‘Look, you can hang around until I finish the game. I do good, then maybe you get paid.’ Vic snaps a finger at Brandi, who takes his glass, making sure to squeak her boobs around the boss’s arm while she’s doing it. ‘Or you can keep dropping in for a few weeks until you catch me with a couple of bucks in my pocket.’

‘More than a couple. A couple of thousand more like.’

Vic shrugs like this makes zero difference. ‘Whatever. Less than fifty grand, I could give a shit.’

Fifty grand. You could buy the lease on this entire club for half that.

He picks a fresh pack of cards from the table and rips off the plastic. ‘Now, if you would kindly get out of my face, I got a game to play.’

Like I said, I’m not much for flashbacks, but for a second the sound of that plastic tearing has me back in a camo tent on the southern Lebanese border with Israel. There’s death at our door and blast tremors rattling the tent poles, and I’m saying, One more hand. Come on, guys, one more hand.

Victor does a few wedge shuffles and my eyes follow the snap of the cards. One of the girls starts to cry, her bony shoulders hitching, her fake boobs bobbing like buoys in the tide.

I like that one. Buoys in the tide. Sounds like an Eagles number.

Vic’s little con is as simple as it is low-down. Any time new girls come in looking to make a little money hostessing, Vic softens them up with tequila and then charms them into a few hands of poker. With Brandi looking over their shoulders and dropping her boss the wink, the girls quickly lose their first month’s wages, and before they know what’s happening they’re toting trays for tips. Modern-day slavery is what it is.

‘You rolling these little girls, Vic? Is this how your mother raised you?’

Vic does not bite on that hook. ‘My mother was wasted by two thirty every afternoon. I raised myself. I built everything I have.’

‘Let the girls go, Vic. Wipe their slate. Tell you what. You let those two out of here all square and you can keep my salary.’

I find it hard to believe that I’m saying this. Simon Moriarty would be writing I told you so in that little notebook of his. All capitals.

‘Hey, you hear that, AJ? Big noble McEvoy, giving it up for the ladies. They only owe me a couple of weeks wages; maybe they’ll win it back.’

‘And maybe hell will freeze over. What do you say, Vic? It would save me having to get angry.’

Vic has an answer to that. ‘Don’t worry, McEvoy. You get angry and I will fucking shoot you, make no mistake. Obviously I hope it doesn’t come to that.’