Quinn let go of the man’s nose and stepped back. He hadn’t let go of the cigar in his right hand. He put it back in his mouth and took a draw. The men turned and dispersed, the short man looking hard at Quinn and spitting in the dirt. They walked toward Founders Square and the pavilion, where you could still hear the stump speeches from the PA system.

“Didn’t even drop your cigar.”

“Hope that didn’t scare you,” Quinn said.

“Would you think less of me if I said I liked it?”

Quinn drew on the cigar and squinted one eye in the harsh morning light. “Not a damn bit, Maggie Colson.”

THREE

Don’t kid yourself, Ray, this place is fucking dying,” Buster White said, adding emphasis with the bloody steak on the end of his fork. “Enjoy it while you’re here. The last days of Rome. Everything is burning. Goddamn Nemo fiddling.”

“You mean Nero,” Ray said, his petit filet in front of him untouched, a cigarette smoldering in a coffee saucer.

“Then who the fuck is Nemo?” Buster White said, chewing, reaching for a big glass of cab, wine and blood dripping down his fat chin.

“A fish,” Ray said, picking up the cigarette. “From a kids’ movie. My grandkids love all that crap. I’ve seen it a million times. Fish gets lost, gets caught, and then jumps into the toilet to save his life.”

They sat in the back room of the Old Chicago Steakhouse in the far corner of Buster White’s casino in Tunica. Officially under the ownership of Dixie Amusements, a corporation with offices in Biloxi, New Orleans, and Memphis, a front for a Syndicate of good ole boy thieves who’d been running shell games in the Deep South since the mid-1950s. Buster was getting old. Ray could see it in his dark-rimmed eyes, bad, blotchy skin, fattened jowls, and continuous indigestion. He couldn’t get through three sentences before belching.

“Are you closing us down?”

“Maybe,” White said, sawing back into the T-bone and filling his mouth, not breaking stride in the conversation. “But that’s not why I wanted to see you. Whether this place goes tits up or not isn’t up to me. We’ve tried to move our casinos off the river and inland. But the religious nutsos think by taking gambling off the water, it’ll just spread all the fucking and dancing. So we got what? The Coast. And the fucking Indians. But something else gave me a goddamn heart attack this morning.”

Ray nodded, brushing some ash off his seersucker suit, legs crossed, cordovan loafers buffed to a high shine for a meeting with the boss. “Wes Taggart.”