriedly apologized to the guy who snarled, “The son of a bitch should watch where he’s going!”

  I smiled pleasantly and followed in Calixto’s wake, reaching the winner’s circle, a half-moon of rubber pavers surrounded by a green hedge. With a start of recognition, I realized the tall, thin man standing at the entrance was Michael Serpentino, Primal’s trainer; the real reason I’d come to the grandstand. His dark hair was shaved close to his skull, like in his picture, and he had a long, thin neck.

  A man in a ball cap, his face red with anger, yelled at Serpentino.

  “You expect me to believe that horse isn’t juiced? You shot him up with something! I’ll make sure they triple test him, you piece of shit. I hope they rule you off!”

  Serpentino ran his tongue over his lips, then shrugged. “I hope they do check him out. He’ll test clean because I didn’t give him anything.”

  What a liar.

  Morales, who’d been shifting his weight from one foot to the other, rushed at the man with the ball cap, getting in his face. “We had the best horse, Parker. Get over it. Fucking crybaby.”

  Calixto seemed to grow even quieter. There was something focused about his silence that frightened me. I hoped there wasn’t a fight. It would draw too much attention, might even blow my cover.

  Parker made a disgusted sound, spun on his heel, and strode away. Over his shoulder, he shouted, “This isn’t over. Not even close.”

  Morales laughed, pranced into the winner’s circle, and did a little dance. He glanced up. “Hey, here comes our horse! Everybody, get in here.”

  A groom was leading Primal into the enclosure. Calixto and I hurried inside, and stood next to Morales.

  “This is so cool,” I said to him. “I want a piece of this pie. I want in, Tony.”

  “Antonio, I believe she’s a player,” Calixto said.

  “Sure, doll. Whatever you want.”

  I faked a happy smile at Morales, when I really wanted to scream at these men to do something for the poor horse.

  Primal was heaving from his effort, stumbling as the groom led him toward us. He stopped and the groom jerked hard on the horse’s lead. Serpentino shoved at Primal’s hind quarters with both hands, pushing him forward, positioning him for the picture.

  When they got him settled, Primal’s head hung almost to the ground, and the jockey managed a weak, nervous smile for the win shot.

  The photographer called, “Okay, everybody ready?”

  I smiled, the flash popped, and Primal groaned. His bony frame shuddered.

  “Shit!” The jockey flung himself from the horse.

  The animal’s knees buckled and he collapsed onto the pavers. By the time I knelt beside him, Primal was dead.

  16

  When I returned to Patrick’s house, I disappeared into my room, booted up my laptop, and sent an encrypted message to Gunny, telling him about Primal and the events leading to the horse’s death.

  “I am particularly interested,” I typed, “in receiving the necropsy results. Will request a copy from Brian.” I signed off before sending my query to the TRPB tech, wondering what drug, if any, the postmortem tests would find in the horse.

  After hooking into the TRPB site, I looked up Calixto Coyune. I’d been right about his accent. He was Cuban American, his father having fled Cuba in 1958, where he’d left a wife and two children behind. The father divorced the woman within a year. Apparently he’d come to Miami with a lot of money and connections because he snagged a top American fashion model. The resulting marriage had produced Calixto. No surprise the son was good-looking and well dressed.

  Did he ever wonder about his two half siblings in Cuba?

  Interesting that both Calixto and Serpentino were Cuban American. Calixto was on the board of the lucrative coffee company his father had started in 1960 in Miami. The father was well into his eighties, and I assumed Calixto would be the heir. What a spoiled brat.

  The Florida Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering listed Calixto as a current owner of three racehorses. He had an address on swanky Fisher Island. No further information was available, which raised a red flag. What was the man hiding?

  A glance at the clock suggested it was time to stuff these men in a mental file and go to bed. But sleep eluded me that night. I couldn’t stop the images of Primal running his heart out, his legs buckling, and finally the trailer with the winch they’d used to drag his body from the winner’s circle.

  Angered and disturbed by the images, I threw back the turquoise comforter and left the bed to stare out the plate-glass window. The ambient light lit the surface of the pool, and I could see the outline of Patrick’s barn in the distance. The only sound was the chirping of crickets.

  So far, I’d accomplished nothing. Cody and Primal were dead at the hands of greedy humans, and I’d been unable to save them. My new job was to protect the integrity of horse racing, which was fine. But I wanted to protect the animals. I admired Zanin for what he did and the directness of his approach.

  I paced across the room and back to the window where the dark shapes of palms and tropical shrubs shifted and swayed in the night breeze. What kind of man was Serpentino? He looked like a snake with his long, thin neck and the way he darted his tongue over his dry lips. If he had administered a drug that forced Primal to run beyond his ability and die at our feet, Serpentino was worse than a poisonous snake.

  Recently, the trainer had been out of town, and though he had stalls on the back side of Rosa
rio’s barn, I hadn’t seen him before the race, only his assistant trainer. Maybe Serpentino had been out shopping for drugs and more horses he could run to death.

  “Damn it.” I would nail that son of a bitch for what he’d done. And Antonio Morales. What a piece of work he was. And what was the deal with Calixto?

  Sometime later, I fell asleep and drifted into uneasy dreams where I followed Serpentino through pines and thorny scrub brush. He led me past stagnant, swampy water, taking me down Flamingo Road. I couldn’t stop the journey. Something dark and terrible lay ahead. Something nameless. I jerked out of the nightmare and sat up. Short of breath, my muscles in knots, I was relieved to be awake in the safety of my room.

  * * *

  In the morning, I shook my mind clear of dead horses and bad dreams, warming my cold hands around a steaming mug of hot coffee. I checked my laptop for messages, but it was so early, Gunny hadn’t replied to my e-mail of the previous evening.

  I arrived at Gulfstream before sunrise and rode Luceta out in the first light of dawn. The temperature had dipped into the low fifties, but the early sun had so much strength, it wasn’t long before it warmed my back right through my protective vest and nylon jacket.

  When I finished with Luceta, Rosario’s other exercise rider, a woman named Meg Goffman, rode out with me on the colt Money Honey. When Meg and I rode our horses past the barn closest to the track, they stopped short to stare at a brown and white companion goat tied outside a stall.

  “You’d think they never saw a goat before,” Meg said.

  “Especially that goat,” I said, “since it was there yesterday and the day before.”

  Meg booted Money Honey forward and we left the goat behind, riding the horses past the last barn and onto the trail leading to the track. The horses hooves churned the sand beneath us and the rising warmth brought its earthy scent to my nostrils.

  For a moment, I wondered about the person who’d named Last Call for Love and what events in their life had made them choose that name. But it was time to focus on the present. We still had two more sets to gallop that morning.

  The horses stepped onto the track, heads up, bodies quick and bouncy beneath us. We eased them into a trot, then a gallop. At the mile pole, we racheted up the pace to a two-minute lick and sped away down the track.

  * * *

  When I’d opened Last Call’s stall gate she came out in her usual explosive style, then refused to go to the track until dragged along by Meg and the palomino pony. Though we got her around the big oval, the use of the pony sadly restricted both the pace and fluidity of Last Call’s movements.

  Now I watched her gaze longingly over her stall gate, testing the barrier’s strength by pressing her muscular chest against the metal wire. To be honest, the tight, honed muscles under her coat surprised me, considering her limited exercise. Who knew how good she’d be with normal training? But to accomplish this, she needed to be more agreeable and willing.

  Dad had convinced me that some horses demanded special treatment and damn well knew when they received it. Thinking about this, I watched Last Call’s behavior in her stall. She still pushed against her gate, pinning her ears and snaking her head back and forth. Clearly, she hated being locked up.

  I walked to the small block building opposite our shedrow that management had provided us for storage. I’d seen an extra stall gate leaning against the wall in there. After flipping on the light and digging through supplies, I found the gate and wrestled it free from a stack of buckets and tack boxes filled with stable bandages, brushes, combs, hoof picks, and polish. I carried the gate to the filly’s stall, set it down, and walked back to where our groom, Julio, sat in a lawn chair by the storage building.

  Finished with his morning duties, he was relaxing with his first beer of the day. Dark stubble already peppered his jaw. One cheek wore a smear of dirt and dried poultice streaked the front of his pant’s legs with white. I felt guilty asking him to go back to work and pulled some dollar bills from my pocket.

  “Julio, I have to make some adjustments to Last Call’s stall. Would you take her for a few loops around the shedrow?” I pushed the money toward him.

  “Sí.” He waved the bills away. “Pero, no es necesario.” He drained his beer, tossed the can into a trash barrel, and stood. He found a lead shank and led Last Call from her stall. After she finished her customary exploding exit, Julio walked her away down the shedrow, with her hooves leaving tracks in the sand he’d watered and raked to the smoothness of glass. Overhead, the miniature roses swayed gently in their planters.

  I stuffed the ones into the pocket of his jacket that hung on a nearby hook, knowing he would have to rerake the sand to avoid Rosario’s wrath.

  As I watched Last Call amble around the corner, it was obvious that without tack, and knowing she wasn’t going to the track, she enjoyed a promenade along the shedrow. She probably liked one-upping her neighbors still locked in their stalls.

  I zipped into the storage shed and grabbed two large screw eyes and a long screwdriver before darting back to Last Call’s stall. As I worked the sharp end of the screw into an old hole in the door’s frame, a faint whiff of raw wood reached me.

  Sliding the shaft of the screwdriver through the loop of the screw eye, I twisted the shaft and wound the screw tightly into the wood. After fastening the second one, I picked up the gate and slid its two pins into the screw eye loops. Now a gate hung from each side of the door frame. I swung the two gates together, as if closing them, and when they met, they formed a V out into the shedrow.

  When Julio appeared around the corner with Last Call, I said, “Put her in.”

  He did a double take. “What you doing?”

  “I’m giving her a room with a view.”

  Julio shook his head. “Rosario, he won’t like.”

  “Let me worry about Rosario.”

  Looking doubtful, and muttering something in Spanish, Julio led Last Call into her stall, then retreated. I snapped the gates together with metal snaps and held my breath, scared to death she’d bust the V open and run loose on the grounds.

  She marched into the V and stopped. She looked right. She looked left. She snatched some hay from her hay net and stood looking out her “window,” munching contentedly.

  I forked a bunch of straw into the V to give her front feet more cushion to stand on, then sat on a hay bale that lay against the wall outside her stall. I sat there until the loudspeaker called for the first race. I wanted to see how she’d react when another horse walked by on its way to the races. If she bared her teeth and lunged, I’d have to undo my handiwork before complaints were lodged with management. Heck, grooms might lodge complaints anyway, as their horses were likely to spook at a horse standing partway out of its stall.

  The door to Rosario’s office in the block building opened and the trainer stepped out. “What’s this supposed to be?”

  I hadn’t realized he was still at the track.

  “Who put those gates together?” He did not sound pleased.

  “I did. It’s part of my make-her-happy plan.”

  “You had no right to—”

  Rosario stared as one of Serpentino’s grooms led a horse toward Last Call’s stall. The horse was bridled, wearing racing bandages on its legs, and was wound up like a top with pre-race nerves. The groom led his horse past Last Call, and our filly stood like a statue, a regal queen regarding her subject.

  “I don’t know about this,” Rosario said.

  “But look at her.” The filly was nodding her head up and down, her expression more content than I’d ever seen. “She loves it.”

  “Huh,” Rosario said. “I hope she’s worth the trouble. I was going to send her out of here in two days.” He paused and stared at the filly. “Put a couple more snaps on those gates. I don’t want her getting loose.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Rosario? I have another idea.”

  “God help us. What?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the
round pen Serpentino has on the other side of the barn. If he’d let us use it, we could put the tack on her and let her explode in there every day. Might do her good.”

  “You learn that from your dad?” Rosario asked.

  “Yeah. Everything I know about horses, I learned from him.”

  “He was a damn fine trainer. All right, Fia. See what Serpentino says.”

  Perfect. Now I had a reason to talk to Serpentino, spend time on his shedrow, maybe get to know his grooms, and find out what went on over there. Not to mention save Last Call from a very dim future.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  As Rosario walked away, the message chime sounded on my phone. A text message from Zanin: “We need to talk.”

  I called his number. It went directly to voice mail. I left him a message that I’d try to reach him later.

  * * *

  I waited until the next morning to talk to Serpentino, when I knew he’d be overseeing his operation on the other side of our barn. Most tracks have a half-hour break in the middle of morning training to allow maintenance time to water, grade, and smooth the track surface. Gulfstream was no exception, and as soon as I dismounted and handed my last pre-break horse over to Julio, I walked to the other side and introduced myself to Serpentino.

  I could see in his eyes he did not recognize me as Kate O’Brien. But I hadn’t expected him to. Searching his face, I saw no trace of kindness in his features.

  I forced a smile. “You won the fifth yesterday. Congratulations!” Somehow, I managed enthusiasm while keeping a straight face.

  He nodded. “What can I do for you?” His gaze swept away from me to one of his horses being hosed by a groom on the pavement outside. His expression made it clear he had better things to do than talk to some other trainer’s exercise rider.

  “We have a filly that could really benefit from using your round pen. Maybe twenty minutes a day? Is that something you might consider?”