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Just give the guy a little money, point him in the right direction, and he’s all over it.”
    Jackie was trying very hard not to laugh. I wanted to smack him.
    “Do you want to know what this private investigator is doing for me tonight?”
    Again, no takers.
    “I’ll tell you,” he said. He took another hit off his glass of J.D. “He’s watching my wife. He’s been following her, in fact, for two weeks straight.”
    “Why are you telling us this?” Bennett said. “If there’s something going on between you and your wife…”
    “No, no,” Vargas said. “Not between me and my wife. Between my wife and somebody else.”
    “Well okay,” Bennett said. “But come on, you don’t have to—”
    “Oh, but I do,” he said. “I most certainly do. I’ll tell you why. I would like somebody at this table…” He gave Kenny a quick glance. “Kenny, you are excused from this question. I would like somebody else at this table aside from Kenny who has no fucking involvement in this matter whatsoever to tell me why our friend Mr. Swanson is not playing cards with us tonight.”
    “He said he couldn’t play,” Bennett said.
    “Yeah, we got that part,” Vargas said. “Tell me why he couldn’t play.”
    “We don’t know,” Bennett said.
    “You don’t know. Okay. And last week, when he couldn’t play, you didn’t know why then either.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Okay. So we play with five last week over at Bennett’s bar and the game sucks and we would have played with five this week, but fortunately, Jackie just so happens to have this friend Alex handy who can fill in for Swanson.”
    “Leave Alex out of this,” Jackie said. “I asked him to play. So we’d have six. That’s all there is to it. We don’t know anything about Swanson.”
    “What about next week?” Vargas said. “Is Swanson going to play next week? Or will Alex be sitting in again? Because we certainly wouldn’t want to cancel the game, now would we? Because then my wife wouldn’t have an excuse to go have a night out with the girls.”
    “Vargas…”
    “Which apparently, gentlemen, doesn’t mean that she’s actually doing anything with the girls like she says she is, but instead is getting a little free legal advice from our good friend the lawyer Mr. Swanson, Esquire, in room one-seventeen of the Best Western Inn, even as we speak.”
    Nobody said anything. Vargas tried to pour himself another drink, dumping half the bottle into his little chip compartment. He looked down at the whiskey fizzing away on his brand new poker table.
    The dog started barking. We just sat there watching Vargas, while his miserable little rat of a dog barked its little rat head off.
    “Miata,” Vargas finally said. “What the fuck are you barking about?”
    We found out about two seconds later. Just when I thought the night couldn’t get any worse, the men with the guns broke down every door in the house.

Chapter Four
     
    “Everybody facedown on the floor! Move it move it move it move it!”
    It all happened in a dreamlike unreality, something played out in slow motion, in another dimension where none of the rules apply. I had been in that place once before, the night my partner was shot and died on the floor next to me. I didn’t think I’d ever have to visit that place again. But here I was. Here we all were.
    “I said on the floor now! Are you deaf?”
    I heard the sound of a chair being upended, a body hitting the floor. It was Kenny, I thought. Somehow, I was already on the floor myself. I was trying to stop my own head from spinning, trying to breathe again and to make myself think clearly about what was happening.
    One man. Another there. Was there a third? Yes. Three men. Some of the lights went out. The Tiffany lamp above the table was still on, casting a bright circle in the center of the room. The dog was running around the place in a total frenzy, making more noise than a dog that size should be able to make.
    “Nobody