Fatal Odds Read online

  FATAL ODDS

  Also by John F. Dobbyn

  Neon Dragon

  Frame-Up

  Black Diamond

  Deadly Diamonds

  FATAL ODDS

  A NOVEL

  JOHN F. DOBBYN

  Copyright © 2016 John F. Dobbyn

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-199-7

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Longboat Key, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  There are no words in any language to express how much love and joy I find in my best pal, my total inspiration, my partner in every adventure, my first editor and title writer, and the finest person I believe God ever created—my beautiful bride, Lois.

  I also thank God for the one who fills our lives with an abundance of love, laughter, and pride—our third musketeer, our son, John.

  FATAL ODDS

  PART ONE

  ONE

  THE MANTRA THAT has soothed the furrowed brows of criminal defense attorneys from the early days of the Old Bailey to current times in Boston’s Suffolk County Superior Court is simply this: The Lawyer Always Goes Home.

  On the other hand, it provides little solace to one facing that most humbling challenge a lawyer can face: defending a client the lawyer truly believes to be innocent. Doing one’s best and “going home” falls painfully short of the mark. The only bearable outcome is winning. And that’s a curse.

  That curse crowned a particular morning that began with a phone call at 5:45, shattering the first moments of actual sleep I had managed all night. I’d spent the prior six hours playing and replaying an event of the previous day that I could not drive out of my consciousness.

  The horses were approaching the gate for the fourth race at Suffolk Downs. I was at the track to watch two jockeys I had known nearly as brothers since their early teens. Roberto and Victor Mendosa were born to my mother’s sister on the sunny isle of Puerto Rico. In something of a rescue mission, my mother and I had brought them over in their teens to live with her in what was then the Hispanic bastion of Jamaica Plain—frequently referred to by other Bostonians as “Jamaica Spain”.

  Both boys had worked with horses in Puerto Rico since the time they were big enough to wield a mucking rake. Again in the form of a rescue a few years later, I got them off the gang-dominated streets of Jamaica Plain and onto the backstretch crew of a horse racing trainer of enormous talent and even greater heart, Rick McDonough. He had an eye for talent. He had them both in the saddle as exercise boys before their sixteenth birthday.

  The jump from there to the calling of a jockey required three things: horsemanship, courage, and size. No teacher on earth could instill the subtle arts of horsemanship better than Rick. Courage, on the other hand, is, or is not, inborn, and no man or woman can engage in that most dangerous of all sports without a generous God-given abundance of it. Diminutive size—the ability to weigh in within ounces of one hundred and ten pounds—as Rick often said, also cannot be taught. As fate had it, Roberto and Victor were blessed with all three. By their nineteenth birthday, they were both among the ten leading riders at Suffolk Downs.

  The horses were at the post. Roberto, the older brother by a year, was on Dante’s Pride in post position three. Victor’s horse, Summer Breeze, was beside him in post position four. I remember glancing at the tote board and noticing that Roberto’s horse was the odds-on favorite at even money. Victor’s horse was the second favorite at 3 to 2. All the other horses in the race were there hoping for a miracle of third money.

  I was at the rail as the horses approached the gate. I gave both boys the thumbs up and got a smile and nod from each of them.

  Victor’s horse walked smoothly into the box like a pro. I noticed that Roberto’s horse balked and pranced in front of the gate until two assistant starters locked hands under his tail and urged him into the gate. Nothing particularly unusual there. Thoroughbreds are frequently born high-strung.

  I was glued to the three and four post positions during that time-stopping pause while the starter waits for every horse to have all four feet planted and head straight. I could almost feel the adrenaline rush that courses through every jockey in the gate.

  Then the break. That ear-splitting bell and the clang of metal gates flying open. In a split second, the guttural breaths of horses driving powerful hips and legs in a burst of acceleration, spraying showers of dirt, were punctuated by the yips and yells of the jockeys.

  I half-walked, half-ran down the rail. My eyes were glued to the brothers. Victor’s four horse broke fast. He was even for the lead with the five horse to his right. I saw Roberto’s three horse stumble leaving the gate. He struggled to gain footing through the first five strides. By twenty feet out, he was still not at full balance, but only half a length short of Victor’s horse to his right.

  Then it happened—what I kept seeing over and over that night for six hours of abortive sleep. For some reason, Victor’s horse shied. He veered to the left. He cut into the path of Roberto’s horse.

  I heard the sickening click of metal shoe on bone. In an instant, the front legs of Roberto’s horse crumpled beneath him. The horse tumbled forward, head into the dirt and body somersaulting forward on top of the flailing body of Roberto.

  The other horses continued to race, while the double sirens of the ambulance for Roberto and the med-van for the horse screamed down the track from behind. I wanted to vault the rail and run to him, but the medics were on him before I could make a move. They encased his motionless body in an inflatable brace and got him into the ambulance within thirty seconds. The others were able to lead his horse into the van. Both wagons cleared the track before the other racers came around the second turn.

  My strongest urge was to run to my car and drive to the Mass General Hospital where they take seriously injured jockeys more frequently than we want to think. Instead, I ran to the finish line to wait for Victor.

  Victor’s horse crossed the wire in first place, three lengths ahead of the second horse. When he was able to look around after the finish, he realized that his brother was missing. He was the first one back to the unsaddling area after a sharply foreshortened run-out. He stopped, unsaddled, and weighed in within minutes. I yelled to him. He jumped the rail to come over to me. I told him what I’d seen as we ran to my car.

  We arrived at the Mass General emergency room in time for a doctor to call to us over his shoulder. He was following at a run the motionless form of Roberto on a cart headed, we assumed, into surgery.

  “Stay in the waiting room. I’ll let you know as soon as I can.”

  “Doc, is he breathing?”

  “So far.”

  TWO

  VICTOR AND I waited together at the hospital for the six hours of surgery on Roberto. All through it, I was on the verge of asking Victor why his horse had veered into Roberto’s path. Then I’d see the lines of pain, worry, and possibly guilt that creased his face, and the time was never right.

  When the doctor finally came out, he looked like he had run a marathon. He wore that “best we could do” look as he explained that bracing and setting bones had been t
he minor part. Internal bleeding had been severe.

  We could see people in uniform wheeling the bed down the corridor with what looked like a collage of plaster, bandages, tubes, and strings. We thanked God that somehow, inside that mélange, there was a breathing Roberto.

  The doctor sat down in a chair beside us. “He’s a tough kid.” That much we knew. “We’ve got him stabilized for the moment. The X-rays show more fractures than that body can sustain.”

  Victor and I leaned heavily on each other for what we sensed was coming next. The doctor’s eyes spoke the emotional investment he had in his patient. His words were directly to Victor whose family tie was written on his face.

  “I wish I could say it’s over. We’ll know better in the next day. I know what you jockeys can take, but that boy had a trauma most of us wouldn’t live through. At this point, we can only pray to God he will.”

  Victor was first. “Can I see him?”

  “Sure.” He nodded down the corridor. “Go with your brother.”

  I started to walk with Victor. The doctor caught my arm.

  “Just one. Leave your cell phone number. I’ll be here checking on him all night. I’ll call you if anything . . . either way.”

  * * *

  At 5:45 the next morning, the buzz of the cell phone snapped me out of the restless half sleep I’d dropped into after replaying the first thirty feet of that race for the millionth time. The tug between fear and prayer made me fumble the phone on the first try. I wanted, and didn’t want, to hear that doctor’s voice. It was a second jolt to hear the raspy voice of the trainer of Roberto’s mount, Rick McDonough.

  “Hey, Mike, can you get out here?”

  “Yeah, Rick. What?”

  “Just get out here.”

  * * *

  I made Formula One time through the Boston streets from my apartment on Beacon Street, through the tunnel, and down side streets of East Boston that even cabbies don’t know. At that hour, I had few other Boston drivers to challenge at intersections and beat on the straightaways.

  They knew me at the gate to the backstretch of Suffolk Downs. At least two mornings a week, I take my wake-up shot, black, strong, and jolting, from the coffee shack at the backstretch by the racing stables in the company of trainers, jockeys, and exercise boys. It usually settles my mind, deep in that misty dawn atmosphere, to be among the genuine people of the sport I love. It braces me for the real slings and figurative arrows of the outrageous prosecuting attorneys I do combat with beside my law partner of three years, the redoubtable old lion of the criminal defense bar, Lex Devlin.

  This morning there was no comfort and no peace. As I walked the length of the twenty stalls of Rick’s barn which housed the horses entrusted to his training, I was picking up a sense of profound eeriness. It’s always a beehive of action at that time of the morning. Today it was like a tomb. There was no one home.

  I reached the rail of the track and saw all of Rick’s hot-walkers, muckers, grooms, feeders, and tackers hanging around inside the outer track rail. They looked like they were on strike.

  I found Rick down the track, sitting astride his favorite retired racing thoroughbred, clocking a young roan that was breezing full-out in the straightaway. I walked down and leaned against the rail beside him.

  “What’s up, Rick?”

  He kept his focus on the roan. “Hell if I know, Mike. Any word about Roberto?”

  “Nothing yet. Maybe no news is good news.”

  “You’re a hell of an optimist. There’s no good news in this thing. You know those two over there by the coffee shack?”

  I noticed he never looked over at them. I recognized the overstuffed middle-agers in suits that might once have fit two slimmer versions. If I was looking for the first good news of the day, this was not it.

  “They’re Boston cops, Rick. The one with a face like a grapefruit is Malloy. He’s in homicide division.”

  Rick nodded. “You know him?”

  “We’ve gone a few rounds in court.”

  “You trust him?”

  “Yeah. About as far as I could throw that horse you’re riding. What do they want?”

  “They asked if I’d seen Victor Mendosa. I told them no. They wanted my permission to look through the stalls. I told them to knock themselves out.”

  “So why aren’t they?”

  “I might have added that the last one who walked into one of those stalls without one of my people to control the horse is still walking sideways.”

  “Rick, you’re a classic.”

  For the first time he looked over at me. “They told me to give them a man to go with them. You know how I like taking orders. I told them all of my men are out on the track waiting for horses. They’ll be back in a while.”

  Rick just tapped the walkie-talkie at his side that he used to give orders to the men back in the stables. I got the picture. Apparently all of his men in the stables heard his words to the two police on their receivers and took the hint. Hence the abandoned stables.

  The two officers at the coffee shack saw us talking and ambled over, coffee in one hand and a sopapilla, the closest thing to a Mexican donut, in the other.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Knight?”

  “Detective Malloy. What a pleasure. I’m taking in the morning air. And you?”

  “Always a smart-ass, Knight.”

  “Actually, it’s true. I do it often. What brings you here?”

  Malloy was true to his personal code of giving no information about anything to any defense counsel. “Police business. You seen that jockey, Victor Mendosa?”

  Now he had me on the defensive and stifling an outbreak of sweat. “Not in a while. Why?”

  “You see him, you put him in touch with me.”

  He started wandering slowly back to the coffee shack, still waiting for an escort to the stables. I could sense that his ears were still tuned in to me like a wiretap.

  I looked back at Rick with the slightest trace of a wink. I knew nothing escaped that old cowboy. “So tell me, Rick. How are things?”

  “Okay. Except for that damned Fly Right. She’s gone lame again. Nothing but trouble, that filly.”

  I knew Fly Right. She was made of steel. She hadn’t been lame since she was foaled. I picked up Rick’s message.

  “You got a carrot, Rick. Maybe she needs some sympathy.”

  He pulled a carrot out of his saddlebag and threw it to me. “Careful, Mike. She’ll take your hand off if she can.”

  He said it loud enough to reach the listening ears. I walked down to stall seven. Fly Right saw me coming and, as always, put her head over the half door to nuzzle my shoulder and get a rub on her neck. She didn’t refuse the carrot either.

  I said it low, barely above a whisper. “Qué pasa, Victor?”

  “Es malo, Miguel.”

  We kept it low, although I’d have bet the only Spanish word Malloy knew was “taco.” The gist of our conversation was this.

  “What’s going on here, Victor?”

  “I stayed at the hospital with Roberto. He never woke up through the night. Those two at the coffee shack came down the hospital corridor about four this morning. I heard them tell the nurse at the station they were there to arrest me.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I got out of there before they saw me. I can’t go to jail, Mike. I mean it. Not here. Sometime I’ll tell you why.”

  The questions running through my mind were piling up faster than I could ask them. I looked back and saw Malloy and his sidekick walking my way. I grabbed the halter and lead line hanging on an outside hook and slipped it on Fly Right.

  “I’ll get their attention, Victor. Get out of here.”

  I led Fly Right out of the stall in the direction of Malloy and his buddy without looking up at them. She was a big filly, around sixteen hands, and she always pranced like she was about to spring. I got to within four feet of them and gave a sharp little tug on the lead line. She was spook
y enough to bolt straight up.

  Malloy nearly jumped out of his suit. He leaped backwards and came down with one leg in a bucket of wash water. The chill of the water gave him a second leap into a pile of straw and horse droppings that had been mucked out of a stall.

  He rolled over his protuberant rear end until his flailing feet caught ground and took him as far from the fearsome beast as he needed to go to recover his sense of dignity, if not his temper.

  He fired some ripe uncensored words at his junior partner, who almost dropped his sopapilla trying to control an ill-advised explosion of laughter. Meanwhile, I led Fly Right back to his stall, which Victor had vacated unnoticed. I slipped out myself before drawing more attention.

  * * *

  I drove back through the awakening city traffic to the offices of Devlin & Knight on the seventh floor of 77 Franklin Street in the heart of Boston. For the previous three years, I had had the unquestionable honor of junior partnering with the man who gave birth to more ulcers in opposing prosecuting attorneys than all the rest of the criminal defense trial bar combined. The memory of the trepidation I had experienced when I was first paired with the then irascible icon, Alexis Devlin, had long since morphed into what could be called sincere respect and admiration—but what, closer to the fact, was the deepest love for the man who slipped into that spot reserved for the father I had lost at an early age.

  Mr. D. was close to one side or the other of seventy years; and yet, by eight a.m., I could always find him and a pot of hot coffee in his corner office. I knew he was preparing for the third day of an edgy white-collar criminal trial. He was due in court by nine thirty. I also knew that he’d make the time under almost any circumstance for my morning and late afternoon drop-ins. This one was more than social.

  I filled him in on what had happened at the track and the hospital and then that morning at the backstretch. He knew Detective Malloy better than I did. He could hardly control his amusement at the detective’s morning flummoxing.