“You want me to sign or not?”

“They’re from Fort Worth, the buyers. I heard them talking to each other. Calling me ‘Rastus’ and ‘tar baby.’ Called me ‘the dinge’ in my own club. Joe, can you get your hands on fifty thousand dollars? If you can, the Casa Mañana is yours. Club, license, lot, everything.”

Joe carefully slid on the gun’s safety and tucked it in his pants. “Half price?”

“For you.”

“Serious?”

“Have I ever joked about the club?”

“There are laws about Indians drinking liquor, let alone serving it.”

“There are laws about bootlegging, and your father was a bootlegger. Afraid?” Pollack smiled a yellow grin. “You want it or not?”

“I want it,” Joe said and knew at the same time: the future was here. The future had coasted toward him in a silent Cadillac. “I want it.”

“You have the fifty thousand dollars now?”

“I need a month.”

“A week. Eddie Junior’s coming in from Italy, and I’m going to be there at the dock.”

After pocket money and black market profits, Joe had a little over $15,000. Even if he sold all the tires and nylons he could lay his hands on, he still couldn’t raise another $500 in a week, and he’d be leaving for Trinity in ten days.

“Two weeks. If I don’t have the money for you then, you can still sell for twice as much and blow the difference on Eddie’s ‘welcome home’ party.”

Pollack gave his hand through the window. “Two weeks, Joe, not one day more. We’ll show the white trash what this war was all about.”

Joe watched the Cadillac roll away down the road and across the dark plaza. When he turned around, Anna was standing in the doorway. He didn’t know how long she’d been there or how much she’d heard. Some ghost of the headlights still seemed to play on her and the house.

Joe Peña’s Casa Mañana.

19

Omega Site was a hangar at the bottom of Los Alamos Canyon, a natural trench of basalt and pines deep and narrow enough to shield the Tech Area a mile away from any explosion. The hangar itself was divided by a cement barrier. One side was occupied by the miniature reactor that Fermi called his Water Boiler. On the other side was an experiment of Harvey’s called Tickling the Dragon’s Tail.