My first target is Jim Johnson. Or more specifically, his wife, Sue. She’s the most influential person in Star Falls. But I need Jim on board first. I need him to soften up the ground for me before I try to get Sue to change her mind about the Colorado Club.

I pull up outside Grizzly’s and realize I haven’t scuffed up my shoes. People are going to clock my spotless boots as soon as I walk in the place and label me a city boy. Which I am. Except tonight, I’m trying to win people over. Or at least not alienate more of them.

The ground is frozen, and there’s not much boot-dirtying mud around, but after kicking my tires and stepping on my own feet, the leather no longer gleams like a flashlight with new batteries. Hopefully no one saw me. I hate to think of the rumors this town could invent if anyone saw me trying to scuff my own boots.

I left town before I could legally drink, so I only ever went into Grizzly’s to look for my father. I open the door and am instantly transported back twenty years. The scent of stale beer and the crack of pool balls brings me to fourteen again, desperate to find my father. My mom had collapsed and I’d gone to fetch Dad. But he hadn’t been at Grizzly’s. Or maybe he’d been in the back playing poker. Losing at poker, knowing him.

I head straight to the bar, slide onto one of the tan leather stools and order a beer. The bartender is young, skinny with a tattoo of what could be a Chinese dragon in red ink on his arm. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him. Suits me just fine.

One of the reasons I haven’t come into town over the last couple of years when I’ve been back overseeing things at the Colorado Club is because I don’t have any connections in this place. My dad was found dead a couple of towns away after a bar fight. My mother remarried three years later while I was in New York and moved to Southern California with my sister, Mary. There’s nothing here for me.

“One beer coming right up, Byron,” the bartender says. Maybe I don’t know him, but apparently he knows me.