That was it. If you didn’t know what the sick fuck had actually done, how could you be blamed for it? Nick wasn’t a player in this, only a business guy trying to divert the competition after they had threatened to drive under his escort services in Houston and Dallas, where 40 percent of his cash flow originated.

Just walk into the office, he told himself. Ignore the way Hugo’s eyes bored into the side of his face, his neck, his back, peeling off his clothes and skin, picking the few specks of his dignity off his soul. Ignore the proprietary manner, the smirk that silently indicated Hugo owned Nick and knew his thoughts and his weaknesses and could reach out whenever he wished and expose the frightened little fat boy who’d had his lunch money taken from him by the black kids in the schoolyard.

The memory of those days in the Ninth Ward caused a surge of heat to bloom in Nick’s chest, a flicker of martial energy that made him close one hand in a fist, surprising him at the potential that might lie inside the fat boy’s body. He turned and looked Hugo full in the face. Then, with his eyelids stitched to his forehead, Nick approached him, his lighted cigarette held away from his sport coat, his mouth drying up, his heart threading with weevil worms. The girls up on the poles, their bodies sprayed with glitter, their faces pancakelike with foundation, became smoke-wreathed animations whose names he had never known, whose lives had nothing to do with his own, even though every one of them courted his favor and always called him Nick in the same tone they would use when addressing a protective uncle. Nick Dolan was on his own.

He rested his right hand on the bar but did not sit down, the ash from his cigarette falling on his slacks. Hugo grinned, his eyes following the trail of smoke from Nick’s cigarette down to the yellow nicotine stain layered between his index and middle finger. “You still smoke three decks a day?” Hugo said.

“I’m starting to wear a patch,” Nick said, holding his eyes on Hugo’s, wondering if he had just lied or told the truth and sounded small and foolish and plaint, regardless.

“Marlboros will put you in a box. The chemicals alone.”

“Everybody dies.”

“The chemicals hide the smell of the nicotine so you won’t be thinking about the damage it’s doing to your organs. Spots on the lungs, spots on the liver, all that. It goes on in your sleep and you don’t even know it.”

“I’m about to go home. You want to see me about something?”

“Yeah, you could call it something. Want to go in your office?”

“The cleaning woman is vacuuming in there.”

“Makes sense to me. Nothing like running a vacuum cleaner in a nightclub during peak hours. Tell me the name of the cleaning service so I don’t call them up by mistake. I’ll walk outside with you. You ought to see the sky. Dry lightning is leaping all over the clouds. Have your smoke out in the fresh air.”

“My wife is waiting dinner on me.”

“That’s funny, since you’re notorious for always closing the joint yourself and counting every penny in the till.”

“There a second meaning in that?”

Hugo drank from his carbonated water and chewed a cherry on the back of his teeth, his expression thoughtful. “No, there’s no second meaning there, Nicholas.” His tongue was bright red. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked at the smear of color on it. “I hired some extra personnel that I need your advice about. A kid that’s proving to be a pain in the ass.” He leaned forward and squeezed Nick’s shoulder, his face suffused with warmth and intimacy. “I think it’s gonna rain. You’ll like the fresh smell in the air. It’ll get all that nicotine out of your clothes.”

Outside, the air was as Hugo had described it, scented with the possibility of a thunderstorm and the smell of watermelons in a field on the far side of live oaks at the back of Nick’s property. Nick walked in front of Hugo into a space between a Buick and Hugo’s big black SUV. Hugo propped one arm on the fender of his vehicle, blocking Nick’s view of the club. He wore a sport shirt and pleated white slacks and shined Italian shoes. In the electric glow from the overhead lamps, his propped forearm was taut and pale and wrapped with green veins.

“Artie Rooney is light nine chippies,” Hugo said.

“I don’t know anything about this,” Nick said.

Hugo scratched the back of his neck. His hair was ash-blond, streaked with red, like iodine, gelled and combed straight back so that his high forehead had a polished look resembling the prow of a ship. “‘Wipe the slate clean.’ What do those words mean to you, Nicholas?”

“It’s Nick.”

“This question still stands, Nick.”

“They mean ‘forget it.’ The words mean ‘pull the plug.’ They don’t mean go apeshit.”

“Let me see if I got your vision of things straight. We kidnap Rooney’s Thai whores, put at least one of his coyotes in a hole, then turn a bunch of hysterical slopes loose on a dirt road so I can either ride the needle or spend the next forty years in a federal facility?”

“What’s that you said about a coyote?”

Nick felt something blink in his mind, a dysfunctional shutter snapping open and closing, a malfunction in his brain or in his subconscious, an impaired mechanism that for a lifetime had not stopped him from speaking or given him the right words to say until it was too late, leaving him vulnerable and alone and at the mercy of his adversaries. Why had he asked a question? Why had he just exposed himself to more knowledge of what Hugo had done on a dark road to a truckload of helpless Asian women, maybe girls as well? Nick felt as though his ectoplasm were draining through the soles of his shoes.

“I’m at a loss on this, Hugo. I got no idea what we’re talking about here,” he said, his eyes sliding off Hugo’s face, his words like wet ash in his throat.

Hugo looked away and pulled on an earlobe. His mouth was compressed, his mirth leaking from his nose like air escaping a rubber seal. “You’re all the same,” he said.

“Who’s the ‘you’?”

“Monkey see no evil. You hire others to do it for you. You owe me ninety large, Nicholas, ten grand for each unit I had to take off Artie’s hands and dispose of. You also owe me seven grand for transportation costs. You owe me another five large for employee expenses. The vig is a point and a half a week.”

“Vig? What vig? Are you out of your mind?”

“Then there’s this other issue, a kid I hired out of a wino bar.”

“What kid?”

“Pete Rumdum. What difference does it make? He got off the leash.”

“No, I’m not part of this. Let me by.”

“It gets a little more complicated. I’ve been to the rathole he lives in. A girl was there. She saw me. So now she’s a factor. Do I have your attention?”

Nick was stepping backward, shaking his head, trying to remove himself from the closed space that seemed to be crushing the light out of his eyes. “I’m going home. I’ve known Artie Rooney for years. I can work this out. He’s a businessman.”

Hugo took out his pocket comb and ran it through his hair with one hand. “Artie Rooney offered me his old Caddy to put you on a crash diet. Enforced total abstinence. Fifteen to twenty pounds a day weight loss guaranteed. Inside your own box, get it? Know why he doesn’t like you, Nicholas? Because he’s a real mick and not a fraud who changes his name from Dolinski to Dolan. I’ll drop by tomorrow to get my cash. I want it in fifties, no consecutive numbers on the bills.”

The words were going too fast. “Why’d you turn Artie Rooney down on the hit?” Nick said, because he had to say something.

“I already got a Caddy.”

Two minutes later, when Nick walked back into his nightclub, the pounding music of the four-piece band was not nearly as loud as the thundering of Nick’s heart and the rasping of his lungs as he tried to suck oxygen past the cigarette he held in his mouth.