LITMIR.BIZ

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and the trainer and the groom are all posing, and the photographer is just about to take the picture, and Shorty hauls Reese off the horse and jumps on top of him and clocks him right in the nose.”

      “Short fight,” Debi said, nodding. “Blood everywhere.”

      “That’s right,” Young said. “Shorty wasn’t afraid of anything. And proud? He had that small man’s pride.”

      Debi said, “Like how all the jockeys and exercise riders have to have these really big girlfriends, just to show all the normal-sized men that they can get any girl they want. Just ’cause they’re small doesn’t mean ... well, you know.”

      “Doesn’t mean they got small dicks.”

      “Daddy!”

      “Well, it’s true. Right, Trick? Every man worries about the size of his dick.”

      Trick said, “Not me. Not anymore. My dick could be a yard long and it wouldn’t matter to me.”

      Young grimaced. “Sorry.”

      Trick shrugged.

      Debi forged on. “So what happened was, for the New Year’s Ball that the Horseman’s Association puts on, Shorty brought this unbelievable woman. Not his wife, I might add. This was during one of his bad spells when he was drinking like it was going out of style. Anyway, this woman must have been six-two, two hundred pounds—bigger than me, even—and she had this gigantic goddamn chest.”

      Young nodded his head. “That’s right. I had the pleasure of being Debi here’s escort that night, and that woman had the biggest kazoobies in the world, and there’s Shorty strutting alongside her like a rooster, big stupid grin on his face, hanging onto her arm like a little boy and his momma.”

      “Well,” Debi said, “he had his flaws, I guess, but I still can’t figure out why anybody would want to kill him. He wanted people to respect him, sure, and he wanted to be successful, but who doesn’t? I mean it’s not like he was a goddamn serial killer or something.”

      Trick looked at Young. “Any leads yet?”

      Young shook his head. “All I know is he was down on his luck. He had that horse die on him a couple of months ago.” He turned to Debi.

      “Download,” she said. “Shorty’d just had the owner a few days when it happened. The vet said it was colic.”

      Trick said, “What’s colic?”

      “Any kind of intestinal problem, but usually it’s a twisted bowel.”

      “What causes it?”

      “Any number of things. Coughing can cause it. The horse might cough so violently it flips its stomach. Or if a horse lies down and then gets up suddenly, that can cause it. There’s about seventy-five feet of intestine in a horse’s stomach. Or if food gets impacted, that can cause it, too. We have to check our horses’ droppings every day to make sure they’re not too hard.”

      Young said, “Something fishy about that horse’s death. Soon as I get a chance, I’m going to ask around a bit.”

      “Did all this hurt Shorty’s business?” Trick asked.

      “His business was already hurting. By then pretty much everybody—everybody but Debi, that is—had jumped ship on him. My guess is he owed somebody some money, but I don’t have any evidence yet. I’ve checked into two of his owners. One of them—an old lady—she’s clean, but the other one, Doug Buckley, he’s a crafty son of a bitch. Tomorrow I’ll check into the Internet guy.”

      “Mr. Khan,” Debi said. “Mahmoud Khan.”

      “The man whose horse died?” Trick said.

      Debi nodded.

      “Rich?”

      “Oh, yeah, he’s rich. You pretty much have to be rich to own thoroughbreds. Mr. Buckley’s rich, too.”

      “How’d he make his money?” Trick asked.

      “Won the lottery. Eight million. He owns Someday Prince, which I’m saddling in the stake today.”

      “Which reminds me,” Young said to his daughter, “please don’t go around giving out my phone number to scumbags like Percy Ball.”

      Debi made a face. “He said it was important, Daddy. I thought he might help you with the investigation.”

      “Well,” Young said grudgingly, “he did. He told me somebody offered Buckley a hundred large for Someday Prince.”

      “When? I never heard about this.”

      “Couple of weeks ago.”

      Debi thought for a moment. “But Shorty was part owner. He wouldn’t have agreed to it. He was gaga over that colt.”

      “That’s right, he vetoed it.”

      Debi shook her head. “He thought that colt was his come-back horse, the next Secretariat. He thought he’d be back on top again.”

      “So I’ve got a question,” Trick said. “How does a trainer so down on his luck that everybody abandons him suddenly acquire not one, but two millionaire owners?”

      They laid off the fourth and lost the fifth. Then Debi had to excuse herself to prepare Someday Prince for the eighth. She was more than a little excited, not only because it was her first time listed as trainer but because the first horse she was saddling was entered in the feature race of the day, the $75,000 Bold Ruckus Stakes for three-year-old Ontario-bred colts and geldings.

      As she stood up to leave, her father said, “Good luck, sweetie.”

      “Do I look all right?” she asked. She was wearing a three-quarter-length lime green dress with a black ivy pattern up one side. She had cleaned and polished her old white eight-hole Doc Martens. She had tinted her hair for the occasion; no longer was it fire-engine red, now it was blood red. She was so nervous she was perspiring, and her nose stud twinkled.

      “You look great,” her father said. “Sort of Christmassy.”

      “I don’t feel Christmassy.”

      “Why, what’s wrong?”

      “It’s so soon after what happened to Shorty. I should be wearing black, but we’re supposed to look nice in the saddling enclosure. The owners expect it.”

      “Besides,” said Trick, “you may have to get your picture taken.”

      She smiled. “If that happens, Uncle Artie, I want both of you in the winner’s circle with me.”

      Young said, “What about Buckley? He might have something to say about a big fat cop and a guy in a wheelchair taking up space in his photograph.”

      “I don’t think we’ll see him. He phoned yesterday to say he wouldn’t be able to make it.”

      “Interesting,” Young said. “He moved out of the Airport Hilton shortly after I paid him a visit. Did he say where he was?”

      “No, he just said something about some meeting or some previous commitment. I can’t remember for sure.”

      “Have you met him yet?”

      “I saw him once or twice early on, when he first hired Shorty, but not since what happened. I’ve just spoken to him on the phone, that’s all. Listen, I gotta go.”

      She hurried off.

      The waitress came by, and Young said, “It’s like a desert around here.”

      “Four?” she asked.

      Young looked at Trick, and Trick nodded.

      When she’d gone Trick said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

      “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

      “I’d

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