“I’ll come in with you,” she said, starting to get out.
“No! Believe me, if I walk in with Mrs. Geary, the guys will be heckling me about it five years from now.”
“Then I’ll wait. One look at that leg and they’ll give you the afternoon off. I’ll drive you home.”
“No,” Ricardo said again. “I’ve got a couple of projects going, I mean betting projects, and I have to be on the scene.”
“I thought you didn’t care about money.”
“I care about it, but I want to make it my way, without any lawyers.”
After closing the car door he stayed there for a moment, looking down at her. “Thanks for the ride, Mrs. Geary. Next time I walk past your driveway I’ll be ready to jump.”
“Call me and tell me how you are.”
He had started away. He gave her a quick look, but because of the damn dark glasses there wasn’t much he could see.
“All right, sure.”
She was watching him, and he limped more than necessary. The scrape was beginning to hurt, and the blood had made its way through her loosely tied scarf and was running down his leg. He wished he could have thought of some easier way to make the lady’s acquaintance. Here they were, living in the same city, part of the same business, but their worlds didn’t intersect. Ricardo’s family had reached Miami from Cuba when he was nine. The schools had caught him young enough so he spoke English with hardly an accent. His father, a manufacturer in Havana before the upset, had become an automobile salesman, selling mainly to Cuban friends who had managed to get out with money. Everybody had to have a car in this country, and he had done well. He had his own AMC dealership now, life insurance, investments, a three-bedroom house in Hialeah; he voted regularly, watered the lawn regularly, paid his bills within ten days, and had American flag decals on his car windows. In Ricardo’s view, he was a little too satisfied with what he had accomplished. He had money, sure, but all around him, though he chose not to see them, were people with money.
While still a senior in high school, Ricardo got a job as a Surfside dog boy, parading the dogs and then retrieving them after the race and taking them back to the kennel. The pay was ridiculously low. With a syndicate of fellow students, including one girl who was good at math, he began to bet. The dogs were supplied by twenty-five contract kennels. Soon Ricardo knew them by sight, and how they had performed in their previous races. He listened to handlers and trainers. His friend worked out a simple computer program and fed it to the high school computer. By the end of the first meeting they were making money, though not enough to justify the work that went into it. Ricardo was the only one who stayed interested. When the others went off to college, Ricardo, after a terrific fight with his father-he still lived at home, but he and his parents didn’t have much to say to each other anymore-took a full-time job as assistant kennelmaster. That meant precisely what it said. He did everything the kennelmaster didn’t want to do himself.
The doctor, a third-year medical student, put on a tight bandage and told Ricardo he was a lucky son of a bitch. Hardly anyone came out of a head-on collision with an automobile without more damage.
“Next time get the license number.”
“I know, and get a lawyer. I prefer to work for my money.”
Dee Wynn showed up at the lockup kennel after most of the afternoon’s dogs were already in. He was an old dog man, and until Ricardo, he hadn’t kept an assistant for more than a month at a time. But Ricardo listened to his stories and stayed out of his way when he was drinking, which these days was most of the time. He shaved infrequently, and one of his upper front teeth was missing. His blue jeans were so stiff with dirt and grease that they could have stood up by themselves. He was the only snuff-dipper Ricardo knew.
“Rick the spic,” he said amiably, breathing out fumes. “Keep at it and you are bound to win. How many animals missing?”
“Just four, Mr. Wynn, from Tip-Top.”
“Well, if they don’t get here in a minute and a half, I say we scratch those dogs, much as the racing secretary don’t like scratches.”
He wavered into his office, rooting in his ass to get at the itch that lived there. He took the pint out of his back pocket and stood it on the desk, clearing a space among the litter of undone paperwork.
The Tip-Top station wagon slowed to a stop outside the delivery chute. Ricardo signed for the dogs and walked them across the scales and into cages. The new arrivals stirred up the kennel, and everybody began to yap and complain. Ricardo stepped outside.
“Dee’s pissed that you’re late again,” he told the handler.
“Yeah, well. They’re always so damn slow loading. Can you cool him down?”
“He’ll forget it. He’s loaded. Big surprise. What about the new bitch? What’s she been going?”
The handler dropped his voice a notch; this was classified information. “Tell Me True. That leg action, oh, my, you know she’s going to go. Worked a thirty-one seventy, feeling nice and saucy this morning. Kennel thinks we’re going to win some money on her.”
Ricardo locked in. Now, for the next two hours, he and Dee Wynn would be alone in the receiving kennel with ninety-six dogs.
He went to look in at Tell Me True, who had drawn the number-two position in the opening race. She was listed as red, but she was darker than red, with a blaze on her chest. Her brisket was unusually deep, running back in that sweet greyhound curve to no stomach at all. She stood quietly on her toes, tongue lolling, looking at him intelligently, as though she could guess what was going through his mind.
He had already handicapped this race, but now he made an adjustment. Including Tell Me True, there were three standout entries. The favorite, who had finished out of the picture in his last three starts and had been dropped into slower competition, looked like a sure winner. He was starting from the rail, and he always opened fast. But he liked to run wide on the turns, and he would be jammed and bumped. There had been a heavy sea fog in the night, and the track would be slow-to-moderate until it dried out fully. This dog performed well under such conditions. Ricardo made his calculations again. He looked into the office; Dee was nodding. Ricardo went to an equipment locker, opened a small box under some dirty rags, and armed himself. Later, when he was removing the identifying tags, he touched the favorite lightly on the hindquarters with a palm needle. The syringe was short and squat, with a half-inch plunger; the needle protruded between his middle fingers. He was being watched by the blank eye of the closed-circuit TV, but the camera was behind him, fixed in position over the door to the weighing room.
The dogs settled down. Ricardo put a new stack of records on the stereo. Customers had begun to appear on the other side of the big window, peering in hopefully to see which of the dogs looked like winners. Dee Wynn stayed in the office, sipping and moving papers. Ricardo could hear the leadout boys horsing around in their locker room on the other side of a thin partition. The paddock judge and the scale clerk were talking dogs. Ricardo listened, but it was the usual guesswork.
He muzzled the eight dogs for the first race and brought them out. They were weighed again, and the paddock judge checked their ear tattoos and the color of their toenails against his Bertillon card, and released each dog to his leadout boy for his number blanket.
With nothing to do for a moment, Ricardo watched the changing odds on the big board in the infield. The canned bugle sounded. The boys led the dogs out for the first parade of the matinee.
“Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer called, “the greyhounds are on the track.”
Ricardo stepped into the open.
His beard, or betting agent, was a flamboyantly dressed black named Billy, halfway up the grandstand. A vacant seat next to him was stacked with cross-referenced programs and computer printouts, window dressing to explain why he won more bets than ordinary people. He had a girl with him, to guard his files while he was inside at the windows. The little clique that was always around him left him alone when he was working, but trooped inside with him, hoping to learn his secrets. He was a fancy bettor, hard to copy. He sometimes bet a race a dozen ways, and the machines would be locked by the time the kibitzers perceived that all the crazy bets were keyed to the same two numbers. He was known as Binoculars Billy, because he liked to check his figures against the liveliness and general tone of each dog as it came out of the paddock. What he was really doing, of course, was watching Ricardo.