Cole didn’t say anything.
“Far as I can see,” I said, “you’re gonna turn it over anyway. Us or Bragg.”
“But what if you ask for laws that we think are wrong?” May said.
Cole was entirely still.
Then he said, “We’ll give you a list.”
“A list.”
“A list of rules,” Cole said. “You agree, we have a deal. You don’t, we ride on.”
They all thought about it. The door in the hotel lobby opened, and it stirred the air in the dining room. The lamp flames moved in the stir, making the shadows shift in the room. The door closed. The flames steadied. The shadows quieted.
“Sounds fair,” Raines said after a while, as if he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“We’ll bring you the list in the morning,” Cole said.
“I’ll be here,” Raines said.
We’d had a list of rules printed up five towns ago, and in the morning, Cole took them down to the hotel and gave them to Raines in his office. The laws were Draconian. The paper had a lot of aforesaids and wherebys in it, but, if you prune the thing to its essence, what it said was that what Cole said was law. Raines frowned as he read it and moistened his lips. Then he read it again. He looked at Cole. Then he looked at the paper again. The door of Raines’s office opened suddenly and a round-faced little waitress came in. Her face was flushed.
“Mr. Raines,” she said.
Her voice sounded foreign. Swedish maybe. She seemed short of breath.
“Not now, Tilda,” Raines said.
“Trouble in the bar, Mr. Raines.”
“Can’t Willis handle it?”
“It’s Mr. Bragg’s men.”
“Jesus God,” Raines said.
He looked at us.
“Space for your signature down there at the bottom,” Cole said. “On the right.”