“Where’s the other doctor?”
“What other doctor?”
“Wallawallabingbang.”
Dr. Habib looked puzzled, then laughed. “Oh, Dr. Wadiwalla? He’s not a surgeon, Mr. Young. No, no, no, he’s a GP. He works exclusively in ER. What did you think his name was? Wallawallabingbang? That’s very amusing.”
Young’s teeth were starting to chatter again.
Dr. Habib said, “Mr. Young? Mr. Young, this is Dr. Chen.” Another face appeared. They were both wearing shower caps. “Dr. Chen is the anaesthesiologist. I don’t think you can do much with his name!”
The other face leaned over Young. It was smiling. A smiling Asian face with a green shower cap. Young began to feel giddy.
“I going to prace this mask over your face,” Dr. Chen said, and he held up a black respirator. “When I ask you, you count down from fi’ to one.”
Young studied the respirator. “How far will I get?”
Dr. Chen was still smiling. “You will get as fah as fo’ but not as fah as three.”
The respirator hovered over his face. Young stared at it. It looked like a spaceship preparing to land. Fleetingly, he thought of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The swirling lights. The weird music.
He could hear Dr. Chen’s voice say, “Begin to count, prease.”
As the respirator settled over his nose and mouth, Young closed his eyes and took a last breath. “Five,” he said. “Four.”
Thursday, June 15
Debi was standing at the backstretch gate as BoumBoum opened the sliding side door of his Econoline van. He manipulated the lever that lowered the hydraulic lift bearing Trick and his wheelchair to the ground.
Trick and Debi talked for a few minutes about Young’s condition, and when Debi mentioned Reg, Trick assured her the bulldog was fine. “I’d better get to work,” he said. “Where am I likely to find Percy?”
“Barn 4,” Debi said, “so long as you get there before eleven. After that, it’s JJ Muggs.”
Trick consulted his watch. “It’s ten-thirty,” he said. “I’d better get a move on.” He told Boum-Boum to get himself a coffee at the track kitchen and to be back at the van in fifteen minutes.
Trick was relieved to find the surfaces he had to traverse hard and dry, and he steered his wheelchair quickly and carefully past horse vans, pickup trucks, fat men in fedoras, and small men in flak jackets.
Inside Barn 4, Trick negotiated his way along the shedrow past buckets and brooms and leaning rakes and bales of hay and straw, past dozens of stalls, most of whose inhabitants swung their heads out as he rolled by. A man sweeping asked Trick what he wanted, and Trick said, “Percy Ball.” The man pointed further along and said, “Far end.”
Trick wheeled himself towards the open door of a dimly lit tack room. Inside, Percy was sitting on a dingy cot cleaning his fingernails with a jackknife. He looked up, studied Trick for a moment, and said, “Who the fuck are you?”
Trick said, “Special Agent Arthur Trick, Metropolitan Toronto Homicide Department.” With his left hand he opened a small plastic identification folder and held it in front of Percy for several seconds, then closed it and returned it to his shirt pocket. “I need to ask you a few questions about the Shorty Rogers case.”
Percy wiped the blade of the jackknife against the thigh of his pant leg, folded it shut, slid it into his hip pocket, and flipped the blond hair out of his eyes. “I told that big cop everything I know. Which was nothin’. I don’t know nothin’.”
“Well, I’m confused,” Trick said, “because Detective Sergeant Young—the big cop—told me you said Shorty may have owed somebody money. And sometime later, you phoned him and told him Shorty was involved in a disagreement with a man named Buckley over a horse they owned together.”
Percy was silent. He pulled a cigarette out of his black jacket.
Trick looked around the tack room. “You allowed to smoke in here? I thought there were rules against smoking in barns.”
“Fuck the rules.”
Trick narrowed his eyes. “Maybe you don’t understand. People in wheelchairs, such as myself, or people who are otherwise disabled, get a little uncomfortable when able-bodied people, such as yourself, break safety rules. If something goes wrong, we can’t get out as fast as you can.”
“Fuck you, too.”
Trick looked closely at Percy but said nothing. He knew dead eyes when he saw them.
“Ask your questions,” Percy said. “I don’t have all day.”
Trick surveyed the room. Junk food trash in a corner. A pair of muddy boots. A pile of soiled clothing. Cigarette butts on the floor by Percy’s feet. A filthy sleeping bag balled up on the cot. “You exercised horses for Shorty, right?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Including the horse that died a while ago?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“We’re checking out the owner’s telephone records. A Mr. Mahmoud Khan. Has he ever phoned you?”
“Yeah ... no, I spoke to him a couple times when he was out here, that’s all. He’d ask me how his horse worked, and I’d tell him. Whichever horse worked that day.”
“Any reason to believe Mr. Khan might be strapped for cash?”
Percy laughed. “Are you crazy?”
“So why did he have Download murdered?”
It was a stab in the dark, and Percy looked away. “You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” He shook his head. “It was colic killed that colt.”
“And who killed Shorty Rogers?”
Percy stood up. His hands were shaking. He glared at Trick. “I don’t know. I’ve no fuckin’ clue who killed Shorty.” He dropped the cigarette and ground it under the heel of his cowboy boot.
“If there’s any information at all—”
“I told ya, I’ve no fuckin’ clue! Now leave me alone!”
Trick studied Percy for a moment, then, with his left hand on the console of his wheelchair, he began to reverse out of the tack room. The little shit’s righteous as hell when he’s telling the truth, he thought to himself, but it’s obvious when he’s lying.
Dr. Habib said, “We have to run a tube down your throat.”
Young, who was in a fetal position on the bed, made no response.
Dr. Habib said, “Your abdominal area was traumatized by the operation. We had to handle you rather roughly. As a result, your bowel system has shut down.”
Young turned his head slightly.
“So much tissue had formed around your appendix,” Dr. Habib continued, “that we couldn’t locate it on the x-ray. We performed a laparoscopy—that is to say, we entered through your navel—but discovered that the mass was too large. So we created a traditional incision over the affected area.”
“Why did you have to handle me roughly?” Young’s voice was weak, barely a croak.
“We had to move things around a bit. To find it. As a result, your bowel system went into shock. In protest, you might say. So now we have