Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

Tommy gave up his apartment to accumulate cash for the anticipated hurricane-betting frenzy that began when Alphonsina got her name. When he was flush, Tommy had bought a new Ford van with captain’s chairs. He parked the van every night in the Sunbelt Realty parking lot. That’s where he slept. I let him use my can for twenty a week. When the radio in his van conked out and he couldn’t get good numbers, it was a panic situation for him. But he refused to cough up any of his precious bankroll for a cheap radio.

Now, Tommy seemed like a good enough guy, so like some kind of boob I allowed him to camp out in my office. He used my TV and my desk to plot his numbers for an additional twenty a week. When Alphonsina hit the newscasts and started to get close, Tommy began to send it in: to the corner convenience store for Florida lottery tickets; to the track; to the outstretched hand of the constantly underfoot bolita runner.

Worst mistake I ever made. Having Tommy there was bad enough, but I didn’t factor in the accordion. We weren’t long into our arrangement when Tommy turned up one night, half in the bag, with his accordion. He insisted on playing “Roll Out the Barrel” and a medley of other polka times for me. I tossed him out and locked the door. He persisted with the serenade in the parking lot. At one point he went into a incompetent, drunken, barely recognizable rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was too ghastly for description.

These accordion nights, as they came to be known, were all too frequent. I tried desperately to get him to leave. But he wouldn’t. He had paid me for the month, which still had two weeks to run, and he wouldn’t take back a partial payment.

“Look, Joe,” he pleaded, “Buford will hit in a couple of days, long before the end of the month. By then I’ll have all the green I can use. I’ll go then and give you a bonus to boot.”

“So how much have you grossed so far?” I asked him.

“Well, nothing yet,” he admitted. “But that’s because Alphonsina didn’t come ashore. It will be different with Buford. It’s headed right for us.”

There is little doubt that Tommy’s train had left the track some ways back. But I couldn’t take any more accordion. I could hear the tuneless, discordant, unmelodious racket through the walls at night when he played the vile instrument in the van. So when Buford was about three days out, I enlisted Bullseye Larry, who owed me a favor, to steal the van while Tommy was down at the corner with his Florida lottery bets. Not to chop it up or send it to Venezuela, mind you, but long enough to dump the dreaded accordion in the Intercoastal. He could park the van up the street when he was done.

Unfortunately, Bullseye got caught with a hot Honda Prelude and ended up in the Dade County slammer before he was able to heist the van. Two important things happened next. The first thing was, Brokenbridge didn’t seem to be collecting on any of his numerous bets.

“Something is wrong with the numbers, Joe,” he confessed to me when Buford was but two days away. “I should be up a bundle by now. It ain’t workin’ right. I don’t think Buford is going to hit Miami.”

The second thing was Tommy’s bolita runner. I should tell you about him. He was the bag man for the local bolita and well known to everybody in the neighborhood because of a singular characteristic. Years ago he was working out in West Hialeah in the industrial parks at a zinc die cast place that made jalousie window cranks. He worked one of the big presses that cut the sprue away from the casting. Got his hand caught in the press one day. He lost all but his pinkie finger on the right hand. His little finger looked about eight inches long. And he couldn’t bend it. It stuck straight out, ramrod stiff. The Cubans called him Tubo de Relámpago. Rough translation in English: Lightning Rod. But everybody else just called him Lightning.

Lightning was terrified of Buford. The closer the hurricane got, the more agitated he became. He began to spend his nights out at Tommy’s van, drinking beer and enduring the accordion — strange behavior.

My part-time operative Frankie Swinehart, or Swine as he came to be commonly dubbed, had just landed a cushy job with Calder Race Course security. A position he’d struggled to obtain after many years of working drudge security in chilly car lots and crowd control at dangerous Cuban dances for the big firm in town. I was a bit surprised to see him come through my office door in uniform in the middle of a working day a half hour before post time.

He picked up Tommy’s chart off the lone office chair. “What’s this?” he said.

“Ain’t you supposed to be work-in’?” I asked.

He threw the chart on the floor and sat down. “Got a big problem, Joe. Everybody’s trying to move their horses out on account of the hurricane. We’re goin’ nuts over at Calder.”

“I can imagine. But what are you doin’ here?”

“There’s been an accident in the backstretch — Arnie Ritter.”

“Arnie! What happened?”