LITMIR.BIZ

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a colt that died. What was its name? Down something. Downtown?”

      Still looking away, Percy said, “Download. The Internet guy owned him. Paid a ton of money for him, but he didn’t do much. Won a special weight maiden race at the Fort last fall, which, as I’m sure you’re aware of, don’t mean fuck all, and after that he couldn’t cut it with winners. Anyways, he died.”

      “In his stall?” Young asked.

      Percy nodded at his beer bottle.

      “What killed him?”

      “Vet said colic.”

      “How old was the colt?”

      “Three.”

      “Young horse. Otherwise healthy?”

      Percy nodded again. “Seemed so.” He finished the first bottle of beer and eyed the second. “Aren’t you gonna drink yours?”

      “You can have it.”

      Young studied Percy a moment, dropped some money on the bar, and walked outside into the sunshine.

      He was unlocking the door to his minivan when a voice behind him shouted, “Hey!” Young looked up. With one hand Percy was shielding his eyes from the sun, and with the other he was holding open the side door of the bar. “He had three!”

      “Three what? Who had three?”

      “Shorty. He had three owners. Picked up a new one. Guy won the lottery or something. Dresses like Saturday Night Fever. Shorty claimed a colt for him. Won his first race for them, and won it very impressive, too. He was supposed to run him back Sunday in the stake. I don’t know what’ll happen now. All’s I know is Shorty didn’t like the man.” Then he disappeared back inside the bar, and the door closed.

      Detective Lynn Wheeler came into Young’s cubicle at Homicide at 2:00 p.m., shortly after he had returned from his visit with Percy, to tell him that the patholo-gist, Elliot Cronish, had called. Wheeler knew there was no love lost between the two men. Young complained that Cronish never took anything seriously. He was more interested in the murderer’s modus operandi than he was in the pain and suffering of the victim.

      “What did he want?” Young asked. He was sitting at his desk. She was standing beside him. Because he was so tall and she was so much shorter, their eyes were at the same level. Wheeler had a physical peculiarity: one of her eyes was brown and the other was blue. When she was being especially businesslike or when she was angry, she somehow drew Young into her brown eye. When she was happy or light-hearted, he found himself staring into the blue one. Right now he was looking into the serious eye, the brown one.

      “It was about your friend,” she said, tucking her blonde pageboy behind her ears. “After they took the body back to the lab and cleaned it up, they found a mark.”

      “What kind of mark?”

      “Dr. Cronish described it as horseshoe-shaped. Above the left temple.”

      Young frowned. “Shit. I was so sure.”

      “About what?”

      “That he’d been murdered.”

      “They found horsehairs, too. Stuck in the wound.”

      “Horsehairs? Well, that ices it, I guess. Shorty got kicked to death by a horse that everyone swears up and down wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

      That night Percy Ball partied in an empty tack room in an empty barn at the far reaches of the backstretch of Caledonia Downs Racetrack. With him was a young man named Marvis and a woman whose name Percy never learned. As an exercise rider Percy considered himself superior to the other two, who were both grooms.

      Marvis had a cube of hashish wrapped in foil. He said Percy and the woman could have some if they paid him ten dollars each. Neither of them was carrying any money, but they promised to pay him the next day, so he agreed. He slid the end of a safety pin into a small chunk of hash, and the three of them, squatting like peasants in the smelly room, inhaled the smoke through a plastic drinking straw.

      Later, the woman, who was skinny and tattooed and had dyed her short, spiky hair lemon yellow, sat beside Marvis and traced her fingers through his cornrows.

      They were drinking Black Ice, and after a while Marvis lay down and went to sleep.

      Because the barn was not in use, its power had been shut off, and now, as dusk fell, Percy picked up the flashlight Marvis had brought with him and, accidentally-on-purpose, flipped back his blond hair in its beam. When the woman didn’t react, Percy said, “Both of us, we dye our hair, eh. Same colour, almost.”

      The woman took the flashlight from Percy’s hand and showed him a tattoo of a scorpion on the back of her neck. Then she pulled up the left sleeve of her T-shirt and showed him a tattoo of a teddy bear on the point of her shoulder. Percy asked if she had any other tattoos, and could he see them. She said no, but he didn’t know if she meant that she didn’t have any others or that he couldn’t see them.

      There was a silence, and soon the woman seemed to forget about Percy and resumed playing with Marvis’s cornrows.

      Percy set his chin. He reached for the flashlight and turned it off. In the darkness, he said, “You like black guys, do you? You like doin’ it with black guys?”

      The woman scrambled to her feet and bumped and stumbled her way out of the tack room. Percy thought about going after her—he had a jackknife in his pants pocket—but even though the beer was all gone, he was content to stay where he was. He wished he had some snacks, though—Bar-B-Q Fritos, maybe, and a couple of cans of Dr. Pepper.

       Friday, June 2

      This time, instead of chasing a private school girl, Campbell Young was himself being chased—by Shorty Rogers, his white Maple Leafs jersey splattered with the bright blood that sprayed from his blond Beatles mop at every twist and turn of the same series of alleyways that had appeared in the first dream. But it’s Percy Ball, not Shorty, who has the Beatles haircut, Young told himself in the dream. And when he looked again, it was Percy chasing him. Young gasped and opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, his chest heaving. He sat up, swung his feet onto the floor, careful not to wake the still-snoring Reg, curled at the foot of the bed, and made his way to the bathroom. There was an open Racing Form on the vanity beside the toilet, and as he stood there urinating he looked down at it, his head at an angle, and became so engrossed in the past performances of a filly named Small Wonder that he was still standing there, penis in hand, thirty seconds after the last drop.

      A few minutes later he was at his kitchen counter pouring milk over a half-bowl of Grape-Nuts when he heard the clicking of Reg’s nails as she made her way down the hall.

      Young opened the door onto his little balcony and discovered that it was a fine, sunny morning. As he held the door, Reg waddled out and slowly and painfully made her way down the wooden steps to the backyard. Young watched from the balcony as she snuffled around before settling down on her haunches. When she was finished, she returned to the bottom of the staircase, studied the first step long and hard, made several false starts, and then finally, with one protracted effort, mounted the stairs to the balcony and walked past Young, who was still holding the door for her, back into the kitchen, where her breakfast of Iam’s Senior Diet, topped by a torn-up piece of caraway rye, was waiting in her bowl.

      “Don’t expect me to start carrying you up those stairs,” Young said to her as he sat down in his dining nook with his Grape-Nuts. “No free rides around here.”

      With age, Reg had become not only arthritic but constipated as well. She had developed a rectal itch and was now in the habit of dragging herself in a sitting position across the living room carpet, her forelegs doing the pulling, the paws of her rear legs up by her ears, her anus making hard contact with the abrasive material of the broadloom. This caused her to grunt with pleasure. Young’s cleaning lady complained that the dog was staining the carpet.

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