Up on the television, the new governor of Mississippi stood on the dais with his wife, a fat, brassy blonde who looked zonked out of her mind, and two college-age kids, a boy and a girl. He was speaking to the crowd of his lunatics, using his hands to emphasize the words that Fannie couldn’t hear. She could only see the scroll at the bottom of the screen. VARDAMAN WINS BY A LANDSLIDE.

Vienna’s was in fine form tonight, a couple hundred guests ogling the girls, tossing dollar bills, feeling high-rumped waitresses and being led back to the VIP room to open up their wallets and throw down their credit cards for one more bottle, one more dance, so much fucking fun that those men never wanted it to end. And there was Fannie, the fucking queen of it all, sitting at the bar, anonymous and alone, winning at damn-near everything that she ever wanted. She had the state, the corridor, the drugs, the stolen shit, the fucking tractor trailer shipments, the Cartel contacts, the whores, domestic and international, and the promise of it all, that it would only get bigger and better. Ray was dead. Buster was nothing. She and the Chief and that grinning bastard on television.

Let that dumb son of a bitch Skinner try to close down her least profitable business and erect that cross. She’d hang that old fucker from it by his dick.

She sipped the last of her champagne, turning to see two teenage girls locked in an embrace on the center stage, that Katy Perry song “Roar” pounding on the speakers. Eye of the tiger. Dance through the fucking fire. Two men in their twenties, nicely dressed with good clothes and good teeth, stared down from the end of the bar at her. She looked down at the amazing display of cleavage she was sporting tonight in her little black dress and couldn’t blame them. But, damn, if only those boys knew, she’d bring them both to their fucking knees and make ’em cry for Momma.

Fannie smiled, leaning back on her barstool, nodding to the music, as the DJ played another song. “Hey, Midnight Man,” Fannie Hathcock said, turning back to the bar.

Midnight Man leaned over the bar to hear her better. “Yes, ma’am?”

“I like that,” she said. “Tell him to play that shit again.”

*   *   *