Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

From Murder at the Racetrack

Every night that June, from my cell window at Orofino, I watched the fireworks color-burn the midnight sky over the Indian reservation across the road. The colors lit up fields and sometimes the sparks would drift to earth and the old horses the Indians kept would scatter, faster than you would think they were capable of. Speed left from races they never ran, I told myself. I knew horses when I was a kid near Saratoga, in upstate New York. Whole worlds had happened since then. Those horses and fireworks were my only friends at the beginning of that summer.

I wasn’t in the race to win anymore. I’d fallen on some hard times in Eastern Washington and a gang that was a branch of the Posse made a deal with me. They’d pay me to finish off another man’s time in Idaho. I don’t know how they rigged it up, who they paid off. But one day they brought me into a hospital room in Spokane and the deputies that shackled me and took me to Orofino called me by a different name. I was inside under a new name and eight years stood between me and the door.

The Idaho State Correctional Facility at Orofino was an old brick campus, housing twice as many men as it was built for. It was a mixed classification facility, which is the worst, because the killers are in with the guys who forgot a child support payment. The guys doing a decade don’t look very kindly on the guy who gets to go home in three months. I was a maximum classification at that time, because the guy I was pretending to be had a record that began in the womb.

The guards came for me early one morning and cuffed me and shackled me for transport. I knew it couldn’t be good. Someone had filed a writ with the Federal Circuit Court and the federal judge had ordered that I be brought to his temporary chambers, in Boise. They were being forced to produce me, except I wasn’t anyone — I wasn’t the man they wanted incarcerated and I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone I was working for the Posse. In my own mind, they may as well have been driving a mute to Boise. We passed south through the beautiful Idaho mountains and trees and blue sky. The deputies driving me didn’t say a word, just stopped once for coffee and then drove on. We drove into the streets and city of Boise. I slept on a bench overnight in a holding cell and they brought me upstairs into chambers in the morning.

The judge was in robes and seated behind a large desk, with an older woman stenographer in front of the desk. My brother and an Asian man, both impeccably dressed in gray suits, stood in the back of the room. The judge addressed me.

“The court has been made aware of some unusual circumstances surrounding your case.” He pointed at my brother and the Asian man. I nodded and the judge continued. “We’re convinced... the court has been convinced...” He paused. “The court is convinced that a sealed record and immediate release is the only way you’ll be alive at the end of the week. The State of Idaho didn’t seem inclined to let you go — so the appeal was passed up to me.”

I didn’t say anything. The court bailiff came over and unlocked my cuffs and shackles. I rubbed my wrists.

The judge stood. “I’m instructing one of my marshals to escort you to the Nevada border so we don’t have a problem. I can’t help you if you re-enter this state. And you’re on your own with other problems — but we won’t hold you here as a stationary target.” He handed me some paperwork. “You’re free to go, as long as you’re leaving the state.”

I looked at my brother, who spoke to the judge. “He’ll ride with us to Nevada, Your Honor.”

“Keep your head down,” the judge said. He looked directly at me. “And watch behind you.”

My brother shook hands with me, but we didn’t say anything, not a word. He drove the new sedan behind the marshal’s car, with Mr. Osaka in the back and me in the passenger’s seat. It was a long ride, but finally we saw a sign for the Nevada state line. We crossed it and the marshal pulled a U-turn and headed north, back into Idaho.

Mr. Osaka mumbled something and my brother spoke to me.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t warn you, but we had a heck of a time finding you. You got yourself in pretty deep.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

My brother nodded as he drove. “We’d been looking for you, to come help with Mr. Osaka’s operation. In looking for you, we found out that the man you went as, the real man, just got arrested in Montana. It was only a matter of time before the Posse tried to get to you on the inside.”

Mr. Osaka mumbled to my brother.

“What’d he say?” I said.

“Mr. Osaka doesn’t speak,” my brother said. “He understands English perfectly well and he probably speaks it, although I’ve never heard him. I speak for him. Always, for the past five years. He talks in a kind of yakuza dialect — he and I speak it to each other and that’s it. Nobody else.”

“Handy,” I said. I hadn’t seen my brother much at the beginning of the last decade and not at all in the past five years, but years didn’t come between us. I just figured he had his own job going on, somewhere, and when my plans started to fail, I didn’t want to bring him down with me. He was a couple years younger than me and maybe I felt responsible. He’d gotten bigger since I’d seen him last.

“Do you want to work for Mr. Osaka?” my brother asked.

“What are we doing?” I said.

“Watching whales,” my brother said. And as we drove, he detailed the operation to me. In the end, I agreed.

Whales are a select group of Japanese businessmen, probably only two hundred worldwide, who come to the United States to gamble. They’re called whales because they bet huge — they’re up seven million, they’re down thirty million. If one of these guys walks into a small casino on a good night, he can bankrupt the place, or lose enough to let the casino build another club and a hotel.

Whales like bets that other gamblers can’t get their hands on and sometimes it can be exotic — betting on street fights, illegal car racing. But the yakuza control the horse racing and that means that the yakuza can sometimes control the whales.

Mr. Osaka bought seven hundred acres of land outside Reno, flattened it all out, put in a private horse-racing track and was getting set to lay in a private airfield when some of his contractors thought they’d muscle him for more money. Those contractors are gone and now my brother and I are in charge of the operation.

A private racetrack, with all the barns and stables. The whales own stuff all over the world and pretty soon, the private jets are coming in, with the stallions and racehorses the whales have accumulated. A horseman’s field of dreams. We’ve got the compound gated off and the whales pull up, with their limos and their drivers and their party girls. Every morning — the races start at eleven and they walk around, drinking, looking at the horses.

Mr. Osaka has only two betting windows open, run by Asian men the same as him. Tattoos on their hands, one guy with a Japanese character right on his throat. These are the honest men, bound to count the money, to take the verbal bets and always pay. No slips, no tickets. These guys are taking bets in the hundreds of thousands and never sweating.

Mr. Osaka walks the compound with us and mumbles to my brother as we pass the honest men by the bet windows.

“As children, they are not taught about wanting. Then, when they learn about money, they are taught it is filthy. The combination makes them honest,” my brother translates.

The favorite bet for the whales is the pinwheel. The pin-wheel lets the whale run his horse on Mr. Osaka’s track, but bet against other horses running at other tracks that come in by satellite feed. Your horse can finish second here but if you’ve matched it up against the right combo, say from Saratoga, or Pimlico, or Yonkers, you can double or triple your take. Or you can throw your money in a bigger hole. Money is green paper, to these people. They give more money to the party girls to keep them quiet than I’ve ever earned in my life. But that ended, too, once I got on Mr. Osaka’s payroll.