I shook my head. “Don’t talk that way. We got ’em.”

“A cheater never lets you win.”

Patterson clasped my hand and then reached into his pocket for a couple of dollars before getting back into the Rocket 88, climbing the hill, and then turning out of sight toward the west.

EARLIER THAT DAY, BILLY STOKES HEADED DOWN TO FOURTEENTH Street to turn in a sack of dimes and quarters after selling a mess of Bug tickets to some poor blacks down by the railroad. The Bug was a lottery they’d been running in town since forever, and during the summer when he was out of school he got paid five dollars by his daddy to make the Friday run. Most every house in Niggertown bought the tickets, just like some kind of religious event. Old women even bought dream books to turn what they’d seen in their heads into lucky numbers. Billy sure needed that five dollars; he’d promised to take a girl he’d just met to a picture show down at the Palace Theater.

He’d spent his last dollar on a Bug ticket himself, hoping his numbers would come out in the morning paper from numbers on the New York Stock Exchange.

Billy hadn’t seen his daddy, Reuben, since Wednesday, which wasn’t that unusual because, sometimes, he’d take off for days and return either red-eyed and sore and grumpy or dressed in a new suit with ruby cuff links and spreading out money on the table of their old house that he knew would be gone by week’s end.

He pushed his red Schwinn down the slope of Fourteenth Street, looking down to the old muddy river and between the cavern of clip joints and honky-tonks that had just started to heat up on an early Friday night. It was twilight, and the neon signs started to flicker, advertising exotic women and games of chance. THE SILVER SLIPPER. THE GOLDEN RULE. There was laughter and bawdy saxophone music, and the soft green and red and blue neon seemed almost magical on that summer night as he passed GIs drinking straight from bottles of Jack Daniel’s and friendly, plump whores who would smile at him or pat him on the head as he passed by, either because they thought it was funny to see a kid down here or because they knew Billy was Reuben Stokes’s boy.