Down Here

me for a good quarter-mil. He wasn’t any better at picking horses, but his faith was too pure for him to be deterred by mere experience.

There was nothing I liked in the first. A sorry collection of pacers going for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar purse. You could claim any of them for four grand, and the only sure thing was that there wouldn’t be any takers.

But there was one that drew my eye in the second—a shipper from the Midwest that looked good on paper. I noticed she was a front-runner, with a nice clean stride. No breaks on her program, unusual for a trotter. She always seemed to tie up a bit in the last quarter and get shuffled back, unless the pace was leisurely enough for her to hold on at the end. She was coming out of Sportsman’s Park—a five-eighths-mile track, favoring closers—but Yonkers is a quarter-mile, with a very short run to home.

The mare I liked was in a twenty-K claimer. A couple of the other horses had pretty decent last outs, so I expected her to go off at a nice price. I wasn’t crazy about the post she’d drawn, but, with her early speed, I thought she could grab the rail from the five-hole before the first turn.

I put a big question mark at the top of the first race, then drew a box around the one I liked in the second.

Max made a circling gesture.

I nodded agreement. We’d wheel the Daily Double, putting the five horse in the second race against all the entries in the first. If my horse won the second, we’d have the Double. But even then, it didn’t mean we’d show a profit. The Daily Double wheel was eight bets. At a deuce per, we’d have to win and get a payoff of more than sixteen bucks to come out ahead.

You might think, what kind of Double wouldn’t pay off more than that? But if the crowd liked one of the horses in the first race well enough to send him off real cheap, the chalk-players might be spinning their wheels, too. So we could win and still end up short.

Max knew all this. He held up his hand, for “Wait!” I nodded agreement—we’d see if the money got distributed nice and even on that first race before we made our play.

Max took the program from me and started working on that first race, paying special attention to each horse’s mother’s name.

I spotted Sands a few seconds before he saw me. He had a giant paper cup in one hand; I was pretty sure it wasn’t popcorn.

I stood up, like I was stretching. Sands walked past us, then sat down at an angle, so he could watch us without turning his head.

I strolled over, sat down next to him.

“Who do you like in the first?” I said.

“I see you brought a friend,” he answered.

“He’ll stay where he is, if you want.”

“Is he who I think he is?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard about him for years. Friends of yours, stories get so wild about them, people never seem to know if they’re real or not.”

“Your call,” I said.

“Some of your friends, people don’t even know if they’re dead or not,” Sands said, dropping his voice.

“People don’t know a lot of things,” I said. “But it never seems to stop them from talking about them.”

“Nobody’s doing a lot of talking about her now.”

I knew he meant Wolfe. “Meaning they do know something?” I said.

“You’re too cute for me,” Sands said. “I get enough of that on the job. The way things are today, the smart guys are wearing their vests on backwards. Why don’t you go back to your friend? I’ll let the place fill up a bit before I stop by.”

Max and I each bet a sawbuck on his pick in the first. Or, I should say, we bet twenty bucks together—if we didn’t go partners, it wasn’t any fun for either of us. Max came back from the window with a ten-dollar wheel on the Double, too, meaning we had a hundred invested, total.

By the time they called the pacers for the first race, it was dark enough for the track lights to come on. Max’s horse, Dino’s Diamond, was a ten-year-old gelding who had been racing since he was a kid. He slipped in behind the gate like a journeyman boxer climbing through the ropes. Another tank town, another nickel-and-dime purse— getting paid to be the opponent.

The pace car made its circuit, then pulled in the gate. None of the horses seemed to want the lead—they hit the first turn in a clump. On the backstretch, Max’s horse fitted himself sixth along the rail. “Saving ground,” the track announcer called, but it looked more like phoning it in to me.

The horses came around the second turn Indian-file, Max’s pick still where he started. Two horses came off the rail, one drafting behind the other as they challenged the leader. Max’s horse closed up the gap they left. When the two challengers stayed parked out past the three-quarter pole, the file passed them by, moving them out of contention. At the top of the stretch, the leader was tiring, but none of the others seemed to have the will to make a move.

I felt a sudden stab of pain in my forearm. Max, using his rebar forefinger to tell me what my eyes had just picked up—the lead horse, exhausted, was drifting wide . . . and Dino’s Diamond was charging the inside lane like a downhill freight.

It was photo-close, but Max’s horse got a nose in front at the wire. Max stood up and bowed to the valiant warrior who had found his way home one more time. His flat Mongol face was split in a broad grin.

I spent the next few minutes acknowledging the celestial perfection of Max’s handicapping methods, admitting that we should have wheeled his pick instead of mine—sharing in my brother’s joy.

Dino’s Diamond paid $35.20, making us major winners, no matter what happened in the Double. Max would brag on this one forever, starting with Mama.

It was one of those times; anyone I’d have to explain it to, I wouldn’t want to.

They had just called the trotters for the second race when Sands sat down next to me.

^“There’s three more,” he said, without preamble.

“Three more not in the—?”

“Yeah.”

“Why not?”

“No complaining witnesses.”

“Then how would you know they were cases at all, never mind his?”

“One of them, he was almost caught in the act. But the vic denied it ever happened.”

“A hooker who—?”

“No. Stop asking questions. I can’t hang around here. Just listen. It was on the Lower East Side. A neighbor hears sounds of a struggle. Glass breaking, a scream. She calls it in; she’s too scared to go out and see what’s happening herself, so she turns off all the lights in her apartment, peeks out the window. And there’s the perp, going down the fire escape. She doesn’t get enough for an ID, but it’s our man, no question, right down to the ski mask and the gloves. In fucking July.

“By the time that one went down, everyone knows there’s a serial rapist making the rounds, so the uniforms don’t bother to knock. The door goes right in. And there’s the vic, still tied up, blood coming out of her. Nails on one hand all broken. She must have put up a hell of a fight. Place is ransacked, too.

“But the woman, she says nothing happened. She was playing with the ropes—‘experimenting,’ is what it says in the report—then she fell down and hurt herself. Utter, total bullshit. But she doesn’t budge an inch.

“The uniforms don’t know what to do. Fuck, neither would I—whoever heard of something like this? I mean, sure, people playing sex games, they get carried away, someone gets hurt . . . so they don’t tell the truth about how it happened. Anyone who works ER around here is going to see a few of those every year. But this one, with the witness and all, it was for real, all the way.

“So they call in the detectives. Nothing. They even try a social worker. Blank. Zero. Nada.”

“Christ.”

“The second one, she gets found by her aunt. Comes to pick her up in the morning for church, can you believe