“What are you thinking about?”

“Uh . . .” I uttered, reluctantly.

“You wanna buy me a drink?” She was happy to change the subject.

The second question took me away from Mouse and that German soldier.

“Sure do,” I said.

The young woman looked deeply into my eyes. I appreciated the attention.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Easy Rawlins.”

“Easy? You could call a boy Easy, I guess, but a girl would suffer under a name like that.”

I grinned and said, “It’s short for Ezekiel. What’s yours?”

“Montana.”

“For real?”

“Can I help you?” a man’s anything-but-helpful voice asked.

Swiveling my head to the left I saw the bartender, a beefy and pink-skinned specimen with a scowl for a mouth. His hands were working on drying a tall glass with fingers swollen from muscle. He was maybe thirty and only five eight, but if he ever clamped on with those mitts, that would have been the end of whoever got grabbed.

“What’s your pleasure, Montana?” I said to my bar date.

“I didn’t ask her,” the pink bartender said as he put down the glass.

I considered grabbing the tumbler and smashing it around the vicinity of his eyes.

“Rudolf says that Mr. Rawlins should be considered a platinum guest,” Montana informed the barman.

I didn’t look at her because he could have used that glass on my eyes.

Absorbing this intelligence, the bartender went through an amazing transformation. Across the wasteland of the pink man’s broad, flushed face, glower turned to grin.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Monty always has the same. What would you like?”

I made my order and he moved away.

“My father was born in Cleveland but he always wanted to be a cowboy,” Montana said with a bit of nostalgia in her voice.

“Say what?”

“Instead he named me Montana and I turned into a saloon girl.”

“I’d probably name you Platinum.”

Montana grinned and bowed her head, only slightly. “Platinum means that if Cunningham made you mad he might could get fired.”

“It’s more like I made him angry.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Sometimes the band brings in a guest. They could sit at a table but the rules are they can’t stand at the bar. That’s for white customers.”

“The story of my life and my father’s and his father’s and his.”

Montana reached over to pick up a glass filled with red liquid. My drink was there too. Cunningham had stealth capabilities rivaling Craig Kilian’s and Christmas Black’s.

“Did Rudolf ask you to follow me?”

“To take care of you,” the daughter of a would-be cowboy corrected.

“Oh.”

“What do you need, Easy?”