Mortal Lock by Andrew Vachss

couple of hundred bucks?”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “You believe them?”
    “Come on.”
    “Let’s get something to eat,” the old man said.
    8
    “You don’t think you know enough yet?” the old man asked me.
    I’d been going to the track with him for more than three months straight. I’d moved around a few times, just in case anyone was paying attention. It’s easy for me to move, only takes an hour or so. I don’t own a lot of stuff.
    “No,” is all I said.
    “You got all the lingo down, now. You know how to read the program, how to bet, that’s more than ninety percent of the lame
stugotz
that hang around any track.”
    “But there’s more, right?”
    “Sure. There’s always more. Me, I’m still learning, picking stuff up.”
    “Okay, then.”
    He gave me a look, but he didn’t say anything. That night, we sat in his favorite place in the grandstand. “You know why this is the perfect spot?” he told me the first time we sat there. “You can see the action in the turns, on the backstretch, and coming home, too. That’s ’cause this is a half-mile track, get it?”
    “No. What difference could that make? I mean, they all run the same distance, right?”
    “Half-mile track means two circuits to get the whole mile in, okay? Two circuits, four turns.”
    “They’re not all like this one?”
    “Hell, no. Most of them are mile tracks, now. Like the fucking Meadowlands. Used to be a lot of five-eighths courses, too—that’d be three turns, real long stretch. Like Sportsman’s Park just outside Chicago, that was a real beauty.”
    “So, one mile, that’s only two turns?”
    “Yeah,” he said, like he was sucking on a lemon. “Gives you faster times, sure, but you can’t actually see most of the race, unless you’re one of those guys don’t mind wearing fucking opera glasses.
    “By me, binoculars narrow it down too much. You can only watch a few horses at the same time, depending on how tight the flow is. You miss a lot that way. Most people like the two-turn tracks, because the horses run closer to form there. That means the favorites win more often.
    “I’m not talking about horse people; I mean the guys who bring their girlfriends to the track, watch them bet their birthday numbers, think it’s cute.”
    I thought about the guy I was watching for. Then I said, “That’s good for guys like us, right?”
    He gave me one of his looks, but he didn’t say anything.
    10
    “How long have you been doing this?” I asked him one day. We were at a diner, a short distance from the track, having breakfast, waiting for the gates to open so we could watch some new shippers qualify.
    “All my life,” he said. “My old man used to take me, when I was just a kid. That’s why they ran the trotters at night, so working guys could go. But I didn’t do it like this, come anytime I want, I mean, until I retired.”
    “You had a regular job?”
    “What, you think everyone’s like you?” he said. “Con Edison, just like my old man. Thirty-five years I put in.”
    “That’s a long time.”
    “Didn’t seem long to me,” he said. “I figured, I had things to look forward to. My old man, he died on the job, when I was still in high school. I remember him always saying he was going to retire someday, spend all his time playing golf.
    “My old man loved golf, but he only got to play once in a blue moon. He was going to move to Florida—they got a golf course down every block, there. But he never got to go. Me, I could have had what I wanted right here in Yonkers.”
    “So what got messed up?”
    “Everything got messed up. My wife, Pam, she had plans, too. Just like my old man. She never got to see any of them come true, either. Fucking cancer.”
    He looked down at his hands. Big hands, I noticed. I always look at a man’s hands—the eyes show you the right-now—it’s always the hands that show you the history.
    After about a minute, he said, “My kids, I got a boy and a girl. He’s