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.”
“Why?”
“To equalize the pressure. Like on a plane. I told you, this is a loud gun. It’s going to blow your eardrums otherwise. You’ll be deaf for a month.”
I glanced around and checked. He had opened his mouth, but halfheartedly, like a guy waiting for the dentist to get back from looking at a chart.
“No, like this,” I said. I showed him. I opened my mouth as wide as it would go and pulled my chin back into my neck until the tendons hurt in the hinge of my jaw.
He did the same thing.
I whipped the Barrett’s barrel way up and around, fast and smooth, like a duck hunter tracking a flushed bird. Then I pulled the trigger. Shot my guy through the roof of his mouth. The giant rifle boomed and kicked and the top of my guy’s head came off like a hard-boiled egg. His body came down in a heap and sprawled. I dropped the rifle on top of him and pulled his right shoe off. Tossed it on the ground. Then I ran. Two minutes later I was back in my car. Four minutes later I was a mile away.
I was up an easy hundred grand, but the world was down an industrialist, a philanthropist, and a racehorse owner. That’s what the Sunday papers said. He had committed suicide. The way the cops had pieced it together, he had tormented himself over the fact that his best horse always came in second. He had spied on his rival’s workout, maybe hoping for some sign of fallibility. None had been forthcoming. So he had somehow obtained a sniper rifle, last legally owned by the Israel Defense Force. Maybe he had planned to shoot the rival horse, but at the last minute he hadn’t been able to go through with it. So, depressed and tormented, he had reversed the rifle, put the muzzle in his mouth, kicked off his shoe, and used his toe on the trigger. A police officer of roughly the same height had taken part in a simulation to prove that such a thing was physically possible, even with a gun as long as the Barrett.
Near the back of the paper were the racing results. The big black horse had won by seven lengths. My guy’s runner had been scratched.
I kept the photograph on my mantel for a long time afterward. A girl I met much later noticed that it was the only picture I had in the house. She asked me if I liked animals better than people. I told her that I did, mostly. She liked me for it. But not enough to stick around.
ME & MR RAFFERTY
I can tell what kind of night it was by where I wake up. If I’ve been good, I’m in bed. If I’ve been bad, I’m on the sofa. Good or bad, you understand, only in the conventional sense of the words. The moral sense. The legal sense. I’m always good in terms of performance. Always careful, always meticulous, always unbeatable. Let’s be clear about that. But let’s just say that some specific nighttime activities stress me more than others, tire me, waste me, leave me vulnerable to sudden collapse as soon as I step back into the sanctuary behind my own front door.
This morning I wake up on the hallway floor.
My face is pressed down on the carpet. I can taste its fibers on my lips. I need a cigarette. I open one eye, slowly, and move my eyeball, slowly, left and right, up and down, looking for what I need. But before we go on, let’s be clear: However haltingly you read these words, however generously you interpret the word
A bad night.
