Chapter 5: His Jacket

I found Cormac at eleven the same morning, at a slot bank by the Halcyon's main doors.

He was wearing the jacket.

Three men from the old circuit stood around him, laughing at something he had said.

Nobody in that casino had seen what I had seen in the Blue Door, so to them he was still the Legend.

Rafe walked half a step behind me and said nothing.

I had asked him not to speak, and he had agreed with only a nod.

"Lena." Cormac spread his hands. "Baby, you came."

"I read your text."

"I had no choice."

"Your daughter was in a stranger's kitchen."

His friends stopped laughing.

One of them, an older man with a cigarette voice, looked from me to the patch I was not wearing and back to Cormac.

"That the wife?" he asked.

"She's a little upset," Cormac said, with the smile that had gotten him out of every hole for ten years.

"Tell them," I said.

"Lena, not here."

"You sold my heat date to the man holding Junie. Tell your friends what you gave him and why."

The slot machines kept chiming.

A woman at the next bank turned around.

"He asked for it," Cormac said, low.

"Castiglioni said if I didn't, he'd call the state on you for working a table.

"For being Omega on a feed."

"So you gave him a reason to break me on Saturday."

"I gave him a reason not to arrest you!"

"He wasn't going to arrest anybody," I said.

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