“My grandchildren love it,” he said. “We have a lazy river and everything. Sixteen slides across ten acres. It’s all built within the historical context of the Choctaw lifestyle. Someday we’ll have a theme park as big as Six Flags Over Georgia. I have the drawings. Things have really changed.”

Ray took a swig, reaching into his coat pocket for his cigarettes. “Damn, Chief,” he said. “That’s impressive as hell. I’ll have to stop by sometime.”

“But I want you to know one thing,” Chief Robbie said, leaning forward while Ray fanned out the match. “What you people pulled with the Hathcock woman still does not sit well with me. She was supposed to come up and run the skin for us. Nothing more. That woman is the devil, I tell you. She was a spy. A liar. She tried to turn my own people against me. Say things about me that were not true. She stole. She ran drugs. She tried to get a young woman to infiltrate my bed, promising me things that come right out of the barnyard.”

“Oh,” Ray said. “Yeah. Well. Yes, she’s been spoken to. It won’t happen again, Chief. She’s been demoted.”

“Not how I hear it,” Robbie said, pointing his index finger right at Ray. “She’s running north Mississippi now. The drugs. The women. Working direct with Sledge in Memphis. And you handle these fucking power people.”

The Chief pointed around the inside of the hunt lodge, with its tall wood-beam ceiling and mounted animal heads and fish. Expensive gleaming silver and polished walnut shotguns and rifles hung on the wall. The furniture was upholstered with thick leather and the tables and the bar had been handmade from old-growth oak and polished to a high shine.

“Business,” Ray said. “It’s all business. No different when you ran those swamp boat tours down in New Orleans. We all got to grease the wheel, don’t we?”

Chief Robbie nodded with a serious face, craning his neck as Vardaman entered the room, shaved and clean and reeking of mint and intense cologne. The men stood and shook his hand as he joined them at the grouping of a table and chairs, finding a spot dead center in the middle of a big couch, his arms spread wide.

“We got a fine lunch planned for y’all,” Vardaman said. “Elk steaks from Wyoming with field peas and fresh tomatoes from the garden. My cook, a tough old black woman, asked me what kind of animal did I kill this time? Some kind of tiger? And I had to pull up a picture of an elk on my phone. She about jumped out of her skin. Said it was the largest deer she’d ever seen in her life.”