That did it. Rydel removed his hat and hung it by its leather chin cord on the back of his chair. Then he twisted around so he could see Clete more clearly. His eyes were lead-gray, his sideburns neatly etched, the skin around his mouth drained of blood. “Who are you?” he asked.

“You don’t remember me?” Clete said.

“No, I never saw you before in my life.”

“You remember Courtney Degravelle?”

“No, I don’t. You got me mixed up with someone else.”

The head of security had walked up behind Clete. He was a retired St. Mary Parish sheriff’s detective by the name of Tim Romero. He had salt-and-pepper hair and was dressed in a blue sports coat, knife-crease gray slacks, and shined loafers. “Is there a problem here?” he said.

“Not with me,” Clete said. “But this guy here is on the grift. I already reported him at the door. If he hasn’t switched out cards on you yet, he will.”

“Do you mind stepping over to the bar with me?” Romero asked.

“No, I don’t mind. But that guy is a griffin and his partner there, the guy with the waxed head, is a pervert.”

“That’s it, Mr. Purcel, you either come with me or you’ll be escorted from the casino.”

Clete raised his palms. “You want creeps at your tables, that’s your choice. Tell you what, call your colleagues in Atlantic City or Vegas about these two guys and see what kind of feedback you get.”

I cupped one hand on Clete’s shoulder and looked at Romero. “He’s okay. We’re going to get a cup of coffee,” I said.

“If you say so, Dave. But don’t make me regret I took this job,” Romero said.

Clete and I went to the bar and immediately he ordered a Jack and a beer back.

“Clete-”

“Trust me,” he said. “We’re going to nail those guys. We just need to twist the screw a little tighter.”

“I think we’re firing in the well,” I said.

“Wrong,” he said.

He sipped from the shot glass and touched at his mouth with the back of his wrist, his stare riveted on Rydel’s face. Rydel glanced up at him, then back at his cards. Then he looked up again. Clete’s stare stayed on his face. Rydel fitted his hat back on and slanted the brim down like a man keeping the sun’s glare out of his eyes.

I got out my cell phone and walked to a quiet place at the end of the bar. I scrolled down to Betsy Mossbacher’s cell number and punched the “Call” button.

Please pick up, Betsy, I thought.

“Dave?” she said.

“Can you run a dude by the name of Bobby Mack Rydel? I need it right now.”

“What’s going on?”

“Come on, Betsy, help me out. I think I’ve got a house fire here.”

I don’t know how she did it but she did. My suspicion was she or a colleague dipped into an intelligence file. By my watch, it took less than four minutes for her to call back.

“You’ve got a live one,” she said. “Rydel was in Force Recon in the Marine Corps, attended jump school at Benning, and was kicked out with a dishonorable discharge after he was charged with rape in Japan.”

Clete had walked over to the slot machines, not far from the card tables, and had positioned himself where he could look directly into Rydel’s face. Each time Rydel looked up, Clete was grinning at him, smacking his gum, his big arms folded on his chest.

“He ran a training school for mercenaries in the Florida Panhandle and was probably mixed up with mercs in Mozambique in the eighties,” Betsy said. “He has a seventh-degree belt in karate. He beat a man to death in Miami and got off because the victim was armed and Rydel was not. Are you getting this?”

“Yeah, I’m right here,” I said.

Rydel had just bet heavily into a large pot, trying to ignore Clete and keep his eyes focused on the game, waiting for the final cards to be turned up by the dealer.

“Rydel is on a watch list in France. Interpol thinks he may be involved with arms smuggling. He may have been with the Contras briefly, but for sure he’s worked all over Africa,” Betsy said.

Rydel raised the bet, pushing three stacks of chips into the center of the felt. A black man in a purple suit with rings on all his fingers called and raised. Rydel called and raised again, pushing out the last of his chips. The black man shrugged and called the raise, yawning either out of confidence or perhaps acceptance that he had gotten in over his head.

“Here’s the last of it,” Betsy said. “He’s been a contract security employee for several companies operating in the Mideast. His specialty is thought to be interrogation. Don’t ask me to do this again.”

The communal cards the dealer had dealt faceup in the center of the felt included an ace of spades and an ace, king, and jack of hearts. Rydel turned over his hole cards, an ace of diamonds and an ace of clubs. The two aces from the flop gave him four of a kind, an almost guaranteed winner.

The black man grimaced as though he had just bitten down on an abscessed tooth.

“I catch a hand like that about once every six months,” Rydel said.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Me, too,” the black man said.

He turned over his hole cards, a ten and queen of hearts. With the ace, jack, and king from the communal cards, he was holding a royal flush, the best hand in poker.

Clete began wheezing with laughter, his folded arms bouncing up and down on his chest. He passed by Rydel’s chair, slapping him hard on the back. “Tough luck,” he said. “If you need a credit line, forget it. This is a class joint. They don’t take food stamps.”

You could hear him laughing all the way to the men’s room.

Rydel sat for about thirty seconds staring into space, his hands splayed on his thighs, perhaps counting up the number of instances his attention had been distracted from the game by Clete’s ridicule.

He said something in the ear of the woman with the white-gold hair. She wore a white knit dress full of eyelets and her breasts hung as heavy as cantaloupes in her bra. Her eyes were lifted toward the ceiling, fluttering as Rydel spoke. I had a feeling this was not the kind of evening she had bargained for. I also realized I had seen her before.

Rydel got up from the table and followed Clete into the men’s room.

“Hello? Are you still there?” Betsy said.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Where?” she asked.

“In deep shit,” I replied.

CLETE WAS READY for Bobby Mack Rydel when he came through the door. Or thought he was.

“What’s your name, Gordo?” Rydel asked.

“Clete Purcel, the friend of Courtney Degravelle, the woman you and your friends tortured to death.”

“No, your name is Gordo Defecado, a guy who’s both nuts and seriously in need of a tune-up. Think of me as your Mr. Good-wrench.”

“I can see it in your eyes. I can smell it on your skin. You did it to her, you bastard.”

For a heavy man, Rydel was surprisingly agile. He spun on one foot and nailed Clete in the throat with the other one. Then he kicked Clete in the face and knocked him down in front of the urinals. The men who had been inside the stalls or at the lavatories or about to use the urinals began pushing through the door into the concourse. Clete tried to get up and Rydel kicked him in the ribs, then against the side of the head. He stomped Clete’s hand and raised his foot to drive a blow into the back of Clete’s neck.

That was his mistake.

Clete locked his hands behind Rydel’s knees, then came up off the floor, lifting as he did, toppling Rydel backward so that the back of Rydel’s head split on the edge of a lavatory as he went down.

Images that Clete believed he had dealt with long ago seemed to release themselves like red blisters popping on a black screen in his head. He heard a razor strop whooshing down on his naked buttocks. He saw a grass hooch shrink to nothing inside the flame of a Zippo track. He saw a black woman clutching a baby to her breast, standing on top of a flooded church bus, screaming for help that didn’t come. He saw a white woman taped in a chair, a plastic bag cinched over her head, her eyes terrified, her lungs sucking the plastic into her mouth.