“We got two women down at the hotel, they want to know if they can come to your Thursday night shindig,” he said. “Your class.”

Manfred thought Fiji looked completely taken aback. “Of course. Do they need help getting down here?”

“Mamie does. Suzie rolls along like a tank.”

“I’ll be sure they get here and get back,” Fiji said. “Maybe my friends Manfred and Olivia here can help.”

The old man turned his beady eyes on them. “You’re the tough girl from the pawnshop,” he said. He turned his gaze on Manfred. “And you’re the phone psychic guy?”

Manfred nodded.

“I’m Tommy,” the man said, extending a wrinkled hand scattered with age spots. “Tommy Quick. Ain’t so quick no more. Used to be Carlo Bustamente, back in the day.”

“Wow,” Manfred said. “Early days of Vegas, right?”

The old man wheezed with laughter and withdrew his hand from Manfred’s. “There hasn’t been any late days of Vegas!”

Fiji and Olivia cast questioning glances Manfred’s way, but he waved a hand. The rest of the story would have to wait for Tommy’s departure. “So, how’d you come to be in Midnight?” he asked. “Did you lose a bet or something?”

The wheezy laugh again. “You might say that, or you might say I got lucky, sonny,” Tommy told Manfred. “I’ll tell you about it. So I’m in a terrible dive in Vegas, see, the kind you wouldn’t want your mom to stay in. Not that I know your mom, but I’m just saying. It was a place so bad that only broke old people, like us, or broke young people, like your average little criminal, would choose to live there.”

They realized he was waiting for an acknowledgment, and they all nodded like puppets. “Anyways,” Tommy went on, “this woman come by the place we’re staying. Now, we’ve been praying we won’t get stabbed every time we go out to get groceries, you understand?”

He paused again, waiting. They nodded obediently. “This woman says there’s a place in the boonies in Texas where we can live, eat three meals a day, have our rooms cleaned, be comfortable. We says, ‘What’s the catch?’ And she says, ‘The catch is, it’s in the boonies in Texas.’” He laughed again.

Manfred could manage only a weak smile. But Fiji grinned. “So you agreed, then?” Fiji said encouragingly.

“Yeah, me and Mamie and Suzie. The next thing we knew, we were in the Midnight Hotel and being trotted out for every visitor. There’s one other old guy, Shorty Horowitz. He was in the hotel next to ours, but we only knew him by sight. He was the only other guy broken-down enough to take this cockamamie offer.”