“The air-conditioner in this tin can ain’t hardly breathing. Motherfucker’s on life support, and it’s fadin’. Gotta be a hunnert degrees in here,” Jud Repke said.
Ronald Mortvedt, at the wheel of the white pickup truck he’d bought off a Louisville used car lot, glanced over at his complaining companion.
“You turnin’ into some kind of pussy? Little heat ain’t gonna kill you.”
Repke’s light blue denim shirt had sweat crescents spreading under each arm. Repke’s forehead glistened with heat-produced moisture. Mortvedt sat chilly behind the wheel, his black T-shirt dry against his muscular torso. Mortvedt never sweated.
“Open the damn window if you have to,” Mortvedt added.
“We got a layer of dust in here already sifted through the cracks of this piece of shit,” Repke grumbled. “I ain’t opening no damn window.”
They drove on in silence through the late afternoon, the only sound for miles that of the pickup’s engine straining up the highway that rose toward Colorado Springs. Interstate 25 would take them south into New Mexico, their next stop on what Mortvedt called their “horse hunt.”
Repke shifted restlessly in his seat. He rubbed out another Marlboro butt in the rapidly filling ashtray, which wobbled as he did so. “Look at this plastic crap. Don’t know why you bought something made by them hillbillies down in Tennessee.”
“That’s no way for you to talk about your people,” Mortvedt said. “Your folks, they were from up in them Kentucky hills, where the mines were. That’s what you told me, right?”
“They did their living up there. I don’t. I’m a former hillbilly,” Repke said, settling back in his seat, his right shoulder against the door, red NASCAR cap brim down over his eyes.
Mortvedt shook his head. “There ain’t no such thing,” he said.
Repke reached behind him to the ice chest on the floor behind his seat and took out a can of Coors. He said, “Why didn’t we rent one of those new Chevy pickups, the ones with all the doodads on ’em? Bet the air-conditioning works in those suckers.”
Mortvedt’s eyes remained on the road as he answered. “Don’t make no sense to spend that kind of money until we find our horse. Why put all those miles on a rental? Clunky as this thing is,” he said, tapping the dashboard, “we can sell it when we’re done. Stoner gave us a nice chunk of ’spense money. What we don’t spend, we’ll split.
“Once we’ve found our horse, we’ll buy a used one-horse trailer, probably get one off somebody at the racetrack. We’ll haul the horse back to Chicago in that.”
“If we find the right horse,” Repke reminded.
Mortvedt said, “We’ll find the son of a bitch, don’t you worry about that.”
The sound of Repke fumbling in the cooler caused Mortvedt to turn to him for a moment. “The beer just pops out on you in this here heat. You drink too much beer.”
“There ain’t no such thing.”
Their mission had begun with a summons from Harvey Rexroth. Mortvedt flew into Louisville, then had been picked up by Randy Kauffman and taken to Willowdale Farm.
Without going into detail, Rexroth told Mortvedt, “I want you to buy a horse for me.”
Mortvedt’s stoic face did not reveal the surprise he felt. The functions he’d performed thus far involved killing horses, not purchasing them. “What kind of horse?”
“Let’s take a little drive,” Rexroth said.
The two men entered the waiting car and Kauffman drove to the part of Willowdale Farm known as the Annex. Kauffman pulled the car up to the fence of a paddock that contained one horse, a dark bay colt that was grazing in the middle of the damp field.
“Take a very, very good look at him,” Rexroth instructed Mortvedt as they walked through the lush grass toward the grazing horse. “I want you to buy a horse,” Rexroth repeated, “that looks as much like this colt as possible. He’s got to be a racehorse, a three-year-old, one that can compete at least at the allowance level at a major track like Kentuckiana or Heartland Downs.
“This one,” Rexroth said, gesturing toward the field, “is three years old. As you can see, he hasn’t got a distinguishing mark on him-no blaze, no white feet, nothing that stands out from the standpoint of color or markings. He’s not real big, not small either. Being a bay, he’s in the majority of the horse population as far as color.”
Mortvedt’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the horse. “He’s plain, all right. But he’s put together right,” he said appraisingly. The little man walked around to the other side of the horse, which was casually grazing while keeping one eye cocked on him. “Damn good balance, good hindquarters. He’s got a helluva shoulder on him. Nice clean legs, too. Bet he can run a little. Am I right, boss?”
Disregarding the question, Rexroth resumed issuing his instructions.
“I don’t care where you look for this horse’s double-in fact I don’t want to know-but you can pay whatever it takes. Stoner will give you ample expense money when we return to the house. When you’ve found our horse, contact Stoner and he will wire the purchase price. Naturally, the sale would have to be private, and there must be absolutely no hint of any connection to me.
“When you’ve got the horse, call me here. If I’m not at Willowdale, they’ll reach me. I’ll want you to deliver the new horse to my racing stable at Heartland Downs. Leave him there with my trainer, Kenny Gutfreund. I’ll have made the arrangements so that he’ll know you’re coming. As far as he’s concerned, you’re just bringing in a new horse that I heard about and decided to buy.”
That night, Mortvedt drove to Louisville. After buying the white pickup truck the next morning, he met Repke, described the job, and within an hour the two men left for Des Moines, Iowa. Two days at nearby Prairie Park, a combination racetrack-casino facility featuring 1,001 slot machines, served only to diminish Repke’s bankroll as he gambled while Mortvedt checked out the horse population. He found nothing they could use. From Prairie Meadows they drove to Oklahoma City, whose Sooner Park racetrack proved similarly barren of eligible equine prospects.
Repke was relieved to get out of Iowa. “I lost a bundle back there,” he said. “I never seen so many quiet white women in one place in my life. Just stare at those slots, stare at those slots, that’s all they did. Threw me way off my game.”
“How do you know they was women?” Mortvedt said.
Repke said, “You got a point there, partner. They get to a certain age out here in this farm country, they sure start to look alike. From the back, there was a lot of them I couldn’t tell if it was a pointer or a setter, swear to God. Sometimes from the front, either.”
Two more tries were similarly unproductive, one in Wyoming at a little track named Evanston Downs, the other at Pioneer Park outside Denver.
Mortvedt had explained to Repke, “I can’t be looking to buy this horse in Louisiana or Texas, where too many racetrackers know me. And I want to be as far away from Kentucky or Chicago as I can when I go after this horse. But I never been to California or New York, don’t know shit about the tracks or the people there. So we’ll try somewhere else, where a couple of country boys like us won’t stick out like tits on a bull.”
They’d watched a Sunday program at Evanston Downs, then two days of racing at Pioneer Park, plus attending the workouts at both places. A horse named Joyce’s World that won the feature the day they were at Evanston Downs, the $15,000 Werblin Memorial, looked “a helluva lot like what we’re after,” Mortvedt said, “but he’s five years old. Can’t use him.” Now, they were headed to New Mexico.
“Don’t know how they can call Wyoming the Big Sky country, like they got a fuckin’ patent on it,” Repke said as he looked out his window. “How could a sky be any bigger or higher than this one?”
They were still heading south on Interstate 25. They would pass Raton, New Mexico, just over the Colorado border, without stopping, since the racetrack there had long ago closed. This long, smooth highway would carry them to their next destination, the little track located a few miles south of Santa Fe.
On Sunday afternoon, their second day at Santa Fe, Mortvedt sat forward in his grandstand seat and said to Repke, “I must have missed this s.o.b. if they galloped him this morning. Check out the number seven horse here.”
As the field for the eighth race walked past the stands, Repke looked at horse number seven, then at his program. “Name’s Lancaster Lad. Bay three-year-old colt. Owned and trained by W. L. Connaughton. Bred here in New Mexico.”
Mortvedt said, “What’s his record look like?”
“Only started three times. Won two of them, all this year.” Repke looked up at the tote board. “He’s the favorite here, two to one.”
“Let’s hope these cowboys know what they’re doing with the betting,” Mortvedt said, now scrutinizing Lancaster Lad through binoculars as the field assembled behind the starting gate on the other side of the track. “Because this one looks like what we’re looking for.”
Two hours later, the deal was done. Lancaster Lad had won his race by four lengths. As he posed for the traditional winner’s circle photo, Mortvedt leaned across the chain-link fence and called to Lancaster Lad’s owner-trainer, “Mr. Connaughton, could I speak to you when you have time? I’m interested in making an offer for your horse there.”
Connaughton tilted his Western hat back on his head as he moved over to the fence. He was a lean, middle-aged man with a long, deeply sun-tanned face. He wore a white, long-sleeved shirt, a bolo tie under a turquoise clasp, dusty jeans and boots, and an expression of slight shock that was quickly being overtaken by major avarice. “Mister, you just come back over to Barn Fourteen in about a half hour and we’ll talk some business.”
Negotiations lasted until dusk started to obscure the mountain range to the north of the pretty little track. They started in the track kitchen, continued in Connaughton’s tack room office, then concluded back in the track kitchen over a round of beers.
Connaughton had begun by inviting Mortvedt to “make me an offer.” Mortvedt responded by requesting that the angular horseman “set a price.” The figure initially announced of $40,000 was for what Connaughton described as “the fastest three-year-old in New Mexico. Lancaster Lad’s just coming into his own, fellas. Took my time with him, but it was worth it. He’ll blow the doors off anything around here.”
Mortvedt didn’t even respond, merely looking disdainfully at the ceiling. He left it up to Repke, who said: “Maybe you didn’t get our drift, mister. We don’t want to buy your whole stable-just this one horse. Forty thousand would be about the total worth of all the damn horses you got here, and I’m probably going a little high at that.
“We’re interested in just this one. And we’re not going to be keepin’ him around here so he can dust these hammer heads.”
Back and forth they went, in the protracted tradition of horse dealing, before finally agreeing that Mortvedt would deliver to Connaughton the next afternoon $28,000 in cash for Lancaster Lad and another $2,000 for a beat-up, but usable, one-horse trailer to be used for hauling their acquisition to Chicago.
“This horse is tattooed, right? And you got papers on him?” Mortvedt said as their meeting neared its end.
“Son, you ain’t out in the Territories,” Connaughton said. “Course I got those things. I’m giving you a helluva deal here. If my grandson wasn’t suffering under leukemia and I didn’t need the money for the hospital bills, you’d never be able to buy this horse off of me. He’s the fastest horse I’ve ever raised.
“See you fellas tomorrow,” he said as he got up to leave. As they watched the screen door of the track kitchen bang shut behind Connaughton, Repke said, “What is this Lancaster Lad going to do up in the big time?”
“Probably not much,” Mortvedt replied. “The fastest horse in New Mexico these days is probably no better than a lower-level allowance horse up north. They ain’t got the talent down here.”
“So why would a guy like Rexroth have us go to all the time and trouble to find this sucker?”
Mortvedt gave Repke an icy stare. “None of our fuckin’ business,” he said. “Remember that.”
On their way toward the door, Mortvedt stopped at the lunch counter and addressed a stocky Navajo man, a backstretch worker who had been quietly monitoring their negotiations with Connaughton.
“Chief, let me ask you something,” Mortvedt said. “How bad off is Mr. Connaughton’s sick grandchild?”
The man snorted, then turned back to his beer. “That old tight pockets never been married in his long and sorry life.”
When they pulled away from Santa Fe the following morning, Repke looked back. He could see through the window into Lancaster Lad’s trailer stall. “Horse’s doing fine back there,” he said.
Mortvedt drove slowly away from Barn 14. Repke watched as Connaughton’s barn receded in the right-side mirror of the pickup.
Repke said, “Twenty-eight grand for this little horse? Man oh man….”
“Didn’t want to bargain with the bastard any longer than we did,” Mortvedt said, turning the wheel of the truck out of the stable area and onto the service roadway. “What do I give a shit whether we paid too much? What we paid wasn’t our money.”
“Shake hands with that man, better ask for a receipt for your fingers,” Repke said, as W. R. Connaughton continued to enthusiastically wave goodbye. “He thinks he’s pulled off the biggest score in these parts since the Spaniards rode in.
“That old son of a bitch,” Repke concluded admiringly, “would sell the grazing rights on his grandmother’s grave.”