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“Idon’t know what the world’s coming to,” Young announced.

“Oh boy,” Debi said, “now we’re in for it.” She turned to Trick. “Remember, Uncle Artie, last week it was how they’re making TV shows with shaky cameras. ‘I have to close my eyes, I can’t watch, it gives me a headache behind my eyes,’” she said, imitating her father.

Last week they had been sitting at the same table as they were now, in the clubhouse dining room at Caledonia Downs. Every Sunday Young picked Trick up at his high-rise at 11:30 in the morning. They would drive the fifteen miles out to the racetrack and meet Debi by 12:15. By 12:30 they would have returned from the roast beef buffet with their first plates of food in front of them.

“And the week before that,” Trick said, “he was going on and on about the price of gas, and how the Arabs, or somebody—your father thinks everybody from the Middle East is an Arab—were holding back the oil shipments to jack up the price internationally. Which is true, but it ain’t the Arabs.”

Young ignored him. “I’m serious, I don’t know what the world’s coming to. I went to the barbershop yesterday to get a shave, and they wouldn’t give me one. I’ve been getting my hair cut for twenty years at the same place, and whether it’s Albert or Connie, whoever’s chair I’m in, all I’ve ever asked them for was a haircut. I’ve always shaved myself. But yesterday I thought, What the hell, I’ll treat myself to a shave.” Young shook the saltcellar over his meat. “But Albert said they could-n’t give me one.”

“Why not?” asked Debi.

“At first I just laughed at him. I thought he was joking. ‘You’re joking, right?’ I said. He said—he talks like this—he said, ‘I’ma so sorry, Meesta Young, no canna geeva shave.’ Then he pointed to the list of prices on the wall. ‘See. Eesa not even onna de board.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked.” Young looked first at Debi, then at Trick. “What do you think his reason was?”

Debi shrugged her shoulders.

Trick said, “AIDS. He’s afraid of getting AIDS. If he nicks you with the razor and if he’s got an open cut on his finger, it’s game over.”

Young glared at him. “That’s right. That’s what he told me. He said I couldn’t get a shave anywhere in Toronto. No barber in the city will shave anybody because they’re afraid of catching AIDS. But the thing is—and this is what frosts me—I don’t have AIDS.”

“You’re frosted because you don’t have AIDS?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Albert doesn’t know you don’t have AIDS. Maybe he thinks you’re queer.”

Young placed his hands palms down on the table. “Do I look queer to you?”

Trick shrugged. “Okay, so maybe he thinks you’re a drug addict.”

Young appealed to his daughter. “You’ll listen to reason, I know you will. Your Uncle Artie won’t, because he thinks his purpose in life is to argue with me, but I know you will. Getting a shave at a barbershop—even though it’s not something I regularly do, it’s not something I actually ever do—is as basic a right as ... I don’t know ... as climbing up on a stool at McCully’s and ordering a beer. And now, because of this AIDS crap, I can’t get a shave. I said to Albert, ‘You’ve known me for twenty years, and you won’t give me a shave?’ And he said no.”

Trick said, “It’s been a while now since barbers have been giving shaves. It’s hardly news.”

“It’s news to me,” Young said, picking up his fork, “and I don’t like it. It’s just one more thing gone. One more simple pleasure. You can’t walk downtown anymore for fear of getting mugged, you can’t read a newspaper or watch TV without somebody telling you the world is getting more fucked up by the minute. And I can’t get a shave. Well, it makes me mad, goddamn it. Next thing you know, they’ll be making sitcoms about queers.”

Debi said, “Uncle Artie, who do you like in the first? We’ve gotta get a move on here or we’ll miss the Double.”

Trick craned his neck over his Form. “I like the seven.”

“What about the second?”

“Five.”

“What about you, Daddy?”

Young leaned over his Form. “Yeah, I like the seven in the first, but Trick’s full of shit about the second. The five will die by the middle of the lane. You want the four in there.”

“Fine,” Debi said. “We’ll bet both of them. Give me some money and I’ll go make the bets—seven-five, seven-four—while you two argue about something else.”

“I want some more of that roast beef,” Trick said, and using the keypad on the left arm of his wheelchair, he backed away from the table, swivelled, and aimed himself at the buffet.

“Trick,” Young said.

Trick stopped and turned his head slightly.

“Bring me back another one of them Yorkshire puddings.”

Trick had been sitting in his cruiser on Queen Street in October 1992 when he took a bullet in the neck. There was damage to his spine, and he lost the use of his lower body. The extent of his injuries wasn’t known at first because he remained semi-comatose for six weeks after the shooting, and it appeared to Young, and indeed to the doctors who were monitoring his condition, that his biggest challenge was to regain consciousness. Because he was not fully comatose, restraints had to be applied: basically, he had to be belted to his bed. He would twist and turn and lash out with his left arm; his right was rigidly cocked at the elbow, like a man making a muscle—a condition, Young learned, called flexor tension.

At first, Trick had a number of visitors. His cousin Eartha came up from New York State and stayed for three days. His girlfriend of two weeks, a Japanese-Canadian named Yukio, was so upset by the cards Fortune had dealt her that she disappeared after her first visit to the hospital. Trick’s parents were both dead, he had no brothers or sisters, so it fell to his colleagues to do most of the visiting. Wheeler came often, as did Staff Inspector Bateman and several of the others. But Trick’s most regular visitor was Young, who came daily, rain or shine, often accompanied by Debi. He would talk to Trick, hoping for a reaction, a sign he was in there, that he wasn’t damaged beyond repair. Young talked to him about horse racing, hockey, women, movies, dogs. But mostly he talked to him about baseball.

And when the Toronto Blue Jays won the 1992 World Series, Young was with Trick in his hospital room. He felt sure that after four or five weeks without improvement, without emerging from his semi-conscious state, this amazing victory with all its noise and celebration—doctors and nurses and patients and orderlies and interns dancing arm in arm through the corridors of the hospital—would snap Trick out of it, would bring him back.

But it didn’t. He continued to lie on his back in bed, his eyes at half-mast, snot in his moustache. And then even Young gave up. The visits were depressing him to the point that he didn’t want to go anymore. It was like talking to a corpse. Time to move on, he told himself. So he, too, bowed out. He, too, stopped visiting. He took a week off work and flew to Las Vegas. In three or four bourbon-blurred days he lost $3,600 on the slots, then flew home. When he called Debi, she told him there had been some improvement and, cautiously optimistic, Young hurried down to the hospital. There was a new patient in Trick’s room. At the nurses’ station Young asked what was going on. The nurse pointed to the lounge area, and there was Trick sitting in a wheelchair watching a rerun of Hill Street Blues. “Trick!” Young bellowed and rushed over to him, and when Trick turned to face him, one eye was focused, the other lay off to the side. He raised his left hand. His right, Young couldn’t help notice, lay curled in his lap like a fetus. “Hey, man,” Trick said weakly, “where the hell you been?”

It was only after his return to consciousness that it became apparent that Trick had lost the use of his legs. The way he had thrashed around on his bed made it appear that his legs were active; in fact, they were nothing more than doll’s legs, dragged around by the furious actions of his upper body. Everyone had been fooled.

Months passed. Hopes of further physical recovery dimmed. There was an operation to correct his vision, which was successful, and several months of physiotherapy, which accomplished little. Then he was sent home.

Staff Inspector Bateman offered Trick a desk job, but he wouldn’t even consider it, and when the police department presented him with a disability package, he accepted it. He resigned from the Force. He sat in his apartment with the shades drawn. He watched TV. He asked Young to do something about his car, a mint-condition 1968 Cadillac Seville, burgundy with white leather upholstery. “What do you want me to do with it?” Young asked. Trick shook his head. The car had been his pride and joy. Young arranged to have it stored in a remote, unused corner of the police garage. He had one of the mechanics drain the oil, put it up on blocks, and cover it with a tarpaulin.

Now, almost three years since the shooting, Trick was still bitter. Sometimes, if Young picked him up, Trick would have a beer at McCully’s, but more often than not he refused. “I will not be an object of pity,” he told Young. “Whatever my new role in life may be, it’s not so those fools at the bar can feel superior, it’s not so they can feel lucky they’re not me.” The only public place Trick felt really comfortable was the racetrack. Nobody knew him there. Nobody except Young and Debi. And the other horse-players were too focused on their gambling to pay attention to a cripple.

“Shorty was always good to me,” Debi said. “That’s all I can say.”

The third race had just gone, and the money the threesome had won on Harbour Master and Conniving in the Daily Double they had given back on a semi–long shot named Pine Cone.

“I know some people didn’t like him,” she continued. “They thought he was—I don’t know—untrust-worthy. But he was never anything but good to me.”

Young said, “Maybe he was afraid of you. You could have flattened him with one punch.”

“He was little, but he was fearless,” Debi said. “Remember that time he broke Brian Reese’s nose.”

Young laughed. He turned to Trick. “Reese was the jockey on some horse in the same race Shorty had one in. Shorty’s horse was winning with about fifty yards to go when Reese’s horse caught up to him, they hung like that for a few seconds, then Shorty’s horse bobbled, and Reese’s horse won by a neck, and when Shorty’s rider dismounted he told Shorty that Reese had hit his horse across the eyes with his whip. He said they would have won otherwise. So Shorty marches over to the winner’s circle where Reese is sitting proudly on his horse, and the owner and his family and the trainer and the groom are all posing, and the photographer is just about to take the picture, and Shorty hauls Reese off the horse and jumps on top of him and clocks him right in the nose.”

“Short fight,” Debi said, nodding. “Blood everywhere.”

“That’s right,” Young said. “Shorty wasn’t afraid of anything. And proud? He had that small man’s pride.”

Debi said, “Like how all the jockeys and exercise riders have to have these really big girlfriends, just to show all the normal-sized men that they can get any girl they want. Just ’cause they’re small doesn’t mean ... well, you know.”

“Doesn’t mean they got small dicks.”

“Daddy!”

“Well, it’s true. Right, Trick? Every man worries about the size of his dick.”

Trick said, “Not me. Not anymore. My dick could be a yard long and it wouldn’t matter to me.”

Young grimaced. “Sorry.”

Trick shrugged.

Debi forged on. “So what happened was, for the New Year’s Ball that the Horseman’s Association puts on, Shorty brought this unbelievable woman. Not his wife, I might add. This was during one of his bad spells when he was drinking like it was going out of style. Anyway, this woman must have been six-two, two hundred pounds—bigger than me, even—and she had this gigantic goddamn chest.”

Young nodded his head. “That’s right. I had the pleasure of being Debi here’s escort that night, and that woman had the biggest kazoobies in the world, and there’s Shorty strutting alongside her like a rooster, big stupid grin on his face, hanging onto her arm like a little boy and his momma.”

“Well,” Debi said, “he had his flaws, I guess, but I still can’t figure out why anybody would want to kill him. He wanted people to respect him, sure, and he wanted to be successful, but who doesn’t? I mean it’s not like he was a goddamn serial killer or something.”

Trick looked at Young. “Any leads yet?”

Young shook his head. “All I know is he was down on his luck. He had that horse die on him a couple of months ago.” He turned to Debi.

“Download,” she said. “Shorty’d just had the owner a few days when it happened. The vet said it was colic.”

Trick said, “What’s colic?”

“Any kind of intestinal problem, but usually it’s a twisted bowel.”

“What causes it?”

“Any number of things. Coughing can cause it. The horse might cough so violently it flips its stomach. Or if a horse lies down and then gets up suddenly, that can cause it. There’s about seventy-five feet of intestine in a horse’s stomach. Or if food gets impacted, that can cause it, too. We have to check our horses’ droppings every day to make sure they’re not too hard.”

Young said, “Something fishy about that horse’s death. Soon as I get a chance, I’m going to ask around a bit.”

“Did all this hurt Shorty’s business?” Trick asked.

“His business was already hurting. By then pretty much everybody—everybody but Debi, that is—had jumped ship on him. My guess is he owed somebody some money, but I don’t have any evidence yet. I’ve checked into two of his owners. One of them—an old lady—she’s clean, but the other one, Doug Buckley, he’s a crafty son of a bitch. Tomorrow I’ll check into the Internet guy.”

“Mr. Khan,” Debi said. “Mahmoud Khan.”

“The man whose horse died?” Trick said.

Debi nodded.

“Rich?”

“Oh, yeah, he’s rich. You pretty much have to be rich to own thoroughbreds. Mr. Buckley’s rich, too.”

“How’d he make his money?” Trick asked.

“Won the lottery. Eight million. He owns Someday Prince, which I’m saddling in the stake today.”

“Which reminds me,” Young said to his daughter, “please don’t go around giving out my phone number to scumbags like Percy Ball.”

Debi made a face. “He said it was important, Daddy. I thought he might help you with the investigation.”

“Well,” Young said grudgingly, “he did. He told me somebody offered Buckley a hundred large for Someday Prince.”

“When? I never heard about this.”

“Couple of weeks ago.”

Debi thought for a moment. “But Shorty was part owner. He wouldn’t have agreed to it. He was gaga over that colt.”

“That’s right, he vetoed it.”

Debi shook her head. “He thought that colt was his come-back horse, the next Secretariat. He thought he’d be back on top again.”

“So I’ve got a question,” Trick said. “How does a trainer so down on his luck that everybody abandons him suddenly acquire not one, but two millionaire owners?”

They laid off the fourth and lost the fifth. Then Debi had to excuse herself to prepare Someday Prince for the eighth. She was more than a little excited, not only because it was her first time listed as trainer but because the first horse she was saddling was entered in the feature race of the day, the $75,000 Bold Ruckus Stakes for three-year-old Ontario-bred colts and geldings.

As she stood up to leave, her father said, “Good luck, sweetie.”

“Do I look all right?” she asked. She was wearing a three-quarter-length lime green dress with a black ivy pattern up one side. She had cleaned and polished her old white eight-hole Doc Martens. She had tinted her hair for the occasion; no longer was it fire-engine red, now it was blood red. She was so nervous she was perspiring, and her nose stud twinkled.

“You look great,” her father said. “Sort of Christmassy.”

“I don’t feel Christmassy.”

“Why, what’s wrong?”

“It’s so soon after what happened to Shorty. I should be wearing black, but we’re supposed to look nice in the saddling enclosure. The owners expect it.”

“Besides,” said Trick, “you may have to get your picture taken.”

She smiled. “If that happens, Uncle Artie, I want both of you in the winner’s circle with me.”

Young said, “What about Buckley? He might have something to say about a big fat cop and a guy in a wheelchair taking up space in his photograph.”

“I don’t think we’ll see him. He phoned yesterday to say he wouldn’t be able to make it.”

“Interesting,” Young said. “He moved out of the Airport Hilton shortly after I paid him a visit. Did he say where he was?”

“No, he just said something about some meeting or some previous commitment. I can’t remember for sure.”

“Have you met him yet?”

“I saw him once or twice early on, when he first hired Shorty, but not since what happened. I’ve just spoken to him on the phone, that’s all. Listen, I gotta go.”

She hurried off.

The waitress came by, and Young said, “It’s like a desert around here.”

“Four?” she asked.

Young looked at Trick, and Trick nodded.

When she’d gone Trick said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t discuss certain things in front of me.”

Young had a forkful of Yorkshire pudding halfway to his mouth but drew up short. “What are you talking about?”

“Like dick size, or anything to do with dicks. Or anything to do with sex.”

Young shook his head. “I’m sorry, buddy, sometimes I forget—”

“It’s all right, I know you didn’t mean anything, but I’m sensitive about that sort of thing.”

Young stopped shaking his head. “But weren’t we talking about Shorty? We weren’t talking about you.”

Trick gave him a look. “You were talking about dick size.”

The forkful of Yorkshire pudding finished its journey, and Young chewed. “Okay, so let me see if I got this right: from now on I can only discuss things in front of you that don’t involve dick size.”

“Or sex in general.”

“Are you nuts? How am I supposed to know where some topic of conversation’s going to go? How did I know talking about Shorty would lead to a conversation about dick size?”

“Shorty’s lucky,” Trick said darkly. “His troubles are over. Mine have barely started. I’m looking at the rest of my life like this.” He waved his left hand over his wheelchair, his useless right arm, his useless legs. “I could live another forty years.”

“Your troubles have barely started, is that what you said? You’ve been in that wheelchair three fucking years, I would’ve thought by now—”

“By now what? I’d be used to it? How’d you like to piss in a bag all the time and not even know you’re pissing? It’s humiliating. And sometimes I smell like piss.”

“You do not.”

“Don’t tell me I don’t. I know I do. I can smell it. At first I think it’s somebody else, and I say, ‘What the fuck?’ and then I realize it’s me. That’s a good feeling. I’m sure you’d enjoy that feeling. Believe me, brother, it’s not something you get used to.”

The waitress returned and placed four bottles of Labatt’s Blue on their table.

After she left, Young put his fork back down on his plate and said, “So, basically what’s happening is you’re feeling sorry for yourself?”

“Damn right I am.”

“Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Well, get used to it. And while you’re getting used to me feeling sorry for myself, I’ll get used to smelling like piss.”

Young took a deep breath, then said, “You need another interest.”

“Another interest?” Trick said. “Oh really. Like what, for instance?”

“Like, I don’t know, like”—Young waved his arms around—“like computers.”

“Computers?”

“Well, I don’t know. There must be something.”

“Computers?” Trick shook his head. He was so angry his black face glowed. “You don’t get it, do you? Everything I was I’m not anymore. I was a good cop and I was good with the ladies. Now I’m neither.”

“You can still do both. You just won’t be able to do as much.”

Trick’s mouth fell open. “I can still do both? How? How can I still do both? I can hold their hand? Camp, when I see a naked woman in a movie, I still get sexual thoughts, just like any other guy, but down below there’s nothing happening. It kills me. And how can I still be a cop? Arrest guys from my wheelchair? ‘Excuse me, sir, would you mind stepping over here so I can cuff you?’”

“Bateman offered you a desk job. You could still be involved.”

“Yeah, on a computer. I’d rather shoot myself than sit at a computer.”

“What’ve you got against computers?”

“I don’t know. It’s like ... it’s like playing old-timers hockey after you’ve played contact all your life. I can’t sit at a computer and call myself a cop, no thank you. It’s all or nothing for this mother’s son.”

“So what you’re saying is it’s nothing. Since ‘all’ is no longer available, you’re choosing ‘nothing.’”

Trick looked away.

“All I’m saying is,” Young said, in a quieter voice, “the offer was there. It’s probably still there.”

“Right, and they also offered me permanent disability insurance, which as you know was a whole whack of money which I wouldn’t have got if I went back to work, which is why I took it.”

“Right, so now you’re a rich man who mopes around all day watching TV and telling his friends what a shitty hand you got dealt and being pissed off for the next, what, forty years?”

“You should talk. A few years ago, you were ready to pack it in. You could hardly wait to retire. They offered you a package, too.”

“Yeah, well, that was then. After you got hurt, and after I almost lost Debi and Jamal, things changed. I regained my ... I don’t know, I started to care again ... about my work. So, when the time came, I turned the package down.”

“That’s the difference between you and me. I never stopped caring about my work, and I’m the one that can’t work anymore. I’m the one that got fucked.”

“Yeah, but what I’m telling you is maybe you can work again. You’d just be doing something different is all I’m saying.”

Trick was silent. Then he said, “I was never a complainer before this happened. I never complained.”

“I know that.”

“But it’s hard, brother. I think about police work all the time. It was my life. And I think about sex, too.”

“Sex isn’t such a big deal.”

“Maybe for you it isn’t. You probably haven’t got laid in a year.”

“A year? I haven’t got laid in three years!”

Trick laughed. “You’re not serious.”

“Hell, I am! I haven’t got laid since the old Polish woman that cleans for me fell asleep in the La-Z-Boy.”

Someday Prince made a late kick, but the pace was slow and the horses in front of him didn’t back up. He finished fourth. A small slice of the purse for Doug Buckley, wherever he was, but no photograph for Debi, and the large amount of money Trick and Young wagered wound up in the coffers of the Ontario Jockey Club.