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.

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