“It’s ’cause they don’t own much else, isn’t it?” he said in answer to his own question. “Them poor people don’t own nothing but the word of the coyote that takes them across. That’s a miserable fate for someone, isn’t it?”

“What have you got into, Pete?”

He knitted his fingers together between his thighs and squeezed them so hard he could feel the blood stop in his veins. “A guy was gonna give me three hundred bucks to drive a truck to San Antone. He said not to worry about anything in the back. He gave me a hundred up front. He said it was just a few people who needed to get to their relatives’ houses. I checked the guy out. He’s not a mule. Mules don’t use trucks to run dope, anyway.”

“You checked him out? Who did you check him out with?” she said, looking at him, her hands letting go of her clothes.

“Guys I know, guys who hang around the bar.”

Her face was empty, still creased from the pillow, as she walked to the stove and poured herself a cup of coffee. She was barefoot, her skin white against the dirtiness of the linoleum. He went into the bedroom and picked up her slippers from under the bed and brought them to her. He set them down by her feet and waited for her to put them on.

“There were some men here last night,” she said.

“What?” The blood drained from his cheeks, making him seem younger than even his twenty years.

“Two of them came to the door. One stayed in the car. He never turned off the motor. The one who talked had funny eyes, like they didn’t go together. Who is he?”

“What did he say?”

Pete hadn’t answered her question. But her heart was racing, and she answered him anyway. “That y’all had a misunderstanding. That you ran off in the dark or something. That he owes you some money. He was grinning all the time he talked. I shook his hand. He put out his hand and I shook it.”

“His head looks like it has plates in it, like there’s a glitter in one eye and not the other?”

“That’s the one. Who is he, Pete?”

“His name is Hugo. He was in the truck cab with me for a while. He had a Thompson in a canvas bag. The ammo pan was rattling, and he took it out and looked at it and put it back in the bag. He said, ‘This sweetheart of a piece belongs to the most dangerous man in Texas.’”

“He had a what in a bag?”

“A World War Two submachine gun. We were stopped in the dark. He started talking on a two-way. Some guy said, ‘Shut it down. Wipe the slate clean.’ I got out to take a leak, then I climbed down in an irrigation ditch and kept going.”

“He squeezed my hand hard, really hard. Wait, you ran away from what?”

“Hugo hurt your hand?”

“What did I just say? Are these people dope traffickers?”

“No, a lot worse. I’ve got into some real shit, Vikki,” he replied. “I heard gunfire in the dark. I heard people screaming inside it. They were women, maybe some of them girls.”

When she didn’t answer, when her face went blank as though she were looking at someone she didn’t know, he tried to examine her hand. But she went to the kitchen screen, her back to him, her arms folded across her chest, an unrelieved sadness in her eyes as she stared at the harshness of the light spreading across the landscape.

NICK DOLAN’S SKIN joint was halfway between Austin and San Antonio, a three-story refurbished Victorian home with fresh white paint on it, set back in oak trees and pines, the balcony and windows strung with Christmas-tree lights that stayed up year-round. From the highway, it looked like a festive place, the gravel parking lot well lit, the small Mexican restaurant next door joined to the main building by a covered walkway, indicating to passersby that Nick wasn’t selling just tits and ass, that this was a gentleman’s place, that women were welcome, even families, if they were road-tired and wanted a fine meal at a reasonable price.

Nick had given up his floating casino in New Orleans and had left the city of his birth because he didn’t like trouble with the vestiges of the old Mob or paying off every politician in the state who knew how to turn up his palm, including the governor, who was now in a federal prison. Nick didn’t argue with the world or the venal nature of men or the iniquity that most of them seemed born in. His contention was with the world’s hypocrisy. He sold people what they wanted, whether it was gambling or booze, ass on the half shell, or the freedom to fulfill all their fantasies inside a safe environment, one where they would never be held accountable for the secret desires they hid from others. But whenever a groundswell of moral outrage began to crest on the horizon, Nick knew who was about to get smacked flat on the beach.

However, he had another problem besides the hypocrisy of others: He had been screwed at birth, given a dumpy fat boy’s body to live inside, one with flaccid arms and a short neck and duck feet, and bad eyesight on top of it, so that he had to wear thick, round glasses that made him look like a goldfish staring out of a bowl.

He dressed in elevator shoes, sport coats that had padded shoulders, and expensive and tasteful jewelry; he paid a minimum of seventy-five dollars for his shirts and ties. His twin daughters went to private school and took piano, ballet, and riding lessons; his son was about to become a freshman at the University of Texas. His wife played bridge at the country club, worked out every day at a gym, and did not want to hear details about the sources of Nick’s income. She also paid her own bills from money she made in the stock and bond market. Most of the romance in their marriage had disappeared long ago, but she didn’t nag and was a good mother, and by anyone’s measure, she would be considered a person of good character, so who was Nick to complain? You played the cards you got dealt, duck feet or not.

Nick didn’t argue or contend with the nature of the world. He was boisterous and assumed the role of the diffident fool if he had to. He didn’t put moves on his girls and didn’t deceive himself about the nature of their loyalties. Born-again Christians were always talking about “honesty.” Nick’s “honest” view of himself and his relationship to the world was as follows: He was an overweight, short, balding, late-middle-aged man who knew his limits and kept his boundaries. He lived in a Puritan nation that was obsessed with sex and endlessly tittering about it, like kids just discovering their twangers in the YMCA swimming pool. If anyone doubted that fact, he told himself, they should click on their television sets during family hours and check out the crap their children were watching.

According to Nick, the only true sin in this country was financial failure. Respectability you bought with your checkbook. That was cynicism? The Kennedy family earned their fortune during Prohibition selling Bibles? Poor guys ran the United States Senate? A lot of American presidents graduated from city colleges in Blow Me, Idaho?

But right now Nick had a problem that never should have come into his life, that he had done nothing to deserve, that his years of abuse at the hands of schoolyard bullies in the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish should have preempted as payment for any sins he had ever committed. The problem had just walked into the club and taken a seat at the bar, ordering a glass of carbonated water and ice with cherry juice, eyeballing the girls up on the poles, the skin of his face like a leather mask, his lips thick, always suppressing a grin, the inside of his head constructed of bones that didn’t seem to fit right. The problem’s name was Hugo Cistranos, and he scared the living shit out of Nick Dolan.

If Nick could just walk out of the front of the club into the safety of his office, past the tables full of college boys and divorced working stiffs and upscale suits pretending they were visiting the club for a lark. He could call somebody, cut a deal, apologize, offer some kind of restitution, just get on the phone and do it, whatever it took. That was what businessmen did when confronted with insurmountable problems. They talked on the phone. He wasn’t responsible for the deeds of a maniac. In fact, he wasn’t even sure what the maniac had done.