“Thank you very much, Mr. Culbertson. I’d also like to get your phone number if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Why do you need my number?”

“In case I think of additional questions for you.”

He paused a long time, but in the end he recited a string of digits. “I don’t know why you’d want to talk to me again. I told you everything I know.”

“Just in case something comes to mind.” Decker flipped the cover of his notepad and tucked it into his pocket. He handed Culbertson a card. “And here’s my number if you feel the need to call.”

“I don’t know why I would. I barely knew the man.”

“You knew him enough not to like him.”

Another hint of a smile. “True. It was hate at first sight.”

THE BARTENDER POURED another shot, and Oliver pushed it in front of Nick Little. They were drinking at a bar—not some gussied-up, pussied-up travesty of a saloon that peddled apple martinis and frozen strawberry daiquiris, but a bar’s bar. Dark inside with an old-fashioned box TV playing sports. Sawdust on the floor, barstools with red Naugahyde seats, and a polished wood bar top that had heard secrets as old as the Bible.

The neon in the window called the establishment Jackson’s Hole, and Nick Little was a well-known patron. He was slugging back booze almost as fast as the barkeep could pour. It loosened his tongue. Within fifteen minutes, Oliver found out that Nick had been married and divorced twice, one kid with the first and one with the second. His ex-wives were bitches and whores and marriage was a cruel joke perpetrated on men by conniving women in order to screw their husbands out of their paychecks.

It didn’t take much acting for Oliver to agree with him, although he and his ex could now be in the same room without fireworks discharging. He didn’t actively hate his ex, but she did bring out the dyspeptic side of his personality.

Nick Little had manly features—a roman nose veined from alcohol and a big chin with a heavy shadow of stubble that darkened his face. His eyes were Christmas colored—kelly green and red-rimmed. Metal studs pierced his earlobes and climbed all the way up to the cartilage. He was big across the shoulders but thin at the hips. His arms were muscled and festooned with ink. By trade, he worked in a pit crew. When he wasn’t servicing cars, he was racing them. He liked who he was and how he lived, and if anyone had a problem with that, they could eat his shit. He had packed a lot of living into his thirty years and intended to stuff even more life into his next thirty big ones if the guy upstairs permitted.