Read Online Heart's Desire by Laura Pedersen - Free Book Online

person to a clean poker game in most any city in the US or Canada. And I have reason to believe there are a few other dilemmas that Cappy can solve for a client willing to pay his service fee, though I’d rather not know about them. In fact, Cappy doesn’t even like to be referred to as a bookie. He describes himself as a “problem solver,” which in his eyes is more akin to being a management consultant or a social worker. And from the way Cappy set his son up with a car dealership and put his daughter through medical school, it would appear that he’s solved a lot of problems in his day.
    Knocking gently on the closed door I call out, “Cappy, are you in there?”
    “Come in,” says a youthful voice from inside.
    Using my shoulder I force open the warped wooden door, which always sticks when the humidity is bad. Cappy’s place is cramped, poorly lit, and reeks from a toxic mixture of day-old cigar smoke and month-old tacos. The décor consists of dark green walls plastered with newspaper clippings featuring some of the greatest upsets in betting history, particularly those that had also served to help the proprietor separate a large number of wagerers from their wallets.
    I’m surprised to see his grandson Auggie sitting at the rusty metal desk. I’m surprised for two reasons. This first is that Cappy has always vowed that
no one
in his family will ever go into The Business, which I of course take to mean the problem-solving business. And the second is that the last time I saw Auggie was about three years ago, when he was visiting from Dayton and tagging along behind Cappy at the racetrack like a worshipful puppy dog. Only back then he was sporting a Catholic schoolboy uniform with an ugly blue plaid tie, silver braces with green and black rubber bands on his teeth, and wire-frame glasses, all topped off with a crew cut. And although Auggie was a grade ahead of me in school at the time, he looked about twelve instead of fifteen.
    When Auggie stands to greet me it becomes apparent that he hasn’t grown much taller, since we’re about the same height now, but otherwise he’s filled out in all the right places. And the crew cut has turned into gorgeous dark brown shoulder-length hair that hangs loose about his face. Auggie’s soft brown eyes are set deep in strong arches and he looks up at me quizzically from underneath thick lashes, as if trying to determine how we might be acquainted with each other. Around his neck is a leather-and-bead necklace that I like, but most guys around here would be afraid to wear something so blatantly unisex. In his Creed T-shirt from the
My Own Prison
concert tour, tan cargo pants, and black leather sandals, I find the overall effect to be that Auggie is not only cute but also cool.
    “Hi,” I say. “I’m Hallie Palmer. We met once at the racetrack a few years ago.”
    “Oh my gosh!” Auggie reaches across a metal filing cabinet to shake my hand. “You’re the famous Calculator Kid—my grandpa talks about you all the time and how you can do probabilities in your head on the spot!”
    Wow. A person forgets how nice a little flattery feels after living as a constantly broke B-student for a year. “It’s not that I really do them all in my head,” I modestly explain. “In most games there are a certain number of combinations that regularly come up and after a while you simply start to remember them all.”
    He flashes me a metal-free smile and I decide that Cappy indeed got his money’s worth on the braces. “I wish that I could do all that stuff in my head. I can’t even do it with the help of an adding machine.” He nods unhappily toward
The Daily Racing Form
spread out on the desktop, which is all marked up with a pencil and the red rubber flecks of countless erasures. “I’m supposed to figure out the payoffs on a hundred-dollar bet for all of these horses.”
    Moving closer to the track newspaper, not unlike a moth being drawn toward an old flame, I look to