Read Online End of the Tiger by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page B

room. We got along well. He had decided I was steady.
    It makes a good deal for anybody in school, as I am. I’m in my senior year. The track pays you fifteen a night to work behind the windows. If he put me in the money room, I’d start drawing down twenty.
    He moved up beside me and looked at the ticket numbers and said, “Slow night.” He saw the book I had open on the shelf under the window. “What’s that?”
    “Math quiz tomorrow.”
    He shrugged and yawned. Then he moved a little closer and lowered his voice. He pitched it so low that Dave Truelow on my left and Stan Garner on my right couldn’t hear him. Particularly Garner. “Johnny, you see anything like I asked you?”
    “Not a thing, Joe.”
    “Keep looking,” he said, and moved casually away. The minutes were running out, and we began to get some business. The dogs had been shut in the starting boxes. I had no business when the buzzer sounded, so I shut the window. I heard the zing of metal on metal as the bunny came around the track, and heard the roar as the race started. I yawned. I tried to look at the book again, but I kept thinking about Stan Garner. It wasn’t up to me to tell Joe Stack that Garner was roughing the customers. He didn’t do it often. Just when it seemed safe.
    There are a lot of ways to do it. Stan Garner knew most of them. Drunks are the easiest. A drunk puts down a five and wants a two-dollar ticket. Stan countsoff the change as three, four, five. But he counts the ticket as three so that the drunk moves off with two dollars in change and his two-dollar ticket. On a windy night like this one, if a drunk bought with a ten, Stan would fast count him out about six dollars and hold it down and say, “Watch the wind, sir.” The drunk would shove it in his pocket and wobble off toward the track.
    Sometimes Stan would wink at me. He said to me once, “Get what you can, Johnny. The customers will rough you if they get a chance. You have to use the angles to stay even.”
    Joe Stack was putting me on the spot trying to get me to inform on Garner. I felt no moral responsibility toward Stan Garner. He is a stocky, smiling little guy, crooked all the way through. He’ll never go into crime in a big way. But he’ll never be honest when he can be crooked. I didn’t worry about Stan.
    I did my worrying about Dave Truelow, who has the window on my left. Dave and I were friends in the beginning. We applied for the jobs and got them on the same day. We’re both seniors at the University. We stopped being friends a month ago when I took it on myself to tell him that he was making a bad mistake playing out of the box.
    Here is the way it works. When you report in, you are given a money box. If you’re just selling, there may be only fifty or seventy-five dollars in it. As you sell your tickets you put the money in the box. Every once in a while someone from the money room will stop around and take out a few hundred and give you a receipt to put in the box. After the last race you have to be able to total out. The money you started with, plus total ticket sales off the machine, less cash and receipts on hand. The management has no objection to our buying a ticket for ourselves now and then. Those tickets are supposed to be purchased with money out of your pants, not out of the box. Sometimes when an owner steps up and makes a good bet just before race time, the information will go all the way down the line, and nearly everybody will buy themselves a ticket.
    There’s no harm in that if the gambling bug doesn’t bite you. But when it bites you and you start playingout of the box, hoping to make out before checkup, then you can be in trouble.
    I shouldn’t have tried to give Dave a lecture. He knew that I knew he was playing out of the box. But even before that, our personal relationship had become tense because of a girl named Joanne Jamison.
    Her father is an owner and trainer. During the season they travel from track to track. She and