“I want to tell you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“Come here a little closer, I don’t have to shout.” Bob Jr. folded the Sunday paper next to him and leaned toward the window with his arm on the backrest of the seat.

“What?” Ryan said.

“Listen, the two weeks you lived with the spiks we never did talk much, did we?”

“I don’t guess we did.”

“That’s right. So you don’t know me, do you?”

Ryan shook his head, waiting.

“We never talked because I couldn’t think of any reason I needed to talk to you,” Bob Jr. said. “But I’ll tell you something now. Go on home. I’ll tell you it for your own good, because if you’re not a white man, at least you look like a white man and I’ll give you that much credit.”

Ryan kept his mouth shut, staring at the grown man with the cowboy hat down over his eyes, the farm-hick Geneva Beach hot dog with the big arms and thirty pounds and maybe ten more years of experience on his side. And a pure white forehead, Ryan was thinking, if he ever took that dumb hat off. He had never seen Bob Jr. without the hat.

“You don’t work for me no more,” Bob Jr. was saying, “so legally you don’t have to do what I tell you. But I’ll give you the best reason I know for clearing out as quick as you can. You know what it is?”

Jesus Christ, Ryan thought. He said, “No. What?”

“Lou Camacho.” Bob Jr. paused to let it sink in. “You don’t beat up a crew leader in front of his men. He finds out you’re still here, he’ll have somebody stick a knife in you so fast you won’t even feel it go in.”