“This horse is tattooed, right? And you got papers on him?” Mortvedt said as their meeting neared its end.
“Son, you ain’t out in the Territories,” Connaughton said. “Course I got those things. I’m giving you a helluva deal here. If my grandson wasn’t suffering under leukemia and I didn’t need the money for the hospital bills, you’d never be able to buy this horse off of me. He’s the fastest horse I’ve ever raised.
“See you fellas tomorrow,” he said as he got up to leave. As they watched the screen door of the track kitchen bang shut behind Connaughton, Repke said, “What is this Lancaster Lad going to do up in the big time?”
“Probably not much,” Mortvedt replied. “The fastest horse in New Mexico these days is probably no better than a lower-level allowance horse up north. They ain’t got the talent down here.”
“So why would a guy like Rexroth have us go to all the time and trouble to find this sucker?”
Mortvedt gave Repke an icy stare. “None of our fuckin’ business,” he said. “Remember that.”
On their way toward the door, Mortvedt stopped at the lunch counter and addressed a stocky Navajo man, a backstretch worker who had been quietly monitoring their negotiations with Connaughton.
“Chief, let me ask you something,” Mortvedt said. “How bad off is Mr. Connaughton’s sick grandchild?”
The man snorted, then turned back to his beer. “That old tight pockets never been married in his long and sorry life.”
When they pulled away from Santa Fe the following morning, Repke looked back. He could see through the window into Lancaster Lad’s trailer stall. “Horse’s doing fine back there,” he said.
Mortvedt drove slowly away from Barn 14. Repke watched as Connaughton’s barn receded in the right-side mirror of the pickup.
Repke said, “Twenty-eight grand for this little horse? Man oh man….”
“Didn’t want to bargain with the bastard any longer than we did,” Mortvedt said, turning the wheel of the truck out of the stable area and onto the service roadway. “What do I give a shit whether we paid too much? What we paid wasn’t our money.”
“Shake hands with that man, better ask for a receipt for your fingers,” Repke said, as W. R. Connaughton continued to enthusiastically wave goodbye. “He thinks he’s pulled off the biggest score in these parts since the Spaniards rode in.
“That old son of a bitch,” Repke concluded admiringly, “would sell the grazing rights on his grandmother’s grave.”
Chapter 22
When Ronald Mortvedt had begun killing horses for a living, back in Louisiana a few years earlier-piece work that he picked up from an old friend of his who was training on the show horse circuit-his methods were crude.
Early results were mixed and rough, involving horses driven into fences, others inoculated with toxins that would develop into fatal diseases, some urged onto well-traveled highways through holes created in farm fences.
Some of these results passed the post-mortem scrutiny of the insurance companies. Others did not. After collecting his up-front money, Mortvedt would only receive the remainder of the agreed-upon payment if the policy was paid off in full. It bothered Mortvedt, and his friend and business scout, Chuckie Lanier, to be what they considered short-changed if the insurer did not come through.
So, Mortvedt worked to improve his murderous technique. A dead horse wasn’t worth much to him or its owner if it appeared to have been clumsily slaughtered. These horse deaths, Mortvedt realized, had to be as natural or accidental appearing as he could make them. Calculating and thorough, Mortvedt spent months devising ways to meet the standard of efficiency required.
Not long after he first came to Kentucky to do his killing work for Harvey Rexroth, Mortvedt fastened upon a neater, cleaner method than before. He began suffocating his equine victims.
At first, Mortvedt used a practice he’d heard about from Chuckie Lanier, his Louisiana cohort. This involved stuffing ping-pong balls up the nostrils of the horse so that air-flow was halted and suffocation followed. The problem here was the time involved: too many minutes-between ten and fifteen minutes, usually, during which discovery was always a possibility-spent with the terrified, struggling horse, trying to hold its head in place and keep it from crashing around the stall in its frantic attempt to breathe. The horses made too much noise as they thrashed about, terror-driven, their hooves resounding off the flooring. There was no way to keep that from happening. Mortvedt came to believe the risk of this technique, no matter how effective it was as a means of so-called natural death, was too great.
Mortvedt switched to plastic garbage bags. This was another tremendously effective method, leading to suffocation and the resultant “death from natural causes” perceived by those who did not have a clue as to what was going on, but it, too, had its drawbacks. It was difficult and dangerous work to keep the garbage bag tight enough over the head of the panic-stricken horse who would fight so desperately for life.
Both of these methods required the enlisting of a muscular assistant, for as strong as he was for his size, Mortvedt could not manage this alone. Thus it was that Jud Repke had been sought out and signed up. “You got the strength, Jud,” Mortvedt rather grudgingly admitted.
After their joint venture had been in full swing for many months, Jud Repke found himself becoming increasingly reluctant to go on these jobs, despite what he regarded as the amazing amount of money he made working with Mortvedt. Jud would get a summoning call from Mortvedt, agree to a meeting, then try to figure out a way to get out of it.
Jud was never much good at that kind of figuring. But Ronald Mortvedt was awfully good at reading the thoughts and intentions of Jud Repke.
One night, as they sat drinking beer in the parking lot of Repke’s apartment building, Mortvedt said, “Goddam it, Jud, what’s wrong with you? Every time I tell we got us another one to do, you give me that hangdog, hound dog look of yours. I don’t fucking get it. Your daddy had to work half a year up in those coal mines where you’re from to make what I get you in a couple of hours. Hours!
“Now, you never did come straight with me about how much money you made stealing those fancy cars. But I sure as hell doubt it was any more than I’m putting into your pocket. And the risk factor…shit! You see any risk factor in this?
“That’s why I don’t get what your problem is,” Mortvedt said, angrily crumpling his empty beer can.
Repke realized, somewhat uneasily, that this was probably the longest statement he had ever heard from the close-mouthed Cajun. He was further unnerved when he heard Mortvedt say next, “And I don’t like it a goddam bit, man,” giving Jud that slit-eyed sideways look that never signaled anything good as far as Repke had observed.
Jud looked out the window of the car. He said, “It’s not that I mind what we’re doing. It ain’t that. And the money is goddam golden, man, I know that. I appreciate that.” He turned to face Mortvedt and said, “I just don’t like the way we’re doing it. I hate to see those horses suffering like that, it just bothers the shit out of me. I see their eyes rolling around in their heads, their chests bulging out….I don’t like it. It stays with me.”
The memory of Mortvedt patting, and chirping to, and otherwise distracting the horse named Wilton Lad so Jud could suddenly slip the deadly garbage bag over its head came back to Repke with a horrifying flash. He couldn’t help but shudder. He hoped Mortvedt hadn’t noticed.
Jud nervously took a short pull on his quart of beer. He didn’t like to complain to his benefactoring buddy, that was for sure, but he didn’t like the dreams he was having, either. However, weighing Mortvedt’s menacing expression against his need to express himself, Jud figured he’d gone far enough on this subject. And he sure as hell didn’t want to admit to Mortvedt that he was dreaming about dying horses.