Fannie reached for the cigarillo and relit the end, watching the smoke curl and float up over the floor. Debby Boone now gone silent, the whole floor quiet and dead, worse than a funeral, worse than Ray’s service with that horrid fat wife of his doing the second line around the muffulettas and po’ boys stacked not twenty feet from the casket. What in the fuck was happening?

“They gonna close us down?” Midnight Man said, his deep, muffled voice somewhere between a whisper and a grunt.

Fannie didn’t answer, thinking back now on what Ray had taught her. Don’t be emotional about a threat. Be tactical, look at a way to seek out the problem and neuter the son of a bitch. Skinner didn’t get uppity until Vardaman started his run for things, suddenly making Tibbehah County more than Dogpatch, Arkansas. It was some kind of damn poker chip into the governor’s mansion. Skinner had been shining the man’s boots for far too long. But she’d seen the way Vardaman looked at him, as if he was some local yokel joke, until this year.

What could Skinner deliver that Fannie couldn’t? The only thing Buster White figured Fannie couldn’t do is get rid of Quinn Colson’s ass, sending in the goddamn Hee Haw boys, pickin’ and a-grinnin’, to run roughshod over the county. And see how that damn thing worked out, more bullets and blood flying than a Saturday night in Dodge City.

Fannie took a long pull of her drink, winking at Midnight Man for making it just right. That was it, wasn’t it? Skinner had promised Vardaman something he needed more than anything and couldn’t get himself. Fannie turned around as music started up, a new DJ taking the roost, hitting the first notes of Harry Styles . . . one of her new Latina chicks from Houston warming up on the pole, spinning and spinning, stretching her arms and legs, lifting her eyes to the stage lights, bringing Fannie back to everything she’d been doing for Vardaman and Stagg before that. Girls, girls, girls. That spray-tanned fuckwad couldn’t get enough of ’em. And now some teenage girl’s remains found out in the county, only a few miles from Vardaman’s place, a couple of two-bit Nancy Drews skulking about, asking questions about some shit that went down back in 1997 when the Booby Trap was the flavor of the month and Stagg was the main pimp for all of Vardaman’s people.

Fannie started to smile, nodding to herself, leaning across the bar and kissing Midnight Man on his sweating bald head. “That’s it,” she said. “That is fucking it. Vardaman is about to shit his damn drawers. What’d you ever hear about his parties out at the Cracker Barrel ranch, back in the day?”

“When we talking?” Midnight Man asked.