room beyond, what was probably the dining room.
Dennis led CJ to the action, setting both bottles on the table with satisfying thuds.
“You’re a good man, Rick,” one of the other men said, even as he eyed the newcomer.
“Don’t I know it,” the bar owner agreed. Then to CJ, “Take a load off, CJ.”
“I thought we c-could use another,” Dennis said, almost apologetically as he sat down.
“The more the merrier,” Rick said.
The room was thick with cigar smoke. CJ went and sat down next to Dennis, feeling a hint of a smile tug at the corners of his lips. He’d already let the evening take some of the edge off the day, and now he was surrounded by a combination of quality cigar smoke and Ol’ Blue Eyes. It was enough to make a man giddy.
“CJ, this is Harry Dalton,” Rick said, gesturing to the man on CJ’s left. “Disreputable businessman and scourge of the otherwise lovely town of Winifred.”
Harry was lighting a cigar as Rick spoke. He pulled on it until it caught and held the flame, then leaned back in his chair with a thoughtful expression.
“The scourge of Winifred,” he said. “I like that.”
Harry Dalton was a rail-thin man who appeared made of pale shoe leather. He might have been in his fifties, but he’d ridden those fifty years hard. And yet the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth suggested he’d enjoyed the trip thus far.
“It’s a pleasure,” CJ said.
“Then you are far too easily pleased,” Harry remarked, reaching for the cards.
“And this piece of work is Jake Weidman,” Rick said of the man sitting between him and Dennis.
CJ had taken stock of Jake Weidman the moment he sat down, because it was obvious the man was made of money. He also wore a cowboy hat, which, while common in CJ’s adopted part of the country, was less so here. And he was the only one at the table wearing a tie, although by this point in the evening its knot had been yanked down to somewhere near the third button on his shirt.
CJ thought he did a passable job of keeping his face from changing expressions, even with his having stumbled upon the man whom Ms. Arlene had inadvertently mentioned—the Jake Weidman who had something to do with a proposed prison privatization.
“And what are you the scourge of?” CJ asked.
That prompted a smile from Weidman.
“Miscreants and evildoers of all varieties,” he said with an accent that placed him from somewhere near Boston, rather than from Texas, which was where CJ had been leaning.
“Jake runs all of the prisons in Franklin County,” Rick explained.
CJ nodded and thought about that while Harry began to deal the cards. Then he said, “And what exactly does that entail?”
“Mostly what you see here,” Jake answered.
CJ smiled and reached into his pants pocket for the roll of bills he’d taken to carrying since Janet froze him out of the checking account. He was glad Artie didn’t object to paying him in cash. But there was something bothering him—aside from his interest in the newly revealed head of all the prisons in Franklin County—and it wasn’t until he caught Dennis’s eye that it came to him. All of the men around the table were businessmen, albeit of varying degrees of success. Dennis didn’t fit that profile, and he was CJ’s age—younger than everyone else.
Dennis gave a halfhearted shrug before turning his attention to his cards, but Rick intuited CJ’s unspoken question.
“Geronimo’s loaded,” Rick said. “And he’s a bad cardplayer.”
CJ’s eyebrows almost climbed clear off his forehead, and when he aimed a questioning look at his friend, Dennis said, “I won the lottery four years ago.”
CJ couldn’t have been more surprised had Dennis stood up on his chair and started singing show tunes.
“How much?” he asked.
“Twenty million,” Dennis said.
“Twenty million dollars?” CJ repeated.
“Tell him how,” Harry said to Dennis.
Dennis ignored the request for as long as it took him to take and expel a single deep breath. Then, as if recounting the purchase of a twenty-million-dollar ticket was as mundane as filling up at the 7-Eleven, he said, “I played the number of home wins the Sabres had over the previous six years.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I checked,” Jake confirmed.
“Tell him what you bought,” Harry said to Dennis.
“If I tell him, can we just play cards?” Dennis asked with a sigh. He looked at CJ. “Sabres season tickets.”
“Ten sets of season tickets,” Harry corrected.
At CJ’s puzzled look—especially as he hadn’t witnessed Dennis making any trips