Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [15]
Some kids in the back were hanging around the ancient jukebox, imitating the latest Godfather movie. At least they weren’t trying to imitate Bruce Lee, like the kids a few blocks east of here. Their conversation drifted over.
“She’s got some beautiful body, you know, but her face’s ugly as shit.”
“Man, you don’t fuck her face.”
The third one added his sage comment. “Hey, where are you from, lame? Kansas?”
Even if I woke up some morning as totally disoriented as the hippies who live downstairs from me, I’d still only have to stagger as far as the corner to know I was in New York. I put back the Post, paid for the News, collected a sour glance from the owner of the dump, and went back upstairs. My Chinese food was just about ready. I’m a real gourmet—I know you have to burn pork to make it safe to eat.
Usually when I’m here in the mornings I read the race results to Pansy so I can explain why my horse didn’t do as well as expected. So today I called her over and fed her some extra pork scraps while I checked last night’s charts. I never read my horse’s race first—I start with the first race and work my way down. The seventh was the feature at Yonkers, and my horse won. The goddamned horse won, and the sonofabitch paid $21.40 to do it. I checked the horse’s name, checked his position and . . . yeah, it was number three for certain. I was over a grand to the good—damn! I wanted to sit back and read the charts again and again, to retrace my horse’s path to victory as slowly as I could. But I knew it was too good to be true—something had to be wrong.
So I bit the bullet and called Maurice, using the hippies’ phone. When he told me some reason why my horse wasn’t the one that won, I was just going to tell him I’d have Max deliver his money later that day. I’m a good loser—practice makes perfect.
“Maurice, this is Burke.”
“Burke, I thought you died—I figured you’d be on the fucking phone as soon as I opened this morning. You got someone else picking ’em for you now?” And I knew I really had won.
“Oh, yeah,” I said casually, as though my last big winner was last week instead of three years ago. “Look, Maurice, can you hold on to it for me until later this afternoon?”
“What’d you think, dummy, I’m gonna leave town with this big score?”
“No, I just—”
“I’ll be here,” says Maurice, and hangs up. What a charmer.
I went back and sat down at the table and read the charts to Pansy until she was bored to tears. My horse just wired the field—he left from the three-hole, got to the top with a 28.4 quarter, kept the pressure on to a 59.3 half, coasted the third quarter in 1.31 flat, and got home handily by a length and a half in 200.4. His best race ever, a lifetime mark—his father would have been proud. It was like the Flood broad had never taken her money back.
For some reason, it took me a long time to get dressed that morning. I put on a suit, got out my overcoat with all the extra pockets in it, and put in my little tape recorder and the clip-on thing for my shirt pocket that looks like the top of a ballpoint pen—when you flick it to the side, about six feet of car antenna comes out like a steel whip. It’s only good for people who like to work with knives, and the people I was going to see only worked with guns, but I didn’t think it would be a straight path to them. Anyway, I planned to be on the street when I called this Mr. James.
I fixed Pansy up with extra water and left her some dry food in the washtub she uses for a dinner bowl. Then I went down to the garage, got the gun out of its usual place, emptied it, and replaced the slugs with some hollow points that an associate had thoughtfully filled with mercury. Next I dug out the long-barreled Ruger .22 automatic. It holds nine shots, counting the chamber—I put in four filled