Million Dollar Road

by Amy Conner

Genres: Women's Fiction; Humor & Satire; Satire

Synopsis

Set in the heart of Louisiana, Amy Conner's spellbinding new novel tells of a young woman yearning for a better existence-and of the secret longings that will change the lives of all those around her. Eighteen-year-old Lireinne Hooten has always been on the lowest rung of the ladder. Abandoned by her mother, Lireinne lives with her stepfather in an old trailer on Million Dollar Road. Every day she walks the long mile, through a canopy of live oaks, to her job at the world's largest alligator farm. Shy and overweight in high school, Lireinne has become lean and resilient from months of hosing out the huge cement barns. And just like Snowball-the enormous, all-white alligator she feeds illicit treats every day-she's hungry to be free. Lireinne's boss, Con Costello, is powerful, attractive, and used to getting exactly what he desires. Now that he's noticed Lireinne's haunting beauty, he wants her too. But unlike Con's needy second wife, Lizzie, or Emma, his still heartbroken ex, Lireinne isn't interested. Undeterred, Con's growing obsession will upend all their lives-compelling Lizzie to confront the hard truth about her marriage, pushing Emma past her self-imposed isolation and back into the world. And for Lireinne, it will lead to an unexpected chance to redefine herself, far away from her past and from Million Dollar Road. Insightful and atmospheric, Million Dollar Road is a richly observed novel of our most keenly felt appetites-for love, acceptance, and a place to belong.

Release date: May 26, 2015

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Nobody had said a damned thing to Lireinne about any freaking tour.

“Oh, for sure—she’s one in a million, Hiro-san.” The big plywood doors swung open into the BFG alligator barn, hot yellow sun spilling a wide square onto the cement aisle. Dust motes danced in the light. Tina from the front office ushered a small group of Japanese visitors inside into the steamy air of the long, low structure, while somewhere a peacock called to its mate in an imperial screech. Ay-yah, ay-yah. This scorching Thursday morning in August was a headache aborning in Covington, Louisiana.

Lireinne Hooten didn’t turn around at the group’s entrance. Instead, she kept her high-pressure hose trained on a stubborn crusted pile of gator feed in a far corner of the barn. Spilled pellets attracted swarms of rats, and even the farm’s resident cat population, rumored to be somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty or so, couldn’t keep up. The cats, all of them orange, feral, and disturbingly inbred, scattered like the rats themselves when Lireinne got to work early in the morning and the hose came out.

Well, every cat had blown the joint this morning and this tour was messing with her routine. She hoped it was going to be shorter than usual. The BFG barn had to get done before she could move on to the other twenty barns.

Tina and the Japanese gathered at the first tank down by the entrance. Tina slid open the plywood access door, showing off the farm’s prized white alligator.

“Snowball’s not really an albino—she’s leucistic. Albinos’ skins have no pigment, but Snowball’s pigment is white.” Four Japanese cameras chittered insect-like whirs. Tina raised her voice in order to be heard over the low roar of Lireinne’s hose, relating the short history of Snowball. “The egg collection crew found her eight years ago in ’96, part of a clutch of eggs out west, near Morgan City. Out of hundreds of thousands of alligators, she’s the only white one we’ve ever hatched.”

The Japanese were bound to have asked the routine questions since Tina spieled on. “These BFG eight-footers will go to a tannery in Paris to make handbags—every purse uses a whole grade-one skin. This barn is part of the 1999-year class, but Snowball’s bigger because she’s three years older. And no, she’s not for sale. She’s sort of a farm mascot.”

Another low-voiced, polite question. “Oh, right,” Tina said. “It’s called the BFG barn for Big French Gators.”

Bullshit. The crew called it the BFG barn for Big Fucking Gators and everybody knew it. Lireinne stole a glance over her shoulder at the approaching group through the black curtain of her hair. The Japanese, four undersized men in business suits, ties, and mirror-polished shoes, had put down their cameras and were in varying stages of reacting to the intense smell. One of them pinched his nostrils shut against the overpowering reptile reek while the others merely appeared uncomfortable, maybe regretting a big breakfast.

Go on—get out, Lireinne thought, lowering her head. Her long hair, glossy as her pink nail polish, swung down to cover the crescent-shaped scar bisecting her right eyebrow.

Get out, go play Pokémon or whatever.

Meanwhile Tina and the Japanese were strolling down the middle of the barn aisle, stopping from time to time to slide open the plywood doors and peer down into the tanks at the alligators. Lireinne didn’t turn off the hose, even though if they kept coming her way those tiny, shiny shoes would be ruined. She didn’t care. As she saw it, Lireinne was exercising her right to free speech. And besides, instead of her preferred footwear, flip-flops, stupid company policy forced her to wear white rubber shrimp boots she’d had to buy herself. Not even a gator could do damage to those heavy, ugly-ass things.

“Hey.” Tina tapped Lireinne on the shoulder of her faded black shirt, a ripped, shapeless New Orleans Saints jersey that had once been her half brother’s. “Turn that off. I’m giving a tour.” Tina’s nasal whine was raised over the powerful whush-whush of the hose. She didn’t call Lireinne by name, but Lireinne was used to that. For six months, since her first day on the job, the crew and the rest of the farm staff had always looked through her as though she were a ghost with a hose and that was just the way it was. Being a ghost sucked. Lireinne didn’t answer Tina and she didn’t turn the water off either.

Make me, she thought mutinously. I’m working here and you’re not.

“Like, now,” Tina snapped.

Okay. Lireinne twisted the hose’s galvanized nozzle shut. The barn was suddenly quiet, the silence broken only by the grunts and splashing of the alligators in their tanks and desultory, incomprehensible Japanese murmurs. Tina’s narrow-eyed glare promised she wouldn’t forget this.

Except Tina would. A hoser was just a part of the landscape, noticed only by her absence if she didn’t show up for work.

The tour moved on, the scent of the men’s colognes floating like expensive chemical flowers on top of the ripe stench. Well, the stink was a part of the job, and besides, the tour had to be almost over—fourteen minutes, start to finish, the normal time it took to show visitors a couple of the barns and snap some pictures of Snowball—and in Lireinne’s opinion these sweating, overdressed Asians looked like they’d seen enough. She could always tell, especially with foreign people: they’d begin glancing at their watches, edging toward the open doors at the other end of the barn and the clean, relatively cooler August air outside. The oh-my-God impact of 250,000 alligators massed in one place always wore off faster than you might think.

The tour group paused near the end of the barn for a shot of the girl with the hose. Irritated, Lireinne turned it on again in a hissing cannon of water, eliciting a glare from Tina and alarm from the Japanese, who scurried out of the doors into the hot sunlight. So what, Lireinne thought. After she finished the BFG barn, there were twenty more to hose; it was payday and Lireinne had plans for her afternoon. It was Thursday. The Dollar General got new shipments in today.

Ten minutes later, the cement aisle was spotless, a film of water slick as mineral oil pooling in the muted sun falling through the skylights overhead. Lireinne coiled the heavy python-like hose neatly around the coupler outside, but before she moved on to the next barn, she opened the door to Snowball’s tank, gazing down into the water just below her boots. The eleven-foot white alligator swam up to the edge of the tank, her opaque eyes as blue as twin lapis marbles.

Digging into the pocket of her loose athletic shorts, Lireinne found the dog treat she’d bought at the dollar store.

“Here.” She dropped the beige, bone-shaped biscuit onto the surface of the water. Snowball snapped up the floating dog treat with bland ceremony, tribute accepted.

The front office of Sauvage Global Enterprises sat on the hill at the top of the four- hundred-acre farm, next to the gravel road and overlooking the big twenty-acre water retention pond. It was a converted Creole cottage, an old frame house that was much, much nicer than the place Lireinne called home—a green-streaked double-wide on cement blocks. When she went inside the office on paydays, she liked hanging around in there because the air was deliciously cool and smelled like heaven with the aroma of chicken and dumplings, or sometimes spaghetti and meat sauce since part of the regular crew’s compensation was a hot lunch. Lireinne, being what the accounting department termed “casual labor,” didn’t rate even a ham sandwich. Today the kitchen smelled of fried catfish and collard greens. Big Miz ’Cille, the farm cook, didn’t look up from rolling out the biscuit dough when Lireinne clomped through the back door.

“Pay’s not ready yet.” Perched tremendous on a tall stool to accommodate her swollen feet and ankles, Miz ’Cille ordered, “Get out of my kitchen, you. Go wait in the Big Room and don’t touch nothin’.” She punched the biscuit cutter through the stiff, floury mass, the pendulous white flesh of her arms wobbling.

So Lireinne sauntered into the adjacent vaulted-ceilinged conference room, the “Big Room,” to wait for her money. Bleached alligator skulls, some the size of suitcases, hung in skeletal splendor on the pecky cypress-paneled walls. Above the bar were the antique, sepia-toned photos of immense dead gators suspended from oak tree branches and oil derrick arms. The trappers, posed proudly beside their trophies, looked like small, wrinkled children in beat-up fedoras, dwarfed in the shadows of those record-setting dinosaurs. Like everything else in the room, they were the private property of Mr. Roger Hannigan, the owner and CEO of Sauvage Global Enterprises.

Lireinne knew better than to sit on the long leather sofas or to touch the glittering crystal decanters and highball glasses on the bar. Her place was outside with the gators, the cats, the rats, and the peacocks, but while she waited in here she liked to imagine the family who’d lived in this house before they’d sold their failing dairy farm to Hannigan, seeing them all together in this room watching the Saints on TV. The parents would be sharing a six-pack, the kids eating their dinner on trays, while the Saints, those morons, threw the game away time after time. There hadn’t been TV at Lireinne’s house for eight months, not since the cable company had discovered the pirated line, and so when she ate her dinner in her bedroom she was limited to the two fuzzy channels she could get on what her stepfather, Bud, called “natural TV.” Without cable, the 2004 football season was going to be a total loss. Preseason games started in a couple of days and wasn’t that going to suck.

Lireinne twisted her hands together behind her slim waist, standing in the center of the Big Room, waiting on the bookkeeper to bring out the payroll. It wasn’t like payday was ever going to be worth getting wound up over, though. Seven dollars an hour, minus withholding, came to less than a hundred dollars a week because the job was only part-time. But without a high school diploma that was the best an eighteen-year-old was going to get, especially since she didn’t have a car and had to find work where she could walk to it. At least the farm paid her in cash. There was no way in hell she could get to the bank in town without hitching—not such a good idea out here in the sticks.

It was nice, being in the cool Big Room after working outside in the heat since early morning. Her sweat dried now, Lireinne inhaled the mouthwatering smells coming from the kitchen while ’Cille put a plate of biscuits on the table. The back door banged open and the men of the crew began to file inside. Simultaneously, Tina herded the chattering Japanese through the Big Room and out the front door to the farm’s black Escalade waiting on the driveway. They wouldn’t be having catfish. Lireinne was pretty sure they’d be eating lunch at some ritzy restaurant eighteen miles away down on Highway 190 in Covington, the closest town.

“Hey, ’Cille. Smells good.”

That cigarette-ruin of a voice belonged to Harlan Baham, the farm’s crew boss. As heavily as a dropped load of lumber, he collapsed his stocky frame into the chair at the head of the wide kitchen table. With a scrape of chair legs on the linoleum, the two Sykes brothers, full-time grass cutters both of them, sat down, too. Mr. Hannigan wanted the four-hundred-acre grounds around the barns and the wastewater retention pond to be manicured as a golf course. In the Louisiana high summer, that was a dawn-to-dusk job for those guys.

“You got some hungry fellers today. Right, boys?”

Lireinne knew the Sykes twins from her years at Covington High—badasses who cut class with the same bored competence with which they cut the thick Bermuda grass—but they’d never acknowledged her with so much as a nod since she’d come to work here.

That, too, was nothing new: in high school, she’d been nobody, just another fat girl with a bad reputation who lived in a trailer. Lireinne had walked the dim, noise-filled halls with her head down, nobody really seeing her unless they wanted to rag on her ass, just like here at the farm except now she had a hose instead of a backpack. In the months since she’d come to work at SGE, between walking to work and the hosing, Lireinne had lost over thirty pounds, and on her fine-boned frame thirty pounds had been a lot. Maybe that was why the Sykes twins didn’t recognize her. Sometimes Lireinne looked in the mirror and almost didn’t recognize herself.

Her stomach muttered a quiet complaint. It would have been great for Miz ’Cille to hand her a plate of home-cooked food, too. Most of the time nobody cooked at Lireinne’s house, not except for Bud, her stepfather. Since he hardly ever got home in time for supper, she and her younger half brother, Wolf, usually got by on frozen Hungry-Man dinners, microwave pizza, and the occasional family-sized box of Popeyes chicken Bud would bring home after work. Bud’s meals, when he made them, relied heavily on canned corn and Spam.

Five more minutes passed. At last the bookkeeper came down the hall from Mr. Costello’s office. Although she’d seen him around from time to time, Lireinne had never met the CFO. She didn’t expect to, though, because he was upper management. Hell, except for being a name on the payroll, she was sure he wouldn’t know who she was even if he ran over her with his Lexus. The air was rare up there.

“Here you go,” the bookkeeper said, handing Lireinne her pay envelope. “Don’t spend it all in one place.” Jackie said this same lame-ass thing every payday, her smooth brown face masked by a smile that never quite reached her eyes.

And like every payday, Lireinne took her money without a word. Stuffing the envelope into the pocket of her too-big athletic shorts, she trudged past the table of men to the back door, ready to begin her long, hot walk home.

Her hand was on the doorknob when Harlan jerked his loose-jowled head up from his plate.

“Hey, hoser,” he grunted, his mouth spilling crumbs of Miz ’Cille’s biscuits. Being the farm’s only hoser, Lireinne stopped in the doorway, waiting to see what he wanted now.

“Mr. Costello says we’re gonna be killing in Barn Twelve tomorrow.” Harlan said this with a loose grin. “You wear good duds like you done today,” he said in sly amusement, “and you’re gonna be wearing gator blood. It’s a casual Friday, got it?” Hunkered over their plates as though someone was going to snatch them away before they’d cleaned up their catfish, the Sykes brothers sniggered.

“Hear me? Don’t go getting all redded up like you always do, now—purty gal like you wants to keep her clothes nice.” Harlan’s openmouthed guffaw featured black molars and a missing tooth or two.

By way of a reply, Lireinne twisted the doorknob and stomped out into the heat. Go to hell, she thought.

All of you.

Ancient live oaks stretched fern-covered limbs across Million Dollar Road, so-called because way back during the Depression the WPA had spent a million bucks to get it drained, laid, and paved. The shadowy trees overhead formed a dense, black-green canopy shot through with arrows of afternoon sun.

Lireinne walked on the shoulder and kept her eyes on the gravel under her shrimp boots. At her approach, in the drainage ditch among the blue-starred spiderworts, the peepers ceased their shrill song, resuming as she passed on. Behind a three-board fence, rust-colored cows grazed in boggy fields. It was a long mile from the alligator farm to the trailer, and after six months of walking it twice a day, five days a week, by now Lireinne knew every step of that mile.

Before she’d dropped out of high school in the middle of her junior year, she’d had a car, though. Bud had saved what he could, and bought her a used Buick minivan so she could drive herself and Wolf to Covington High instead of taking the school bus. Now the minivan was up on blocks in the weeds beside the trailer, waiting on Bud Hooten to find the time and money to replace the blown head gasket, but for those three amazing months Lireinne had been free to drive wherever the hell she wanted, whenever she wanted, instead of walking or waiting on her always-working stepfather to give her a ride.

After the van had died in the Walmart parking lot, Bud towed it home behind his truck: it’d been parked in the same place for over a year now. Fifteen-year-old Wolf went back to taking the bus, but Lireinne had had enough of a third-rate education and the endless hassle of high school anyway, thanks for asking. Still, she missed being able to shop at Walmart, the hair-care section especially. Although it was just a forty-minute walk from home, the Dollar General was no substitute.

By the time she turned up the shell road to the double-wide half hidden in the grove of massive live oaks, Lireinne’s jersey was once more soaked through with sweat. The yard was empty except for the minivan, and Bud’s truck, as usual, was gone. Dripping window air conditioners groaned a bass note to the peepers’ song while the crackling drone of the cicadas in the tall pines was like high-pitched radio static. Lireinne wiped her forehead, longing for a shower, but before mounting the cement-block steps up to the double-wide, she headed around back to check on Mose.

The old Thoroughbred was parked under a two-hundred-year-old oak, head down, his knotted tail flicking listlessly at horseflies. “Hey, Mose.” Bony and sun-faded, the horse pricked his ears, his liquid brown eyes brightening at her approach. Lireinne’s heart lifted as Mose ambled over to the barbed-wire fence dividing Bud’s property from what used to be the old Legendre horse farm’s hundred acres abutting the back line.

Once Mose had been someone’s prizewinning investment, his hooves shod in racing plates and his long black tail tangle-free. Once he’d been bedded down in deep straw and fed oats and alfalfa hay, but now Mose lived in the oak tree–dotted pasture behind the trailer with only the tall scrub grasses to eat. Fifteen years ago the Legendre acreage had been a thriving Thoroughbred breeding operation—until the tax code changed and the great Louisiana racing business hit the dirt like a plane with a dead engine. The Legendres had lost it to the bank and now the breeding farm was a deserted, falling-down ruin with a weathered FOR SALE sign hanging on the gate. Since Mose had lived there for as long as Lireinne could remember, Bud figured he’d somehow been left behind, forgotten when the rest of the stock had gone to the killer sale.

Lireinne scratched Mose along the white blaze of his nasal bone because he liked that. He liked carrots, too, but Bud had forgotten to buy any the last time he went grocery shopping in town. Scratching was going to have to do for today. When the pond in his field had dried up a couple of months ago, she’d bought Mose two mop buckets and tied them to the fence posts with a couple of old extension cords. Lireinne checked them and found they were dry as dust. The hose was too short to reach, so she lugged mosquito-infested water a bucket at a time over from the sagging aboveground pool. Mose drank deeply, his brown muzzle dripping diamonds in the filtered sunlight when he finally lifted his head.

“Payday, Mose,” Lireinne murmured. “Maybe I can get to the feed store this weekend, buy you some fly spray, huh, boy?” She scratched the sunken crest of his neck and the horse lowered his head. “Deer flies are freakin’ murder this time of year.” Her hand came away sticky from the sweat and dirt caked under Mose’s thin mane, so she rubbed it on her shorts. Feeling the edges of her pay envelope, Lireinne’s leaf-green eyes turned flat and faraway. $147.50 for two weeks’ work. Part-time, yeah, right—except she put in over six hard hours a day, five days a week, and only got paid for four hours. Casual freaking labor, my ass, she thought.

Alone except for a now-dozing Mose, Lireinne abruptly yanked the Saints jersey over her head and tossed it onto the fence. Next, her heavy shrimp boots sailed in shallow arcs far into the weeds. The garden hose was full of holes, but the strong pressure from Bud’s artesian well turned it into a twisting water serpent when she opened the spigot. Holding the hose above the crown of her head, the cold, clean stream flowed over Lireinne’s black hair, over her scarred eyebrow, over white shoulders bare except for her bra straps. For long minutes she stood under the cold water with her eyes closed, her skin gleaming pale as a summer moon in the green light of the oak grove. Gradually, the dirt, the sweat, the stench and ordinary hatefulness of the alligator farm flowed away to pool in the cool gray mud between her toes.

Hoser.

You can’t always get what you want.

The Bunsen-blue Lexus circled the parking lot while the savage chords of Bill Wyman’s bass thudded guitar gut punches behind its dark, closed windows.

Parking at the Lemon Tree was tight this afternoon, so tight that Con Costello, late again, after one pass gave it up and parked by the front door in the handicapped spot. The instant he turned off the engine, the temperature inside the car felt as though it climbed fifteen degrees. Tall Con climbed out of the front seat, grimacing as he shrugged his wide shoulders into a sport coat. Lunch with the Japanese called for a measure of respectful discomfort, so he’d sweat under a thousand dollars’ worth of tropic-weight worsted wool until he could get inside the restaurant and out of the blistering heat.

“Showtime,” Con muttered under his breath. He ran his hand over his hair, thick and silky as a setter’s coat, flame-red as only an Irishman’s ever really is. “Time to Obi-Wan these guys.” Con imagined the Star Wars Jedi Knight in an Italian sport coat, exerting his powers of mind control over the Empire’s Stormtroopers, and grinned wolfishly. He was going to cloud the minds of the Japanese. That was what he did best, after all.

Truth be told, nobody did it better.

At the wide front door flanked by blue lilies of the Nile in terra-cotta urns, Con paused, mentally reviewing the files on his desk back at the alligator farm. What was the leader of the team’s name again? Tojo? Kirosawa? Was it Hirohito? That was it. Hiro. Hiro-san to you, buddy, he reminded himself.

Today was a big day for Con Costello, the in-house legal counsel and CFO for Sauvage Global Enterprises. After lunch, this deal would be done. Signed, inked, put to bed. Still, after the conclusion of today’s business and fulfilling the pending French contract, there would remain over a hundred and fifty thousand alligators back on the farm destined to be belts, wallets, shoes, and handbags, a hundred and fifty thousand alligators eating their heads off and getting their water drained, warmed, and changed out every damned day. The Japanese needed to come to Jesus and pay for their twenty thousand flawless, grade-1 three-footers—a deal worth over four and a half million dollars—just to keep all the plates in the air.

The boss man, Roger Hannigan, wasn’t going to be in attendance for today’s lunch, or at the contract-signing later on, for that matter. Ol’ Rog was in the South of France at the wedding of his youngest daughter to an impoverished comte, or some other French guy who was equally titled and broke. Con was somewhat foggy on the details, but as always he was going to carry the big guy’s water. It was time to earn his $400,000-a-year salary, so he gave his tie a final tug, swung the door open and strolled into the busy restaurant.

With a connoisseur’s eye, Con took note of the girl behind the reservation desk.

“Jennifer, right? I’m with the Japanese gentlemen, honey.”

The tall, long-waisted blonde in the black dress beamed as though he’d just handed her an armful of roses, her small, even teeth a testament to scrupulous orthodontia and bleach trays.

“Right this way, Mr. Costello.” The Lemon Tree had been open only a month and already all of the hostesses knew him by name.

And that was just as it should be. For all of his forty-three years, Con had possessed the knack of making any woman feel like she was the only one in the room—the only one who mattered, anyhow—and over the years this talent had defined him. From his mother and sisters, to Mrs. Schexnaydre, his kindergarten teacher, to his dental hygienist, Penny; from his first wife to his second wife to the girls on the side, Con’s talent worked with an impressive reliability on just about everybody else as well. When what he called the Obi-Wan Factor came into play, things happened. The most moss-backed old judges fell into line, opposing counsel caved, the farm’s clients couldn’t wait to sign on the dotted line, and the girls, well . . . they melted like cherry Popsicles. To Con that was, hands down, the part that made everything else worthwhile.

Bottom line, being Obi-Wan was all about paying attention. People thought they knew what that meant, but Con’s formidable powers of concentration, his ability to draw a laser focus on the unsuspecting subject of his regard, went far beyond simple attention-paying.

Take Jennifer, this hostess leading him into the private dining room, for example. So few women felt like they got the regard they deserved. Once he turned on the old Jedi charm, women fell into his Lexus like ripe fruit into a basket, softly, and with a plump sweetness of dazed gratification. Over the years, Con had come to accept his ability as a vital, living thing, but he never tried to examine it too closely. Sometimes it was damned spooky, even to him.

There was this, too: what if his talent quit working? Who would he be then? Another middle-aged guy with a shit job, yearning for the pretty girls in their summer dresses, that’s who.

Con impatiently dismissed this uncomfortable thought. That was never going to happen, and in any case, it was time to join the Japanese. The table for six was already well into pre-lunch cocktails. Tina, drinking iced tea and looking longingly at the bread basket, seemed glad to see him. She wasn’t his type, not with those doughy hips and acne scars, but Con gave her a flash of the old Obi-Wan treatment anyway. Why not? Homely women needed attention, too, and since they usually got so little of it, were always plenty grateful. More often than not, gratitude had a way of coming in mighty handy.

Over his lunch of smoked redfish with a tarragon-butter reduction, haricots verts, and Russian fingerling potatoes, Con went to work and gathered the Japanese around the fire. By the time the crème brûlée arrived, after four cold bottles of excellent Napa chardonnay, they were red-faced and giggling like kindergartners sharing a potty joke. All that intense attention had primed them for the big kill. In fact, Con decided, the clients were on the verge of begging for it.

Pouring the last of the wine into Hiro-san’s long-stemmed glass, he said casually, “And of course, we’ll want your letter of credit before the close of business on Tuesday. Let’s get the paperwork done back at the farm, and then later I’ll pick you all up at your hotel. We’ll do dinner tonight in New Orleans.”

Set the hook, Obi-Wan, you scoundrel, Con thought as he gave the group a broad wink. “You enjoyed Rick’s Cabaret on your last visit, right?” Rick’s was the ultimate lure, a French Quarter strip club of no small renown where the girls were young, agile, and frisky. “We’ll hit Bourbon Street,” Con said with an easy smile, “once we’ve finished our business, Hiro-san.”

“Yesh,” the older Japanese man slurred. “Very fine, hai.” He raised his glass in a toast.

Done. All done except for the signatures. Con breathed a little easier, although he hadn’t been particularly worried about this deal. The bill for lunch came to $648.09 plus tip, but you had to spend it to make it and Alligators times Demand equals Money. Big Money.

After he paid the check and put the receipt in his wallet, Con waited outside by the Lexus with his jacket over his shoulder, watching while the thoroughly tight Japanese weaved like addled ducklings across the torrid parking lot. Tina’s square-jawed face was determined as she herded them toward SGE’s gleaming black Escalade, but the Japanese weren’t stumbling, not quite, and the farm manager somehow got them all loaded up into the car in creditably short fashion.

Con lit a cigar, tossing the spent match into the Lemon Tree’s landscaping, and waved good-bye to Demand as the Escalade pulled out of the lot. Alligators he had. Demand he would satisfy.

Hell, he was beginning to sound like Yoda now. It had been a long, boozy lunch. Con had unlocked the car, letting the pent-up heat escape, when the door to the restaurant swung open. The hostess poked her blond head out, searching for someone. Her professional smile melted into delight as she spotted Con.

“Mr. Costello! I’m so glad I caught you before you left. One of your guests forgot his phone.” Jennifer tripped out to the Lexus, her high-heeled sandals exaggerating the length of spray-tanned legs Con had judged to be perhaps a little on the meaty side. She held a tiny, state-of-the-art cell phone in the palm of her hand.

“Thanks, Jenny,” Con drawled. He took the phone, his fingers brushing hers. Those hazel eyes were set a blink too close together, but her long, long las