“Hello, Stella.”

“Eat me, Nick.”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

She turned back to her husband. “Soon as you finish with the professor, let’s get rollin’. You wanted to lay 300 feet today. I’m already growin’ mold.”

Annie started to growl low at her.

“That your mutt?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Figured you for the mutt, Travers,” she said. “He’s just your style.”

“Her name is Annie.”

She laughed, making snorting piglike grunts in her nose. “Hope you’re happy together.”

Curtis cracked open a beer for himself and watched his wife’s big ass waddle away. “Man, she still makes me hard.”

“Oh, boy.”

“So what can I do for you, brother? Those red maple floors of yours cracking up?”

“Nope. Need some advice on working a con.”

He nodded outside and spoke a little louder for his wife’s benefit. “Let me finish this cigarette outside. All right?”

Outside, he leaned against a metal support pole and watched a couple of Hare Krishnas banging the shit out of a tambourine. “Hey,” he yelled. “Hey.”

One of the Krishnas, orange robe and standard bald head, turned around.

“Y’all fuck off.”

They started singing and banging some more but turned the other way.

“Goddamned assholes,” he said. “Jesus will turn those fuckers into an orange quilt.”

“About the con.”

“Yeah, what’s up? I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Stella. She’d keep my nuts in her purse if she knew you had something for me.”

“Need some direction. I’m working a job for an old buddy of mine. He has this kid he works with – he’s in the music business and they make rap records – and this kid got taken for a huge one.”

“What they use?”

I told him about the offices at Lee Circle and this guy named Thompson and the way they worked on the kid’s paranoia about his trust fund.