Free Watch Me Go by Mark Wisniewski

Tom ran the two-furlong races based on
     an understanding that results would never be leaked to the
Form
. One of the horses would be connected to some gambling pal of Tom’s, the other to
     what Tom called a “rookie owner,” a rich grandstander who knew nothing about training
     but had recently claimed his first racehorse for fun. Rookie owners came and went
     all the time—in fact Jasper’s theory was that horseracing relied on them—and Tom would
     bump into them at the stables, try to take them under his wing, and give them tips
     on feed, hay prices, and so forth. After he’d won their confidence, Tom would tell
     them about secret workouts he knew of, two-horsesprints where owners could assure their horses were tight without having impressive
     workout times reported publicly. Without grandstanders knowing about the workout times,
     primed-to-win horses, when they did run at Finger Lakes, would presumably command
     higher odds, meaning, again presumably, that rookie owners could cash in on long-shot-priced
     tickets. And of course nothing was certain but rumor had it that, thanks to a run
     of luck that began with a secret sprint, one rookie owner quit his job laying concrete
     to live in a penthouse with a view of pretty much all of Central Park.
    To keep the sprints secret, owners supplied surrogate jockeys such as sons, daughters,
     or neighbors. Rookie owners would agree to an evening, usually a Tuesday, the off
     day at the track, and, given the nature of the horse people present, wagers took care
     of themselves.
    Tom and his gambling pals would arrive on Jasper’s acreage a couple hours early, so
     they could slow down the rookie’s lane with water tanked on the back of a pickup and
     rake the mud over, then double-check the rookie’s gate to make sure it was rigged
     to open a half second slower.
    A half second advantage is all you need in a sprint.
    A half second puts you out in front by two and a half lengths.

17
    DEESH
    “HAND ME YOUR CELL,” Bark says, and now, seeing I’ve already caved in about the gun, I want to say,
Man, who do you think you are?
    But I know who Bark is. He’s the one driving. So all I say is, “Why?”
    “We’re
disappearing
, man. I leave both our cells at my place, cops’ll figure we’re still in the Bronx.”
    I yank out my cell, hand it over, hiss out a sigh I keep mostly to myself. Then we
     are rolling again. We slow down, then glide. A block from Bark’s building, he double-parks,
     gets out and jogs off, not a word over to me, which trips me about what he’ll do in
     there. He has no woman to call is our current understanding, though I wouldn’t put
     it past him to be speed-dialing Madalynn. I’d call her myself if I had my phone. I’d
     tell her a disguised good-bye.
    Then Bark’s back outside, across the street, walking toward the truck. His posture
     says he’s armed. He ignores me as he gets behind the steering wheel.
    “No need for it to be loaded,” I say.
    “Right,” he says, without even a quick glance over.
    Which, if you know Bark like I do, means his gun’s not only loaded—it’s begging him
     not to stay hidden.

18
    JAN
    AS TOM AND COLLEEN CORCORAN and Jasper and my mother and I and Tug crammed into Jasper’s Galaxie to head for the
     secret sprint, the Corcorans’ yard struck Tug as emptier than usual, and he cringed
     when he realized why: The forty-gallon drum his family had burned leaves in was gone.
    Had Tug not been Tom Corcoran’s son, this drum’s absence would have struck him as
     the result of petty thievery, but, of course, Tug would
always
be Tom’s son, so now, as Jasper’s Galaxie headed off, Tug considered a reality most
     every Finger Lakes horse person had taken to heart at least once, the absence of The
Form
Monger’s wife.
    That cautionary tale had played out semipublicly back when Tug was just the tongue-tied
     kid who followed Tom around the track, and the upshot of this tale, as Tom once explained
     it