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doubling him over. Larry coughed and retched, but while he was bent over, he reached down and pulled the mattress back, revealing plastic baggies full of cash.
    “How much is here?” Connor asked him.
    “Eighteen thousand,” Larry answered.
    “Grab it,” Connor commanded.
    Larry reached down and collected all of the bags. The instant the bags were in his hands, Connor jerked him by the hair, leading him down the hallway and back into the living room.
    “Put it on the counter,” Connor told him, and Larry obeyed.
    Connor gave the man one last punch to the face, hitting him square in the eye, before shoving him back toward the couch.
    “I’m going to count it. If there isn’t at least thirteen thousand dollars here, I’m going to keep punching you until you are blind,” Connor announced, brushing his hand on his pants to remove any of the meth head’s hair that had stuck to it. Holding on to the junkie’s hair as hard as he had for that long had made it ache, but not as much as his left hand did after striking Larry in the face repeatedly.
    Connor counted out the money. Eighteen thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties. He looked at Petre, giving his partner a nod before he gathered up the money and put it in as few bags as possible.
    “You got your fucking money!” the woman on the floor shrieked at them. “Now get the fuck out of here!”
    Connor walked over to where she was still curled up on the floor, the souls of his shoes struggling to break free from something sticky that had fused with the stained carpet at the molecular level. He knelt down and grabbed her by the chin, forcing her to look up at him.
    “Did he do this to you?” Connor asked her.
    The woman spit in his face, a disgusting blend of phlegm, saliva, and blood that had leaked into her mouth from a cut on her lip when he’d slapped her earlier. He held her chin for a few more seconds before he let it go. She curled into a tighter ball and began to cry again. Connor stood up and walked to the couch. Larry shrank into the cushions in fear.
    “What’s her name?” he asked the junkie.
    “J—Juh—Jera,” Larry stuttered.
    “Jera,” Connor said, rolling the name around in his mouth. He walked back to where his partner had become a statue in a business suit. “We’ll be seeing you again in a week. If you don’t have thirteen thousand dollars, it will be worse next time. Each time we come and you don’t have the money, it will be worse than the time before. Eventually Mr. Ojacarcu will decide you are too expensive, a waste of our time. You don’t want to waste our time.
    “If you think next time to have a gun or one of your dopehead pals, or anyone other than you and your lady friend here, Mr. Ojacarcu will stop treating this as an annoyance, and begin treating it as a serious matter. You don’t want this to become a serious matter, do you, Larry?”
    The sweaty little man shook his head. He knew better than to cross the boss, his supplier. By morning, he’d realize that getting kicked around and losing some hair was preferable to waking up in a crude box buried somewhere in the endless scrub wastes that littered the Snake River Plain.
    “It was pleasure to do business with you,” Petre said, giving a slight bow, pretending to tip his hat like Humphrey Bogart.
    “Get the fuck out of my fucking house,” Larry said, blood running down his face from multiple cuts and a smashed nose.
     
    *****
     
    “You really need to work on your phrasing,” Connor told Petre as they headed back to Boise on the freeway.
    “What is phrasing?” his partner asked.
    “It means when you say some shit like ‘Politeness will get you more honey’ you sound like a retard foreigner,” Connor chided. “The correct phrase is, ‘You will catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar.’”
    “You think I am retard?” Petre asked.
    “No. I think you need to work on your catch phrases so you don’t sound like one.”
    “My saying is