“Davenport? Lucas?”
Lucas turned, saw them, and smiled. “Hey. How’re you doing? Day at the races, huh?”
“The chief wants to talk to you. Like right away.” The fat cop hadn’t thought of it until the last minute, but this could be hard to explain.
“They pulled the surveillance?” Lucas asked. His teeth were showing.
“You knew about it?” The fat cop lifted an eyebrow.
“For a while. But I didn’t know why.” He looked at them expectantly.
The thin cop shrugged. “We don’t know either.”
“Hey, fuck you, Dick . . .” Lucas stood up with his fists balled, and the thin cop took a step back.
“Honest to Christ, Lucas, we don’t know,” said the fat one. “It was all hush-hush.”
Lucas turned and looked at him. “He said right now?”
“He said right now. And he sounded like he meant it.”
Lucas’ eyes defocused and he turned toward the track, staring sightlessly across the oval to the six-furlong starting gate. The jockeys were pressing their horses toward the gate and the crowd was starting to drift down the patio to the finish line.
“It’s the maddog killer,” Lucas said after a moment.
“Yeah,” said the fat cop. “It could be.”
“Has to be. Goddammit, I don’t want that.” He thought about it for another few seconds and then suddenly smiled. “You guys got horses for this race?”
The fat cop looked vaguely uneasy. “Uh, I got two bucks on Skybright Avenger.”
“Jesus Christ, Bucky,” Lucas said in exasperation, “you’re risking two dollars to get back two dollars and forty cents if she wins. And she won’t.”
“Well, I dunno . . .”
“If you don’t know how to play . . .” Lucas shook his head. “Look, go put ten bucks on Pembroke Dancer. To win.”
The two cops looked at each other.
“Really?” said the thin one. “This is a maiden, you can’t know . . .”
“Hey. It’s up to you, if you want to bet. And I’m staying for the race.”
The two internal-affairs cops looked at each other, looked back at Lucas, then turned and hurried inside to the nearest betting windows. The thin one bet ten dollars. The fat one hesitated, staring into his wallet, licked his lips, took out three tens, licked his lips again, and pushed them across the counter. “Thirty on Pembroke Dancer,” he said. “To win.”
Lucas was sprawled on the bench again and had started a conversation with the woman in the cowboy boots. When the surveillance cops got back, he moved down toward her but turned to the cops.
“You bet?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t look so nervous, Bucky. It’s perfectly legal.”
“Yeah, yeah. It ain’t that.”
“Have you got a horse?” The woman in the cowboy boots leaned forward and looked down the bench at Lucas. She had violet eyes.
“Just a guess,” Lucas said lazily.
“Is this, like, a private guess?”
“We’ve all got a couple of bucks on Pembroke Dancer,” Lucas said.
The woman with the violet eyes had a Racing Form on the bench beside her, but instead of looking at it, she looked up at the sky and her lips moved silently and then she turned her head and said, “She had a terrific workout at six furlongs. The track was listed as fast but it probably wasn’t that good.”
“Hmm,” said Lucas.
She looked at the tote board for a few seconds and said, “Excuse me, I gotta go powder my nose.”
She left, hurrying. The fat cop was still licking his lips and watching the tote board. The odds on Pembroke Dancer were twenty to one. Three other horses, Stripper’s Colors, Skybright Avenger, and Tonite Delite, had strong races in the past three weeks. Pembroke Dancer had been shipped in from Arkansas two weeks earlier. In her first race she finished sixth.
“What’s the story on this horse?” asked the fat cop.
“A tip from a friend.” Lucas gestured over his shoulder with his thumb, up toward the press box. “One of the handicappers got a call from Vegas. Guy walked into a horse parlor a half-hour ago and bet ten thousand on Pembroke Dancer to win. Somebody knows something.”
“Jesus. So why’d he lose his last race so bad?”
“She.”
“Huh?”
“She. Dancer’s a filly. And I don’t know why she lost. Might be anything. Maybe the jock was dragging his feet.”
The tote board flickered and the odds on Pembroke Dancer went up to twenty-two to one.
“How much you bet, Lucas?” the fat cop asked.
“It’s an exacta. I wheeled Dancer with the other nine horses. A hundred each way, so I have nine hundred riding.”
“Jesus.” The fat man licked his lips again. He had another twenty in his wallet and thought about it. Across the track, the first of the horses was led into the gate and the fat cop settled back. Thirty was already too much. If he lost it, he’d be lunching on Cheetos for a week.
“So you got anything good?” asked Lucas. “What was this thing about Billy Case and the rookie?”
The fat cop laughed. “Fuckin’ Case.”
“There was this woman lawyer,” said the thin one, “and one day she looks out her office window, which is on the back of an old house that they made into offices. The back of her office looks at the back of the business buildings on the next street over. In fact, it looks right down this walkway between these buildings. At the other end of this walkway there’s a fence with a gate in it, like blocking the walkway from the street. So you can’t see into the walkway from the street. But you can see into it from this lawyer’s office, you know? So anyway, she looks down there, and here’s this cop, in full uniform, getting his knob polished by this spade chick.
“So this lawyer’s watching and the guy gets off and zips up and he and the spade chick go through this gate in the little fence, back onto the street. This lawyer, she’s cool, she thinks maybe they’re in love. But the next day, there’s two of them, both cops, and the spade chick, and she’s polishing both of them. So now the lawyer’s pissed. She gets this giant camera from her husband, and the next day, sure enough, they’re back with another chick, a white girl this time. So the lawyer takes some pictures and she brings this roll of Kodachrome in to the chief.”
The first of the horses was guided into the back of the gate and locked. The woman with the violet eyes got back and settled at the end of the bench. The thin cop rambled on. “So the chief sends it down to the lab,” he said, “and they’re only like the best pictures anybody ever took of a knob-job. I could of sold them for ten bucks apiece. So the chief and the prosecutors decide there’s some problem with the chain of evidence and we wind up in this lawyer’s office with a video unit. Sure enough, here they come. But this time they got both the spade chick and the white chick. This is like in Cinemascope or something. Panavision.”
“So what’s going to happen?” Lucas asked.
The fat one shrugged. “They’re gone.”
“How much time did they have in?”
“Case had six years, but I don’t give a shit. He had a bad jacket. We think he and a security guard was boosting stereos and CD players out of a Sears warehouse a few months back. But I feel sorry for the rookie. Case told him this was how it’s done on the street. Gettin’ knob-jobs in alleyways.”
Lucas shook his head.
“Right on the street, in daylight,” said the fat cop.
The last horse was pushed into the back of the gate, locked, and there was a second-long pause before the gate banged open and the announcer called “They’re all in line . . . and they’re off, Pembroke Dancer breaks on the outside, followed by . . .”
Dancer ran away from the pack, two lengths going into the turn, four lengths at the bottom of the stretch, eight lengths crossing the wire.
“Holy shit,” the fat cop said reverently. “I won six hundred bucks.”
Lucas stood up. “I’m going,” he said. He was staring at the tote board, calculating. When he was satisfied, he turned to the other two. “You coming behind? I’ll drive slow.”
“No, no, we’re all done,” said the fat cop. “Thanks, Lucas.”