“I’m sorry, Braz,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

And even as her heart ached for his loss, she knew that part of her grief was guilt because Braz had been right.

“Tally? You okay?”

She opened her eyes, disoriented for the moment, then realized Dennis Koffer was peering in at her over the swinging flap. The show’s patch wore a ball cap with “East Bay Raceway” stitched across the front and his usual cigar poking out the side of his mouth beneath his neat gray moustache.

“Yeah, Dennis. Thanks.” She fumbled in the pocket of her shorts for a tissue and blew her nose.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. What are you doing up so early?”

“Just getting my ducks in a row about today. You opening the Dozer?”

She nodded.

“You do remember that we’re a Sunday schooler this evening, right?”

“Oh, God, I’d forgotten.”

“You might want to narrow the side spills a little and add more prize chips, okay?”

“Okay.”

Sundays in the South were usually big-dollar days, and today would be no exception, especially since the Fall Festival Committee had decreed that tonight would be church night. This meant everything had to be squeaky clean so that Sunday school classes and youth groups, their parents and chaperons, could come out to the carnival, enjoy the lights and the rides, buy fried candy bars and chili dogs, and play for charity without being led into temptation. They would have money in their pockets, too, because many of the groups would come to “play for Christ” and to donate their prizes to toy drives for underprivileged children.

All evening, gospel and Christian rock would blare from the speakers strung through the lot, totally indistinguishable from soul and secular rock unless you listened carefully to the words.

For hanky-panks, it would be just another evening, but the gaffed games would have to be played fairly straight, which meant stashing the expensive plush and electronics that no one was ever allowed to win and scrambling to restock their stores with “slum,” cheap prizes that wholesaled at less than it cost to play the game. The alibi agents and flatties always griped when required to turn the midway into a Sunday schooler, but it was good public relations. Made the town fathers look On you a little kinder.

The patch smiled at her. “And you’ll remind Val no tricks with the Spot?”

Against her will, Tally had to smile back. “Now, Dennis, what are you suggesting?”

“Just be sure he loses the gaffed set tonight, okay?”

“Okay.”

If the flat metal disks were less than a certain proportion to the red spot, it would become impossible to cover every bit of the red. If a sharpie stepped up too confidently to the counter and Val was getting close to having thrown twenty-five percent of his plush already, he would palm the regulation-sized disks and slip the mark a set of microscopically smaller ones.