“Is that O’Brien?” Paco indicated a beefy man with a scarred face; he was carrying a huge oak cudgel and with him was a man who looked equally rough, both of them cut from the same coarse cloth.

“Yeah, looks like both of them.”

Matt and Hugh O’Brien had grown up in the Live Oaks gang. Their father had died five years before while drunkenly trying to rob a fisherman from a rowboat on the Mississippi River. In their midtwenties now, the men were notorious troublemakers around Gallatin Street, always ready to make money at any task except an honest living. They had the kind of connections that could be useful in this hellish underworld of crime.

After buying a round of drinks—the Irish whiskey little more than neutral spirits with a half pint of creosote dumped into it—Steve got right down to business.

“I’m told you gentlemen have the merchandise we need.”

The older O’Brien, Hugh Jr., looked at him with narrow eyes that were as flat and black as a lizard’s. “Maybe we do. Maybe we don’t. I ain’t seed no money yet.”

“You were paid a conscription on order. You get the rest when the merchandise is delivered to the docks.”

Steve met his gaze with the same cold expression. It was a familiar game, a poker bluff to see who blinked first.

“Yeah, well, we had more trouble than we thought we was,” O’Brien growled. “That warehouse was locked tighter’n a whore’s purse, and we had to git rid of a guard that we didn’t expect.”

“That’s not my problem.” Steve eyed him, aware that the younger man was shifting from foot to foot, his hands still wrapped tightly around the neck of the heavy cudgel capable of taking off a man’s head in one blow. “We had a deal. It’s up to you if you want the rest of the money.”

After a short silence, O’Brien jerked his head in a nod. “I’ll git the rifles to the dock. You just git me my money.”

“How many?”

“Two thousand, maybe more. Hell, there’s enough crates to reach from here to Canal Street, end to end. Somebody at the Custom House is going to be pissed as hell that they ain’t there no more. Took us damn near all night to load them sonsabitches on wagons and git ’em took off and hid. We should git a bonus fer that.”

A heavy layer of smoke drifted in the close, dark saloon, smelling of tobacco, whiskey and stale sweat. It was rife with danger as well, and belligerence that could prove deadly.

“Your efforts won’t go unrewarded, gentlemen,” Steve said easily. “Just have the rifles at the dock by midnight tonight. We sail in the morning.”