High in Trial - By Donna Ball Page 0,48

them?”

I said quickly, “Flame and Bryte are fine.” He sank back against the sofa, and I added, “Who? Who would try to hurt them?’

“The same guy that did this to me.” He closed his eyes. “Big fellow, blond hair, gray shirt. I told the police. God, my head is spinning. I can’t keep them here. He might come back. I’ve got to talk to Marcie.”

I glanced at Miles. Sometimes I can read his mind, too. I let him say it. “So the police have already been here…”

He dragged a hand over his face, as though trying to reestablish circulation. “Yeah. Last night. Yesterday. Some time, I don’t know. I told them I’d never seen the guy before. I opened the door and he pushed his way in here, swinging a lead pipe. Broke my hand, then my knee. Then he said something like, ‘That ought to do it,’ and walked out of here as calm as you please while I lay there screaming on the floor. Son of a bitch.”

“What about Bryte?” I said. “You said you were taking her home with you yesterday. Was she still here?”

He shook his head and fumbled for the water glass. “I never got her out of the fairgrounds. Marcie promised we’d work out a deal after the trial. I guess…” He took another gulp of water. “This is it.”

I looked at Miles in confusion. He gave me a silent shrug.

I said, “What time was all this?”

“I don’t know. Four o’clock, maybe. It was almost dark by the time the ambulance got here. I kept passing out trying to get to the phone.”

I was really hurting for the poor guy, but Miles was more practical. “And you just got out of the hospital this morning?”

He nodded and took another drink of water. “They wanted to keep me a few days, but I don’t have insurance, and…” He shrugged. “The dog training business doesn’t exactly make you rich.”

“Tell me about it,” I murmured sympathetically.

“That’s why I couldn’t really blame Marcie for what she did.” He went on, talking now almost as though to himself. “But to borrow money from people like that… Her problem is that just because she’s got a law degree, she thinks she knows everything. The main thing she knows is how to wiggle in and out of the law without getting caught, if you ask me. I always knew there was something a little off about the way she did business and who she did it with, but I never thought she’d risk the dogs.” His voice fell a bit. “I don’t think she meant to, not really. That doesn’t make it right, what she did, but even she has limits. She couldn’t have known it would come to this.”

I was completely lost, but Miles seemed relatively unsurprised. “So Marcie got in over her head, borrowed money from these, er, business associates…”

“She helped them put together some kind of deal. They said if she ever needed a favor… She said she didn’t know it would get so complicated, but how stupid could she be? She knew what kind of animals they were.”

“And you think that’s somehow related to what happened to you last night?”

“Think?” He gave a dry snort of disgust. “I know. She as much as told me so yesterday. These dudes are into some seriously sleazy stuff. Video gambling, prostitution, loan sharking, all kinds of racketeering… They killed one guy that tried to narc on them over in Surreytown.”

I twisted around to stare at Miles. His face was unreadable. “So let me guess,” he said. “They kept raising the interest, she couldn’t pay…”

“Nah, it wasn’t the money they wanted. It was the win. The dogs. I was the trainer. She was in charge of everything else. She ran this game like a business. For her, I guess it was. She said that’s the way to win. Maybe she was right.”

“So,” I said carefully, trying to understand, “these people, these bad people, they wanted your winnings from the Standard Cup?”

“Not just that,” Miles answered for him, and Neil didn’t object. “They were manipulating the odds on all the dogs, all the competitions. That’s the way racketeering works.”

“I didn’t know what she was into, just that nothing good was going to come of it for me. We have a contract on Flame about sharing the profits, but not on Bryte. So I figured if I blew the run with Flame, I’d be out of our agreement, and whatever I won with