“Hold on,” she said, and I turned the cognac straight up. Brought it down immediately, wheezing and gasping and coughing, damn near choking to death. She rammed it out of the parking lot and hit second and squealed viciously on the corners until she hit a straightaway and we must have been doing seventy by then and she downshifted and braked sharply and whipped it around a curve and out onto the street, and then two streets over she pulled in behind a bread truck, and four big black guys jumped out with knives and guns and robbed my terrified ass while she hung out the window on her elbow laughing herself silly, the pee running down her leg, maybe, I guess, saying, Hoo boy, you white boys something else.

Well, it scared the shit out of me, naturally. I felt weak all over for about twelve minutes. But then I got to thinking about it and said to myself, Well, it’s gone now, wasn’t anything you could do, you still got your hotel room, you can charge some beer on your MasterCard and haul ass in the morning before they check. That and plus I had five one hundred dollar bills folded into a minute thing in the heel of my right sock. I’d just tell my groovy employers that they’d stripped me naked, even looked up my ass. Real killers. So I started walking back up the beach. I’d sobered up a little, what with the robbery and all. I didn’t know how I’d get back into North Mississippi and my beloved pine trees. They’d specifically stated that they wanted headless shrimp. Like Captain Mike McDonald and his crew were going to sit back and shuck the fuckers. But that was just the kind of rich ignorance I was dealing with. I wanted to go out on the boat with them. I wanted to pull the nets. I wanted to see what came up from the ocean depths, what unspeakable stuff spilled out when they hoisted it up onto the deck.

But the Gold Nugget beckoned. I could see it from the beach, from the dark water, from the sucking tide sucking further south with each suck. I had to sit down to get out my money. It was good money.

A whole new shift had come on. I settled at a table, my hands trembling just a little. I knew the sister was going to come back a little later, and I didn’t know what to do about it. My ass was in a crack. I tried to figure out how much they had taken off me. It was somewhere around three hundred dollars. I had two hundred dollars’ worth of coolers in my pickup.