“Exactly.”
“Not a chance,” my guy said. “We don’t know each other.”
“Except as rival owners.”
“There are hundreds of rival owners.”
“Is a horse of yours going to win if this guy’s doesn’t?”
“I certainly hope so.”
“So they’ll look at you.”
“Not if it looks like the man was the target, instead of the horse.”
I asked, “When?”
He told me anytime within the next four days.
I asked, “Where?”
He told me the horse was in a facility some ways south. Horse country, obviously, grand fields, lush grass, white fences, rolling hills. He told me about long routes through the countryside, called gallops, where the horses worked out just after dawn. He told me about the silence and the early mists. He told me how in the week before a big race the owner would be there every morning to assess his horse’s form, to revel in its power and speed and grace and appetite. He told me about the stands of trees that were everywhere and would provide excellent cover.
Then he stopped talking. I felt a little foolish, but I asked him anyway: “Do you have a photograph? Of the target?”
He took an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. Gave it to me. In it was a glossy color picture of a horse. It looked posed, like a promotional item. Like an actor or an actress has headshots made, for publicity. This particular horse was a magnificent animal. Tall, shiny, muscular, almost jet-black, with a white blaze on its face. Quite beautiful.
“Okay,” I said.
Then my guy asked me his own question.
He asked me, “How much?”
It was an interesting issue. Technically we were only conspiring to shoot a horse. In most states that’s a property crime. A long way from homicide. And I already had an untraceable Barrett Ninety. As a matter of fact, I had three. Their serial numbers stopped dead with the Israeli army. One of them was well used. It was about ready for a new barrel anyway. It would make a fine throw-down gun. Firing cold through a worn barrel wasn’t something I would risk against a human, but against something the size of a horse from two hundred yards it wouldn’t be a problem. If I aimed at the fattest part of the animal I could afford to miss by up to a foot.
I didn’t tell the guy any of that, of course. Instead I banged on for a while about the price of the rifle and the premium I would have to pay for dead-ended paperwork. Then I talked about risk, and waited to see if he stopped me. But he didn’t. I could tell he was obsessed. He had a goal. He wanted his own horse to win, and that fact was blinding him to reality just the same way some people get all wound up about betrayal and adultery and business partnerships.
I looked at the photograph again.
“One hundred thousand dollars,” I said.
He said nothing.
“In cash,” I said.
He said nothing.
“Up front,” I said.
He nodded.
“One condition,” he said. “I want to be there. I want to see it happen.”
I looked at him and I looked at the photograph and I thought about a hundred grand in cash.
“Okay,” I said. “You can be there.”
He opened the briefcase he had down by his leg and took out a brick of money. It looked okay, smelled okay, and felt okay. There was probably more in the case, but I didn’t care. A hundred grand was enough, in the circumstances.
“Day after tomorrow,” I said.
We agreed on a place to meet, down south, down in horse country, and he left.
I hid the money where I always do, which is in a metal trunk in my storage unit. Inside the trunk the first thing you see is a human skull inside a Hefty One Zip bag. On the white panel where you’re supposed to write what you’re freezing is lettered: This Man Tried to Rip Me Off. It isn’t true, of course. The skull came from an antique shop. Probably an old medical school specimen from the Indian subcontinent.
Next to the money trunk was the gun trunk. I took out the worn Barrett and checked it over. Disassembled it, cleaned it, oiled it, wiped it clean, and then put it back together wearing latex gloves. I loaded a fresh magazine, still with the gloves on. Then I loaded the magazine into the rifle and slid the rifle end-on into an old shoulder-borne golf bag. Then I put the golf bag into the trunk of my car and left it there.
In my house I propped the racehorse photograph on my mantel. I spent a lot of time staring at it.
I met the guy at the time and place we had agreed. It was a lonely crossroad, close to a cross-country track that led to a distant stand of trees, an hour before dawn. The weather was cold. My guy had a coat and gloves on, and binoculars around his neck. I had gloves on too. Latex. But no binoculars. I had a Leupold & Stevens scope on the Barrett, in the golf bag.
I was relaxed, feeling what I always feel when I’m about to kill something, which is to say nothing very much at all. But my client was unrelaxed. He was shivering with an anticipation that was almost pornographic in its intensity. Like a paedophile on a plane to Thailand. I didn’t like it much.
We walked side by side through the dew. The ground was hard and pocked by footprints. Lots of them, coming and going.
“Who’s been here?” I asked.
“Racetrack touts,” my guy said. “Sports journalists, gamblers looking for inside dope.”
“Looks like Times Square,” I said. “I don’t like it.”
“It’ll be okay today. Nobody scouts here anymore. They all know this horse. They all know it can win in its sleep.”
We walked on in silence. Reached the stand of trees. It was oval-shaped, thin at the northern end. We stepped back and forth until we had a clear line of sight through the trunks. Dawn light was in the sky. Two hundred yards away and slightly downhill was a broad grass clearing with plenty of tire tracks showing. A thin grey mist hung in the air.
“This is it?” I said.
My guy nodded. “The horses come in from the south. The cars come in from the west. They meet right there.”
“Why?”
“No real reason. Ritual, mostly. Backslapping and bullshitting. The pride of ownership.”
I took the Barrett out of the golf bag. I had already decided how I was going to set up the shot. No bipod. I wanted the gun low and free. I knelt on one knee and rested the muzzle in the crook of a branch. Sighted through the scope. Racked the bolt and felt the first mighty.50 shell smack home into the chamber.
“Now we wait,” my guy said. He stood at my shoulder, maybe a yard to my right and a yard behind me.
The cars arrived first. They were SUVs, really. Working machines, old and muddy and dented. A Jeep, and two Land Rovers. Five guys climbed out. Four looked poor and one looked rich.
“Trainer and stable lads and the owner,” my guy said. “The owner is the one in the long coat.”
The five of them stamped and shuffled and their breath pooled around their heads.
“Listen,” my guy said.
I heard something way off to my left. To the south. A low drumming, and a sound like giant bellows coughing and pumping. Hooves, and huge equine lungs cycling gallons of sweet fresh morning air.
I rocked backward until I was sitting right down on the ground.
“Get ready,” my guy said, from above and behind me.
There were altogether ten horses. They came up in a ragged arrowhead formation, slowing, drifting off-line, tossing their heads, their hard breathing blowing violent yard-long trumpet-shaped plumes of steam ahead of them.
“What is this?” I asked. “The whole roster?”
“String,” my guy said. “That’s what we call it. This is his whole first string.”
In the grey dawn light and under the steam all the horses looked exactly the same to me.
But that didn’t matter.
“Ready?” my guy said. “They won’t be here long.”
“Open your mouth,” I said.
“What?”
“Open your mouth, real wide. Like you’re yawning.”