THE HORSE LOOKED AT Dortmunder. “Ugly goddamn thing,” Dortmunder commented, while the horse just rolled his eyes in disbelief. “Not that one,” the old coot said. “We’re looking for a black stallion.” “In the dark,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Anyway, all horses look the same to me.” “It’s not how they look,” the old coot said, “it’s how they run. And Dire Straits could run the ass off a plug like this one. Which is why he won’t be out here in the night air with these glue factories. We’ll find Dire Straits in one of them barns down there.” That was another thing rubbing Dortmunder the wrong way—the names that horses get saddled with. Abby’s Elbow, Nuff Said, Dreadful Summit, Dire Straits. If you were going out to the track, where the horses were almost irrelevant to the occasion, where the point was to drink beer and bet money and socialize a little and make small jokes like, “I hope I break even today; I could use the cash,” it didn’t matter much that you were betting 30 across the board on something called Giant Can and that you had to wait for a bunch of horses outdoors somewhere to run around in a big oval before you found out if you had won.
