The Horse Heist

“Hey Anthony! Can I come over and hang out? “ It was my best friend Matt. We had just gotten out of school, and It was third to last Friday of the school year in late April. The sun shone around us, and a mild breeze cooled the air as we sat around our bikes on the rack. “Sure, just don’t mention my dad’s job when he’s around.

During our bike ride home we encountered a lot of traffic coming into Louisville. The Kentucky derby at Churchill downs was tomorrow as always the first Saturday in May. The traffic and noise thinned out once we reached the dirt road that led to my family’s white farm house. When we walked into the entryway the only sound was coming from my dad’s laptop keyboard. A week ago, my dad’s boss laid him off to save the construction company some money. He’s been in a bad mood since, and has been on his computer searching for jobs hours into the night. He was especially stressed because even with his construction job, he couldn’t fund the renovation of the house and the house payments, and we were getting behind.

I expected to find him in a worse mood than he was, but when Matt and I walked in, he had a smile on his face. He had been searching for jobs online when he came upon some sites and ads to make bets on the horse race. He told us that he had already been out to Churchill downs to take a look at the three year old thoroughbred horses. While he was there, a bet had been made. After watching the horses and jockeys practice, he decided to wager two thousand dollars on a horse named “Windstorm. “ A tall fat man named John Ringo was betting against him for horse named “Hogan” and seemed absolutely sure his horse would win. He was taking bets from a lot of other people going for the top contender horses, with Hogan remaining a long shot. “Windstorm is the horse that is sure would win.” He explained to me a lot of other technical stuff that was way over my head, and then announced that he talked to Matt’s parents and said he was spending the night. After a dinner of cold turkey sandwiches we went off to my room and spent and uneventful night watching Netflix on the ancient tube TV in my room.

That morning brought a heavy downpour. We woke to the sound of rain on the old shake shingled roof. We had nothing to do outside or in except for video games and movies on my tiny TV. A short time after we woke, my dad came down the stairs.

“Do you guys want to go to the track with him and look at the horses?”

Matt eagerly called yes back down the stairs. I tagged along with the two of them but I was less than enthusiastic sitting In the back seat of my dad’s beat up pickup while he and Matt sat talking up front.

When we arrived at the downs fifteen minute later, the place was a madhouse. There were jockeys frantically searching the stables and there were only ten spooked horses left. The parking lot had been closed down, and the police were there. It appeared that when the stables had been opened, there were a couple horses missing and they were all top contenders. In the midst of all the commotion, Dad pointed out the man named John Ringo, who seemed too cool in all of this, then approached the police, who confirmed that Windstorm had indeed gone missing along with other top contenders. The three of us returned back home in silence. When I asked him what would happen if the horses weren’t found, and he kept evading the question and said “it’s in the police’s hands and we shouldn’t worry about it.” Despite his superficial optimism, I sensed the inward lack of confidence in his words; like he knew that blew it and that we were in trouble.

Later that day around 2:00 pm, about the time the races should have been happening, Matt and I went out to the back yard. The rain had cleared up, and Matt was warming up for his baseball game later that afternoon. After tossing the ball back and forth for a few minutes he was completely warmed up, and he started pitching. He wasn’t accurate by any means; he just threw the ball fast. He side armed one ball five feet off to the side, and ten feet above my head. It sailed through the air towards the woods at the bottom of the hill behind my house. We took about five steps into the trees to the edge of the steeper hill, and we spotted the baseball one hundred feet below among the grey rotting leaves from the previous autumn. The difficult part wouldn’t be getting down the hill; it would be climbing back up the steep grade.

Matt took the first two steps down and gave me a thumb up. I followed right behind him. I took two steps before everything went wrong. Matt had brand new Nike metal baseball cleats, which sunk into the mud that was created by the morning’s rain. My sneakers just slid around. My fall brought us both to the ground, and we didn’t stop sliding until we reached the bottom of the hill. What we could see now that we couldn’t see from the top of the hill was a long grey metal horse trailer that was hooked up to a blue Chevy pickup with two men sitting inside smoking cigarettes with the windows open. We turned towards each other at the same time; we knew what was going on. We started sprinting up the hill not wanting to bring unwanted attention from the truck, but Matt’s cleats became entangled in a mass of roots and he let out a cry of pain as his ankle twisted. The truck started up and lurched in our direction. I felt a tug on the back of my shirt. My struggling was helpless the man was too strong, and the cigarette smoke just caused me to sputter and cough. Moments later I was bound and lying helplessly in the back of the truck. My captor disappeared. He returned briefly with the struggling silhouette of Matt, who was thrown into the bed of the truck along with me. Following a short and bumpy drive, the truck stopped and we were dragged to an upstairs bedroom of an old abandoned farmhouse, much like my own when we moved in. We were thrown onto the splintering wooden floor, and With the turn of the key, we were locked inside.


Though faint, we could hear the muffled voices of three men floating up the stairs. They discussed their plot to take the four stolen horses to the Midwest and illegally sell them. They wanted to execute the plan immediately, deciding to leave town at nightfall, deserting us in our helpless state. They discussed how well we fit into their plans as the perfect decoys. “Surely the police would look for missing boys before they went after horses.” We sat for a while until the voices dwindled. We didn’t dare speak until they were gone. When they were we silently searched for a means to escape. Attempts to snap the ropes with Matt’s metal cleats were unsuccessful. They were only meant to be sharp enough to dig into dirt. We spotted a rusty nail protruding from the floorboard; it was the only solution left. We had to go one at a time using it to fray parts of the rope a little at a time. It took nearly twenty minutes, but it was enough to free us. There was one window on the west side of the room. It was the only way top escape without alerting our guards. The wooden frame had expanded after years of rainwater seeping in, and every inch caused another squeak. Each one risking the alert of our escape to our captors below. It turned out to be a tedious job but we able to finish it just before the sky started pouring rain. We used the frayed rope to repel down the side of the house as quietly as possible onto the shake shingled garage roof and from there we shinnied down the wet drainpipe to the ground.


We slipped into the shadows inside of the garage just as the thieves walked out of the front door. We saw two other men appear on the front porch through two separate knotholes and watched them join their leader, John Ringo, at the truck. The sight of him made me sick. If he succeeded, dad would lose more than the bet. We had to act quick or risk losing not only the horses, but also my home to foreclosure. I turned toward Matt who was almost a year older and about three inches taller than me and asked if he could drive the van parked beside us in the garage. He was hesitant at first, but upon hearing the nearby voice of a man saying “I’ll be there in a sec, I just need to get some equipment from the van” he sprang into action. Without delay, we were both seated, sopping wet, in the unlocked van just as the man turned the corner into plain sight. Matt twisted the ignition, and he hit the gas, slamming through the back wall of the garage in reverse.

Matt tore up the backyard, running over trees and bushes, fleeing from the thieves who were in pursuit of us in their truck which they had unhooked from the horse trailer. Ringo was at the wheel, and his scruffy faced passenger was firing holes in our tailgate with a double barreled 12 gauge. The vehicles circled the house numerous times, until Matt got the great idea of slamming the brakes. The truck rammed the back of the van, which caused the trucks airbags to deploy. The van, which was too old to have airbags, was still drivable, but the truck was not. It was smoking and rattling when the driver blindly hit the gas in continued pursuit. Matt took a sharp turn back towards the house, and the truck tried to do the same, but he couldn’t see over the airbags, and he hit a large tree, and the truck was halted for good. Matt and I were sitting in the van laughing harder than we had in weeks when the van ran out of gas and stalled in the front yard of the house. It wasn’t over yet. There were more men in the house, and they were bound to come out any moment, and come out they did after Matt and I had saddled two of the racehorses up. There was nothing else the bandits could do as we headed back towards town on some of the fastest horses in the country.

The next morning it was all over the news…“Teenagers Foil Horse Heist!” The horses had been found and the race was back on. The sheriff’s office offered a five thousand dollar award that was given to Matt and I, though all of my money went towards the house. The race was to be rescheduled for the next Saturday and in thanks, jockeys whose horses had been stolen and returned pitched in and purchased VIP tickets on “millionaires row” for our families to watch the race. We were surrounded by the rich and famous when Windstorm won the race by a nose, and my dad was offered a job maintaining the racetrack. The rest of the summer turned out to be pretty ordinary, that is until the State Fair rolled into town….but that’s another story.