“Why do you care?” he panted, his arms churning.

“Because their movement is dead, but they open that church every morning, they preach, they fight sin on every corner of a district that gets more evil every year. I care because I need to know—why do they bother? Why do they still believe?”

He bent himself double and, with a final thrust, drove the crank home. All the machinery came alive, groaning and screaming toward some impossible task. Abner wiped his brow and checked his watch. Only when he saw the time did he permit himself to breathe.

“If they’re so sure I took that goddamned digit,” he said, “why aren’t they here to say so?”

“It’s not their kind of place.”

“That’s a lie, and probably not the first they told you. Only reason Judy and Enoch don’t do their act here is ’cause the Gray Boys pay them twenty bucks a month to stay away.”

“Who are the Gray Boys?”

“The Eastside crowd that runs this place. That’s just what I call them—I don’t know their right name, or if they even have one. I just know they’re gray, and as interchangeable as all the parts in this damn machine.”

“Van Alen wouldn’t stand for an Eastside gang in the Lower West.”

“Van Alen might not have a choice.”

That stopped me short. I hadn’t heard of anyone tough or stupid enough to challenge Van Alen’s grip on the Westside. I chewed on that as the bell continued to keen. When the noise was nearly unbearable, the machinery stopped, the ringing quieted, and the crowd fell into a seething hush. Abner put his hand against the wall. A metal chip fell out of the slot.

“Seventy-three!” he cried. “Who’s got seventy-three?”

“Goddamn it!” cried a man from deep in the bar.

“This game is rigged,” called a woman at my elbow.

I reached into my coat pocket, the clammy touch of coincidence sliding up my neck. I handed Abner my ticket.

“I’m seventy-three,” I said.

“You would be.”

“What’s my prize?”

“The specialty of the house. A free drunk and a place to sleep it off.”

From a narrow shelf above the mirrored glass, Abner took a chipped porcelain dog bowl. He set it under the nearest hose and filled it with a torrent of the awful gin.

“I’ve had my fill,” I said.

“You drink it, or I gotta dump it out, and this room tears us both to pieces.”