ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel. Joe Tone
Читать онлайн.Название Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008204822
Автор произведения Joe Tone
Жанр Драматургия
Издательство HarperCollins
He flew.
On the phone with Forty-Two, Ramiro, still reeling from the phantom dick-shooting, steered the conversation back to the horses. He said Tempting Dash was looking good.
“What’s up with Chevo?” Forty-Two asked. “How’s the forecast? How’s he?”
Chevo was ready, Ramiro said. But that was hardly enough for the Zetas. They were under assault from so many angles—from the Gulf, from the Sinaloa, from Calderón, from the Americans. The idea of losing something as simple as a horse race seemed unfathomable to them, and they took every step to avoid it.
Along with doping their horses, they loved to fix races, especially the unregulated ones in Mexico. Sometimes they bribed the “starters,” who manage the gates, and their assistants, who load the horses into the gates, paying them to hold on to their opponents’ horses for a millisecond. Other times the Zetas paid off the groundskeeper to drag one lane of the track until the dirt was packed tight, letting the briber’s horse fly across the harder surface. Often they slipped their jockeys a little battery-charged device that sent a shock wave into the horse, reminding him to pick up the pace. All of these cheats were methods favored over the years by American cowboys, but the Zetas were especially zealous in their application of them.
Ramiro told Forty-Two about the deal he’d cut with the gate crew at Lone Star Park: five hundred dollars each, plus four thousand for the head starter and an extra thousand for the one who made sure Tempting Dash got out clean. Operativo Huesos was in motion. But there was a second phase, which was what Forty-Two wanted to talk about now.
“Hope he wants to run, because once the jolts are applied, it doesn’t matter,” Forty-Two said, referring to the electric-shock mechanism he wanted Ramiro to slip the jockey.
The jockey they’d tapped to ride Tempting Dash was Julian Cantu. He’d grown up navigating the bush tracks of rural Mexico, unregulated, poorly groomed courses carved out of the trees or desert, with fans forming the rails. Julian was known as a smart jockey who raced with an edge—sometimes too much of an edge. He’d been fined recently for bumping his horse into another. Julian was on board, Ramiro assured his boss. (Cantu was never formally accused of being a buzzer, and no evidence was ever found that he did. This may only have been bravado on the part of Ramiro.)
Forty-Two would soon hang up abruptly, as he often did. But not before making his prediction.
“You will win, Gordo,” Forty-Two said. “We’re going to win.”
DALLAS, TEXAS
October 2009
Ramiro hardly had time to reflect on what it might mean to win the Dash for Cash Futurity. His days barreled past. Trainers called to ask when shipments of medicine would arrive. Vets called to talk about horses they’d treated. Auction managers called to ask Ramiro whether he planned to pay up before the next sale. His secretary called to outline options for whatever flight or hotel or rental-car reservation he wanted to change at the last minute. He moved perpetually and impetuously among Dallas, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, and Monterrey, not to mention the ranches dropped into the barren stretches in between. He never wanted to pay the change fee. He always paid the change fee. Everyone pays the change fee.
The morning of the Dash for Cash, Ramiro flew to Dallas from Oklahoma City, where he’d just spent $113,000 on nine horses. He drove to the track in a rental Nissan. It was finally cool in Dallas, that brief window of fall that graces north Texas around Halloween. He called his parents, who were flying in from Monterrey for the race. Ramiro’s dad reminded him to bring a jacket.
Ramiro arrived early at Lone Star Park, a prefab oasis of stucco and glass rising from the suburbs west of Dallas. The track was built in 1997, and after twelve years, it felt only gently used. Many nights, it was. Racetrack attendance was in decline across the country, as the sport faded in the shadow of more popular pastimes. The tracks in Texas were falling prey to the sport’s most deadly predator, casino gambling, which flourished across each of Texas’s American borders. At Lone Star, and at tracks around the country, the betting window looked ever more like something that belonged in a sports museum.
Only big-money quarter-horse races brought crowds of more than a couple thousand people, and the Dash for Cash Futurity was one of them. It was the first stakes race of the track’s quarter-horse meet. Lone Star wasn’t the highest-dollar track in quarter-horse racing; only New Mexico’s Ruidoso Downs and California’s Los Alamitos could reasonably make that claim. But since Lone Star’s meet took place late in the season, it offered one of the last chances of the year for owners to squeeze another quarter-mile from their best colts and fillies. That, along with the purse, lured some decent horses and a decent crowd.
Ramiro found a table with his parents, and they fixed their eyes on Tempting Dash. He moved fluidly, which was lucky. He was the youngest horse in the field. He had also chipped a bone in his knee during one of the races in Mexico, so Ramiro had taken him to a Texas vet to get the knee cleaned up. Technically, he was running on a surgically repaired leg, and he’d run hard on it just a couple of weeks earlier, in the qualifier for this futurity.
That’d been quite a sight: Tempting Dash, the horse no one had heard of, crashing hard toward the rail and cutting off half the field on his way to a two-length win. Chevo and Ramiro figured that his hard move toward the infield was just his way of shielding his young eyes from the track’s harsh lights, since he’d never before run at night. But it had looked like an act of aggression.
That was just a qualifier, though. This was the race Ramiro cared about, because this was the race Forty cared about.
The starters herded the horses into the gates one by one. Their cow-pony genes kept them calm, but even in that regard, Tempting Dash stood out. The vet from the Texas Racing Commission, who’d examined all the horses before the race, couldn’t help noticing how placid Tempting Dash was as the race approached. A two-year-old? With this kind of crowd on this kind of night? As chill as the doc had ever seen.
All went quiet. The gates flung open. If Ramiro really had paid off the gate crew, they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. Another well-bred horse, one of the favorites, burst into an early lead. Who knew if a chipped-knee horse, once so skinny they called him—
El Huesos! About six seconds in, Tempting Dash sped past the lead horse and shaded toward the rail, away from those lights again. Just like that, he was ahead. His lead grew, and suddenly Ramiro could feel his family’s eyes turning away from the track and toward him. When he checked the scoreboard, it confirmed that Tempting Dash had not just won the $445,000 race—$178,000 to the winning owner—but that he’d covered the 400 yards in just 19.379 seconds. It was a track record.
Ramiro pushed through the crowd and down to the winner’s circle. His Nextel rang out with calls of congratulations, and he called friends to tell them the news. He made plans to celebrate that night, and he secured some kick-ass tickets for the next day’s Dallas Cowboys game, from a friend who happened to play in a Grammy-winning norteño band called Intocable. “Untouchable.”
As Ramiro pulled out of the parking lot, another call came through. It was El Flaco, a Zetas boss in Monterrey. Ramiro could hear Forty in the background.
“His horse won, right?” El Flaco asked in Spanish. They rarely called Forty by his name on the phone, worried the Americans might be listening in. He was referred to only in vague terms like “the boss” or “that guy.”
“Yes, his horse won,” Ramiro said. “It’s a track record.”
“Again?” El Flaco asked him. “I didn’t get that last part.”
“Tell him it is a track record,” Ramiro repeated. “A track record.”
“Got it, sir,” El Flaco said. “Got it.”
“We