Read Mortal Lock for Free Online

purse; the horse that comes second, his owner gets half of what’s left, and so on … all the way down to fifth. So if you own a horse, he can get you a check even if he never wins a race. They do it that way because it’s better for the game. It costs just as much to feed a horse that never wins a race as it does to feed a world champ, so the idea is to spread the purse money around, help the owners out, keep more of them in the game.
    “Now the driver’s take is ten percent of whatever his horse earns in the race. Let’s say the purse is ten grand. That means five g’s for the winner’s owner, and five hundred for the driver, okay? So what you do, you tell the driver of the best horse, here’s a couple of grand for your
self
, you do the right thing. No big deal. All you got to do is make sure your horse, it’s not gonna be his night, see?”
    “If that’s the way it is, how come
you
bet on them?”
    I thought that was a good shot I’d just landed, but the old man didn’t even blink. “You stay away from those kinds of races. That’s something you have to learn. Some guys, they strictly play the stakes races,” he said. “A stakes race means the owners have to buy their way into them, keep putting up more and more money as the season goes along. The
stake
, see? You ante up, that lets you sit in. But you have to keep calling to stay in the pot.
    “Some of those races, the purse gets so big, you could
never
get to the driver. It’s not just that the driver’s in for a fat check if he gets his horse home—any driver gets seen tanking in a big race, he’s on the permanent shit list. You train one of the top horses, you
know
what he’s supposed to do out there, and you watch
close
. So even if the driver doesn’t get nailed by the track, the trainer, he’ll know.”
    “A big race, like the Kentucky Derby?”
    “Yeah,” he sighed. “Like the Kentucky-fucking-Derby. Only for a trotter, that would be the Hambletonian. Named for the original, see?”
    “I never—”
    “I know.” He spit over the rail. “You never heard of it.” He tooka breath, like he was taking control of himself. “Listen,” he said, “you think the trotters don’t run for big money, too? That Hambletonian I just told you about? Last year, the purse was two million, okay? That sound like chump change to you? They got all kinds of races for six figures, and a few go over that. There’s plenty of money in this game, you got the right horse.”
    He sounded like a guy apologizing for something, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything at all.
    “You couldn’t pay a driver enough to pull in one of those big races,” he said. “And finding three of them crazy enough to try, forget it.”
    “So why wouldn’t they cheat in the other direction?” I asked him. “Isn’t there a way to make them go faster?”
    “You mean like when they stick a garden hose down their throats and pump them full of baking soda? Sure. That’s what they call a ‘milkshake’—it stops their muscles from locking up so they still got plenty of zip down the stretch. But you mostly see that used on thoroughbreds, not trotters.”
    “How come? They’re all horses, right?”
    “No! That’s what I’ve been telling you. Okay, look, they call all standardbreds ‘trotters,’ but it’s not like they all trot. Some of them are pacers. Trotting and pacing, those are different gaits. But you got to hold that gait. If you start running, you’re out.”
    He held up his hand to stop my next question, then he showed me what he was talking about, using the first two fingers of each hand: “Trotters move their outside front leg and inside rear leg at the same time; pacers move both outside legs, then both inside legs, like sidewinders, see?
    “The big thing to remember is what I told you, they got to stay on whichever gait they pick. If they break stride, start galloping, the way the ponies do, you got to take them off to the side, settle