Excerpt

I have just given seventy-five-to-one against Lowborn Prince, who has not finished in the money since G. Washington chopped down the cherry tree, and I am wondering what kind of idiot puts five bills on this refugee from the glue factory when Benny Fifth Street walks up to me and whispers as follows:

"I saw you take that bet, Boss. Lay it off."

"What are you talking about?" I say. "Booking five hundred dollars on Lowborn Prince is as close as a bookie can come to stealing."

"Lay it off," he repeats.

"Why?" I ask.

He looks around to make sure no one is listening. "I just got word: the hex is in."

"Not to worry," I assure him. "I brought Big-Hearted Milton, my personal mage, along, just to be on the safe side."

"You don't understand," says Benny Fifth Street. "Don't you know who made that bet?"

"Some little wimp I never saw before."

"He's a runner for Sam the Goniff!" he says. "And you know the Goniff. He's never bet on a fair race in his life."

The horses are approaching the starting gate. It's too late to lay the bet off, so I just make the Sign of the Pentagram and cross my fingers and hope Benny is wrong.

The bell rings, the gate opens, and Lowborn Prince fires out of there like he's Seattle Slew, or maybe Man o' War. Before they've gone a quarter of a mile he's 20 lengths in front, and I can see that Flyboy Billy Tuesday has still got him under wraps. He keeps that lead to the head of the stretch. Then Billy taps him twice with the whip and he takes off, coming home forty-five lengths in front. By the time Billy has slowed him down and brought him back to the Winner's Circle the race is official and the prices have been posted, and Lowborn Prince pays $153.40 for a two-dollar bet. But I didn't book a two-dollar bet. I pull out my pocket abacus and dope out what I owe the Goniff, and it comes to $38,870, and I know that I have to pay it or the Goniff will send some of his muscle, like Two Ton Boris or, worse still, Seldom Seen Seymour, to extract it one pint of blood at a time.

I hunt up Big-Hearted Milton, who is sitting at his usual seat in the clubhouse bar. As he sees me coming he pulls five hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket and thrusts them at me.

"Here's your money," he says. "Fair is fair. I didn't deliver."

"That's fine, Milton. Now give me another thirty-seven grand and we'll call it square."

"That has never been part of our understanding," he says with dignity.

"Neither was letting a hex get by you."

"I tried to find you and give it back when I heard what was coming down," says Milton. "It's not my fault you were ducking out of sight because the cops were making the rounds."

"You knew Lowborn Prince was going to win?" I demand.

"I knew the hex was in. I didn't know who was going to win, because I didn't know who the Goniff was putting his money on. There were three other longshots in the race. It could have been any of them."

"What went wrong?" I ask. "You've broken lots of hexes for me."

"Yeah, but they were from normal, run-of-the-mill mages. Not this time."

"Who the hell does the Goniff have hexing for him?" I ask.

"You ever hear of Snake Eyes Malone?" says Milton.

"Malone?" I repeat, frowning. "When did he get out?"

"Not out," Milton corrects me. "Up. They buried him in Yonkers, and that was supposed to be the end of it."

"So?"

"So he's a zombie now, and probably a vampire as well, and maybe a Haitian goblin as well, and my magic isn't strong enough to counteract his."

"Look, Milton," I say, "this is serious. If I take one more beating like this, I'm out of business, and probably out of fingers and other even more vital parts as well. What am I going to do?"

"You need a real expert to go up against him."

"A voodoo priest, maybe?" I ask.

"Yeah, that might do it," says Milton.

I gather my flunkies, Benny Fifth Street and Gently Gently Dawkins, and tell them we're leaving the track early, that we've got to find a voodoo priest before I can go back to work. Benny immediately suggests we buy plane tickets to Voodooland, but I explain that there isn't any such place, and Gently Gently says that he's got a friend up in Harlem who belongs to some weird cult and for all he knows it's a voodoo cult, and I tell him to offer his friend anything, but make sure he brings his voodoo priest to my place, and I'll be waiting there until I hear from him.

So I go home, and I send Benny out to bring back some healthy food, like blintzes and chopped liver and maybe a couple of knishes, and then there is nothing to do but sit around and watch the sports results on my new twenty-inch crystal ball. The big news of the day is Lowborn Prince, and it is so painful to watch that I almost can't eat my blintzes, even though I have loaded them up with sour cream and cinnamon sugar, but at the last minute I decide I have to practice a little self-denial so I only pour one container of strawberries on them, and I spread the chopped liver over little poker-chip-sized pieces of low-cal rye bread.

Finally, at about eleven o'clock, there's a knock on the door, and it's Gently Gently Dawkins. He walks in, all three hundred and fifty pounds of him, and tosses his hat onto a table.

"So where is he?" I demand.

"He's on his way up the stairs," says Gently Gently. "He's an old guy. He don't climb as fast as I do."

"And you left him alone?" I yell.

"Believe me, no one's going to bother him," says Gently Gently, and just as the words leave his mouth in hobbles this stooped-over, bald, wrinkled, old black guy, and I would say he was dressed in rags but Ezekial the Rag Merchant would take offense.

"This?" I say. "This is what you spent all day looking for?"

"I'm pleased to meet you, too," says the old guy.

I turn to him. "You're really a voodoo priest?"

He shakes his head. "Do I look like an amateur?"

"Don't ask me what you look like and maybe we won't come to blows," I say. "If you aren't a voodoo priest, just what the hell are you and why are you here?"

"I'm here because this nice man"—he gestures toward Gently Gently Dawkins—"put the word out that he was looking for someone who could neutralize a Haitian zombie vampire's hex." He smiles and taps his chest with an emaciated thumb. "You're looking at him."