“Okay, even if I’m fucking susceptible to favors and prone to like you, why should Howard Hughes go outside his own organization full of suck-asses he feels comfortable with to hire a fucked-up ex-cop who goes around shooting niggers for kicks?”

Wayne flinched. He gripped his wine glass and almost snapped the stem.

“Mr. Hughes is a xenophobic drug addict known to inject narcotics into a vein in his penis, and I can concoct-”

Carlos yukked and slapped the table. His wine glass capsized. Pepper chunks flew. Olive oil spritzed.

“-drugs that will stimulate and sedate him and diminish his mental capacities to the point that he will become that much more tractable in all his dealings with you. I also know that you have a very large envelope for Richard Nixon, should he be nominated. Mr. Hughes is putting in 20%, and I plan to raid my father’s cash reserve and get you another five million cold.”

The toga geek walked in. He brought a sponge and swabbed the mess presto-chango. Carlos snapped his fingers. The toga geek disappeared.

“I keep coming back to your father. What’s Wayne Tedrow Senior going to be doing while Wayne Tedrow Junior sticks him the big one where it hurts the most?”

Wayne pointed to the dolls and back up to heaven. Carlos cracked his knuckles.

“Okay, I’ll bite.”

Wayne raised his glass. “Thank you.”

Carlos raised his glass. “You get two fifty a year and points, and you jump on Ward’s old job straight off. I need you to oversee the buyouts of legitimate businesses started with Teamster Pension Fund loans, so we can launder it and funnel it into a slush fund to build these hotel-casinos somewhere in Central America or the Caribbean. You know what we’re looking for. We want some pliable, anti-Communist el jefe type who’ll do what we want and keep all the dissident hippie protest shit down to a dull roar. Sam G.’s running point now. We’ve got it narrowed down to Panama, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. That’s your main fucking job. You make it happen and you make your hophead pal keep buying our hotels, and you make sure we get to keep our inside guys, who just might help us out with some skim.”