“Don’t see him there. So I be talking to the guy at the door. Big-ass nigger. Don’t look like no bitch to me. Used to work for one of those Congress guys. Tells me the name. I don’t know it. Who cares about those fucks? But I don’t tell him that. He asks me, ‘What you want?’ Like he knows I ain’t there to party. I tell him about Raymond. He don’t says he knows him. He don’t says he don’t. So I ask him where else to go, like where would Raymond be hangin’ near Chinktown. But I don’t call it that. So he tells me about this other place. He writes it down—the address.”

“Why did you start talking to this fellow in the first place?” Dunne asked.

“Don’t know. Just did. Getting sick of this empty trip.”

“And you want to follow this lead?”

“Ain’t too far from my unc’s building. He could walk it.”

“Good thinking, Mr. Starrell.”

Dunne gave him a ten-dollar bill and told him to take a cab and then find him afterward at the Italian restaurant at the corner of Sixth and New York, the one with the bright neon sign.

“Where you been?” Starrell asked. “Don’t you know no rag-head cabbie gonna pick up a nigger?”

“In those clothes, you’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Like this is it: I got the magic fuckin’ white-man cammies. Bet your ass, I could get me a job at the White House in this.”

“I’m glad you think so. This time you leave first and I’ll wait.”

“And I want my money tonight. Don’t FedEx me. No next-day delivery shit, this time.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Starrell,” Dunne said. “Now go to work.”

The room was dark, and Starrell squinted. Shit, he thought, there’s cowboy shit everywhere. Cowboy posters on the walls. Cowboy hats hanging, too. Those white skulls with the horns you always see in the movies. The jukebox was loud. Some sad-voiced woman was wailing:

Loneliness surrounds me
Without your arms around me.

The place was crowded. Waiters were wearing open leather vests with nothing on beneath them and those type of pants you see on riders in the rodeo. Starrell’s uncle once had made him watch a television show about black men in the West. Starrell hated watching all that stuff about slavery. But he remembered this black rodeo champion who was shot and killed in a bar after winning a big rodeo. Some white fuck didn’t like how he was celebrating his victory.

This is buggin’, Starrell told himself. Cowboy bitches.