These accordion nights, as they came to be known, were all too frequent. I tried desperately to get him to leave. But he wouldn’t. He had paid me for the month, which still had two weeks to run, and he wouldn’t take back a partial payment.
“Look, Joe,” he pleaded, “Buford will hit in a couple of days, long before the end of the month. By then I’ll have all the green I can use. I’ll go then and give you a bonus to boot.”
“So how much have you grossed so far?” I asked him.
“Well, nothing yet,” he admitted. “But that’s because Alphonsina didn’t come ashore. It will be different with Buford. It’s headed right for us.”
There is little doubt that Tommy’s train had left the track some ways back. But I couldn’t take any more accordion. I could hear the tuneless, discordant, unmelodious racket through the walls at night when he played the vile instrument in the van. So when Buford was about three days out, I enlisted Bullseye Larry, who owed me a favor, to steal the van while Tommy was down at the corner with his Florida lottery bets. Not to chop it up or send it to Venezuela, mind you, but long enough to dump the dreaded accordion in the Intercoastal. He could park the van up the street when he was done.
Unfortunately, Bullseye got caught with a hot Honda Prelude and ended up in the Dade County slammer before he was able to heist the van. Two important things happened next. The first thing was, Brokenbridge didn’t seem to be collecting on any of his numerous bets.
“Something is wrong with the numbers, Joe,” he confessed to me when Buford was but two days away. “I should be up a bundle by now. It ain’t workin’ right. I don’t think Buford is going to hit Miami.”
The second thing was Tommy’s bolita runner. I should tell you about him. He was the bag man for the local bolita and well known to everybody in the neighborhood because of a singular characteristic. Years ago he was working out in West Hialeah in the industrial parks at a zinc die cast place that made jalousie window cranks. He worked one of the big presses that cut the sprue away from the casting. Got his hand caught in the press one day. He lost all but his pinkie finger on the right hand. His little finger looked about eight inches long. And he couldn’t bend it. It stuck straight out, ramrod stiff. The Cubans called him Tubo de Relámpago. Rough translation in English: Lightning Rod. But everybody else just called him Lightning.
Lightning was terrified of Buford. The closer the hurricane got, the more agitated he became. He began to spend his nights out at Tommy’s van, drinking beer and enduring the accordion — strange behavior.
My part-time operative Frankie Swinehart, or Swine as he came to be commonly dubbed, had just landed a cushy job with Calder Race Course security. A position he’d struggled to obtain after many years of working drudge security in chilly car lots and crowd control at dangerous Cuban dances for the big firm in town. I was a bit surprised to see him come through my office door in uniform in the middle of a working day a half hour before post time.
He picked up Tommy’s chart off the lone office chair. “What’s this?” he said.
“Ain’t you supposed to be work-in’?” I asked.
He threw the chart on the floor and sat down. “Got a big problem, Joe. Everybody’s trying to move their horses out on account of the hurricane. We’re goin’ nuts over at Calder.”
“I can imagine. But what are you doin’ here?”
“There’s been an accident in the backstretch — Arnie Ritter.”
“Arnie! What happened?”
Arnie was a horse trainer. Years ago I was an assistant trainer under Buddy Wayne. I kept my track license up over the years and did odd jobs for some of the trainers in the backstretch. Arnie Ritter was one of them. He was a good trainer and a longtime friend.
“Arnie asked Jimmy Cox to let me off to come over and see you. He knows me, and you know each other. That big Glitterman colt Arnie’s been prepping gave him a shot in the chest. Broke some ribs and collapsed a lung. He’s in pretty bad shape.” The accordion music started up out in the parking lot. “Jeesus, what’s that racket?” Swine asked.
I told him about Tommy and Lightning and surmised that the two idiots had got an early start on a beer-drinking accordion night.
Swine continued, informing me that Arnie didn’t want me to waste time visiting him in the hospital. “Arnie’s son Bill has twelve head at Fairgrounds in Louisiana,” Swine said. “Arnie wants you to make sure his two colts in the Calder backstretch get out before the hurricane. He wants them shipped to Bill in Louisiana. Arnie told me to tell you that he has it fixed with the horseman’s bookkeeper to cut you a check for fifteen hundred to arrange transportation.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about arranging transportation,” I readily confessed. “Where am I supposed to find transportation?”
Swine shrugged. “How tough can it be? Find somebody with a horse trailer willing to take two head to Fairgrounds for fifteen hundred. Thing is, you ain’t got much time. That hurricane is supposed to come ashore around midnight.”
From the parking lot came a barely recognizable accordion interpretation of “Easter Parade,” vocal by Lightning Rod in slurred Spanish. “You got any good news for me?” I asked.
Swine pushed his bony body up from my client chair. “Yeah, I got to get back to work. That guy out there singin’ sounds like somebody wounded him in the throat.”
Up to now I hadn’t worried much about the hurricane. I’d been through a few. When Andrew hit, I was holed up at a hurricane party in the Surfer’s Bar and Grill just around the corner. They don’t normally have much surf in Florida, and it’s doubtful that a genuine, actual surfer ever set foot in Surfer’s Bar and Grill. But it was a hell of a party. We were all rather relaxed, so we just sort of crammed into the dining room when the front half of the roof blew down the street.
Remember I told you that Tommy was the only one happy about the hurricane? I might have been mistaken. Buford was less than twelve hours away. No matter which TV station I turned to, the weathermen were positively orgasmic. They seemed to be on a hurricane high. There was much grinning and jumping about. How the weather people were able to repress the urge to break out into joyous, hysterical laughter is a mystery — and more, a real tribute to their professionalism. Documentaries and specials were presented endlessly while hurricane watches and hurricane warnings choked off scheduled broadcasting. Anywhere up and down the coast from Key West to Vero Beach you were already a victim unless you had stockpiled a two months’ supply of canned goods, flashlight batteries, bottled water, and plywood sheets, and, oh yes, portable radios and a bathtub full of water to flush the john. They neglected to mention that given all the hysterics it would require a trip to North Carolina to find a retailer with items such as candles and batteries still on the shelf; provided, that is, one were able to get onto a major thruway going north. And all I had to do was get two horses to Louisiana.
I do have a company car, a ’65 Mustang convertible. Me and the Mustang crawled north toward Calder amidst the unwashed, with-out-plywood-sheets, no-bottled-water, batteryless rabble who were trying to put Buford in their rear view mirrors.
Calder was practically abandoned. Diehard, dedicated horse-players were clearly a solid minority in Miami this day. There were just a few hundred fans sprinkled about. In the backstretch it was a different story — one titled Pandemonium. It looked like a horse push-pull-drag-get-’em-in-the-van contest.