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from me and now he wants me to listen to him. You believe this son-of-a-bitch?”
    Oren looked up at Flett, standing beside the craps table, his shoulders turned a few degrees. He was fingering some chips and staring at his shoes. Oren had foolishly believed that Flett could run interference for him, plead his case to Ralph Bannen. Now Oren saw there was no way Flett could do that. And he didn’t really blame him. Flett was in no position to get him a deal. He owned the roadhouse but it was Bannen who ran book out of it and who paid off the sheriff, Bannen who brought the whores up from Wallace and who muscled the guys who couldn’t pay. Oren had thought he was pleading his case to the house by going to Flett, but Bannen had always been the house. And it was Bannen’s ex-whore wife he’d banged, and Bannen’s safe he’d broken into. He remembered something that Flett always said: only three kinds of trouble out here—money, women, and Ralph Bannen. I hit the trifecta, Oren thought.
    He started to pull himself up against the cedar wall and felt a sharp kick to his side that lifted him and dropped him to the floor again. A cowboy boot. Oren thought it might have split his ribs. When he could open his eyes, he looked up to the pinched face of Rutledge. Rutledge, who he’d run down to Lewiston not three weeks ago to fish steelhead. Jesus. This was bad. The guys, five of them including Bannen and Flett, stood circled around him, a pack of dogs. Oren wheezed.
    “So what do I do?” Bannen asked. He looked around the circle, grim male faces all of them, eyes darkened by the dim lights in this room, all of them with shadowy evening beards. “What about you, Timmy? What would you do with a guy like this?”
    Tim Flett was Oren’s age, thirty-three, their birthdays just two months apart. Oren wondered why this would come to him now, maybe because it was the only thing. Otherwise, they couldn’t be more different. Tim was a local, grew up in his daddy’s sawmill and lived a mile from where he was born. Oren was a roamer from Montana originally, who’d skipped along the Highline after the war, then down into the Idaho panhandle and into Washington. Tim was a settler, took the money he inherited from his old man, bought this roadhouse and built his home on the lake. Oren couldn’t settle for anything, even a perfectly good girl like Katie. Always scratching for money, losing jobs, chasing trouble. Oren wondered if he could’ve been a guy like Tim Flett, living above the surface, instead of always below.
    “Shoot, Ralph. I don’t know,” Flett said. He was a pretty big guy himself, with short red hair curled tight on top and cheeks and neck that were always scarlet. But he wasn’t big like Bannen, whose chest heaved in and out as he breathed.
    “No. Come on, Timmy. Tell me.” Bannen looked around. “This is your place. What would you do to a guy who dicks your wife so he can steal from you?”
    Oren didn’t dare correct him. Bannen’s wife had been one of the sweeter whores Bannen ran before he took her out of commission, and getting her had always been the point. The safe was an afterthought. No, he’d only taken a little of Bannen’s money, but he’d had every last bit of the man’s wife.
    Flett made eye contact with Oren and then looked away. “Since he came in on his own, I’d just hit him around some,” Flett said quietly, “maybe break something.” He looked at Oren again, and seemed to want him to know this was the best he could possibly do. “And then he’s gotta get so far outta town that not only do you never see him again, you never hear his name again.”
    So that was the play. It was, Oren saw, as much defense as Flett could offer on his behalf. And at that moment, sucking air through the pain of broken ribs, his face burning, staring up at Ralph Bannen, Oren was grateful for it.
    “I don’t know,” Bannen said, way too quickly, and Oren went cold. “I don’t think that’ll do it for