Like me.

The driver, a forty-ish hood, said, “Jesus, I thought he was supposed to be tough. Is he still under?”

A pale oval with a double chin and tiny eyes looked back at me. My slitted eyes would, I hoped, look closed as I sat there slumped.

“Still under. What do you expect, Mel? He’s over fifty.”

“Hell, so are you, Dutch.”

Wortman second-in-command: Elroy “Dutch” Downey.

“Fuck you very much, Mel. Anyway, I wasn’t the one who got dosed. If this bastard dies on us, Buster’s gonna be pissed. He already ain’t in the best of moods.”

“It was your idea. You said this Heller was tough! And you’re right about the boss—he’s half in the bag. That’s when he gets mean.”

“Not good news for our line-load back there.”

Line-load: taxi jargon for passenger. Was every St. Louis mobster a former cabbie?

I knew where we were now. Not far from East St. Louis—Collinsville, Illinois. We were cutting through another sin strip, the neons of taverns and night clubs like welcoming fires in the night, the Oasis, the Mounds Club, the Horseshoe Lounge, Diamondhead, Red Rooster. A scummy little Las Vegas that stayed open all night in this extension of East St. Louis.

Soon the bright lights turned into rural Collinsville and then we were turning onto a graveled drive.

“You awake back there?” Mel asked the rear view mirror.

“…Yeah.”

“Just behave yourself and this won’t be a one-way ride.”

“What’s the occasion?”

Dutch said, “That would spoil it.”

Up ahead, spotlighted like a premiere, loomed a pair of intersecting square brick buildings with flat roofs, the main two-story adjoining an add-on single story, a Streamline Moderne castle. Between this place and the Coral Court, all that was missing was a rocket ship. As we drew closer, I could make out the wide moat that surrounded the island on which the castle perched, the two-thirds of a moon making an ivory shimmer out of the water. Something silver and scaly broke the surface on the jump.

I said, “That thing has fish in it?”

Dutch said, not unfriendly, “Best-stocked private lake in Illinois.”

And the only one with a gangster living on an island in the middle of it.

For all the modern majesty of the castle and its well-manicured grounds, the bridge that crossed the moat was a wooden, rickety thing. It led to a macadam driveway that curved around right to a three-car garage, which is what the one-story add-on structure turned out to be. My buddy Dutch used a remote control gizmo to open the triple door, which slid overhead to admit their car, an Oldsmobile, into the garage next to a silver Cadillac. Yes, another Cadillac, and if you’re keeping up with your irony scorecard, every Cadillac in this part of the world emanated from a Greenlease-supplied dealership.

The door closed behind us at the push of a button on the brick wall shared with the house. My ankles were cut loose but my hands remained cuffed as we entered a big white hospital of a kitchen that only made the lingering sweetness of chloroform seem more distinct in my mouth. Through there I was nudged in the back with a gun into a hallway merging into a cavernous foyer whose marble floor was as pure white as the money that paid for it was not. A limestone central fountain with a September Morn nude wading in it was overseen by wall-hugging potted plants on pedestals with leaves like green swords.