“He left,” Fannie said. “Little son of a bitch peeling out onto the highway, flipping me the bird from his open window. But when Dixie tried to leave this morning, there he was, standing outside his little red truck, screaming he deserved some kind of goddamn apology.”

Quinn looked at the girl, the hair too black to be real against her china white skin. Her false eyelashes highlighted bloodshot eyes. “You want to file charges?”

“I don’t want him to stomp my ass.”

“You have somewhere to go?”

Dana Ray nodded.

“And a way to get there?”

“I’m parked right out by Miss Fannie,” she said. “I just don’t want no trouble and I want Bradley Wayne to leave me the hell alone. He may have paid for my tits, but I paid his sorry ass back a long time ago. I don’t owe that man nothing.”

“OK, then,” Quinn said. “I’ll walk you out.”

“What’d I tell you,” Fannie said.

“You said the sheriff was a real gentleman,” Dana Ray—Miss Dixie Nightingale—said. “You said he didn’t care who you were or what you did, he’d make sure to look out for what’s right.”

Fannie looked up at Quinn and gave him a big ole Hollywood smile. Quinn kept his hands on his hips and motioned to the door with his chin. “Ready?”

The girl said she had to get her bag and ran back toward the dressing room. Quinn turned his eyes back to Fannie, who was waving away the smoke with the back of her hand, a self-satisfied expression on her face.

“You could’ve gotten one of your bouncers to toss his ass.”

“And get shot?”

“Midnight Man?” Quinn said. “Nobody messes with him.”

“He had the day off.”

“Come on, now.”

“Are you saying I called you for another purpose?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “You have something you want to tell me about Wes Taggart and Big Daddy White down on the Coast?”

Fannie stared through all the smoke and neon and winked. “Always good to see you, Quinn. A goddamn true-ass Southern gentleman.”

Dana Ray appeared back in the strip club with a duffel bag over her shoulder. He walked with her toward the front door, held open wide by the Asian woman with the pink hair. “Come again,” the woman said, her voice straight out of the piney woods.

The sun was white hot when they hit the blacktop. Across the lot, the driver’s side of the little red truck jacked open and the sawed-off little creep walked toward them. He wore a sleeveless work shirt over a white undershirt. Quinn spotted the butt of a handgun.

“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”

“Get in my truck,” Quinn said, reaching for his .45. “This won’t take long.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Bradley Wayne said.