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with ninety-nine other horses. A guard making night rounds would lock the gate at some point late in the evening. The guard hadn’t made his rounds yet that night.
    I drove through the gates, a yellow parking pass stolen from Sean’s Mercedes hanging on my rearview mirror, just in case. I parked in a row of vehicles along a fence opposite the last of the forty big stabling tents on the property.
    I drove a sea-green BMW 318i convertible I bought at a sheriff’s auction. The roof sometimes leaked in a hard rain, but it had an interesting option that hadn’t come from the factory in Bavaria: a small, foam-lined metal box hidden in the driver’s door panel, just big enough to hold a good-sized bag of cocaine or a handgun. The Glock nine millimeter I kept there was tucked into the back of my jeans, hidden by my shirttail as I walked away.
    On show days the show grounds are as busy and crazy as the streets of Calcutta. Golf carts and small motorcycles race back and forth between the barns and showrings, dodging dogs and trucks and trailers, heavy equipment, Jaguars and Porsches, people on horses and children on ponies, and grooms walking charges done up in immaculate braids and draped in two-hundred-dollar cool-out sheets in the custom colors of their stables. The tents look like refugee camps with portable johns out front, people filling buckets from pump hydrants by the side of the dirt road, and illegal aliens dumping muck buckets into the huge piles of manure that are carted away in dump trucks once a day. People school horses on every available open patch of ground, trainers shouting instructions, encouragement, and insults at their students. Announcements blare over the public address system every few minutes.
    At night the place is a different world. Quiet. Almost deserted. The roads are empty. Security guards make the rounds of the barns periodically. A groom or trainer might drop by to perform the ritual night check or to tend an animal with a medical problem. Some stables leave a guard of their own posted in their elaborately decorated tack room. Baby-sitters for horseflesh worth millions.
    Bad things can happen under cover of darkness. Rivals can become enemies. Jealousy can become revenge. I once knew a woman who sent a private cop everywhere with her horses after one of her top jumpers was slipped LSD the night before a competition offering fifty thousand dollars in prize money.
    I’d made a couple of good busts at this show grounds when I’d worked narcotics. Any kind of drug—human or animal, remedial or recreational—could be had here if one knew whom and how to ask. Because I had once been a part of this world, I was able to blend in. I had been away from it long enough that no one knew me. Yet I could walk the walk and talk the talk. I had to hope Sean’s little joke in
Sidelines
hadn’t taken away my anonymity.
    I made the dogleg turns from the back area known euphemistically as “The Meadows,” the tent ghetto where show management always sticks the dressage horses that ship in for only several shows each season. From those back tents it takes twenty minutes to walk to the heart of the show grounds. Earth-moving equipment sat parked at one corner, backed into freshly cleared land amid the scrubby woods. The place was being expanded again.
    Lights glowed in the tents. A woman’s melodic laugh floated on the night air. A man’s low chuckle underscored the sound. I could see the pair standing at the end of an aisle in tent nineteen. Elaborate landscaping at the corner of the tent set the stage around a lighted stable sign with one golden word on a field of hunter green: JADE .
    I walked past. Now that I had found Jade’s stalls, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I turned on the far side of tent eighteen and doubled back around, coming up through the aisles of nineteen until I could hear the voices again.
    “Do you hear anything?” The man’s voice. An