after twenty years.
It came and went quickly.
She was talking to a chic blond worn ml; then she laughed and turned and joined a tall guy in
Ultrasuede who was holding open the door of a dark blue Mercedes sedan.
So that was Harry Raines. My dislike for him was intense and immediate, a feeling I didn?t like but
could not control. I looked for flaws, blemishes on the face of this golden boy who had it all. His
blond hair was thinning out the way a surfer?s hair thins out, and he had traded his tan for an office
pallor, but he was a handsome man nonetheless, with the bearing and presence that most powerful
men exude. Harry Raines wore success the way a beautiful woman wears diamonds. If he had flaws,
they were not apparent. I watched as he helped her into the car, trying to ignore the feelings that hit
me in waves, like the aftershock of an earthquake. A handsome, good-looking pair. I tried to shove
my feelings down in the dark places where they had hidden for all those years but it didn?t work. As
the Mercedes drove off into the dark I was aware that my hand was shaking.
Easy, Kilmer, I told myself; that was then, this is now. The lady probably doesn?t even remember
your name. I tried shrugging it off and joined Dutch.
Some things never change. The Ponce Bar was one of them. It was a dark, oaken room with a brick
floor, a zinc-topped bar, and Tiffany lamps over the stalls and tables. The mirror behind the bar itself
ran half the length of the room and was etched glass.
They had built the hotel around it, rather than change a brick of the place. Politicians had been made
and trashed in this room, business deals closed with a handshake, schemes planned and hatched. It
was the heartland of the makers and breakers of Dune-town. For two hundred years the room had
crackled with the electricity generated by the power brokers, arm-wrestling for position.
Only Findley and Titan seemed immune to the games. Together they called the business and political
shots of the entire county, unchallenged by the other robber barons of Dunetown. It was in this room
that Chief had given Teddy and me one of our first lessons in business.
“Right over in that corner,” he had told us, “that?s where Vic Larkin and I locked horns for the last
time. We owned half the beach property on Oceanby together; our fathers had been partners. But we
never got along. Larkin wanted to develop the beach front, turn it into a damn tinhorn tourist trap. He
just didn?t have any class. I favoured leaving it alone.
“One night it came to a head. We had one helluvan argument sitting right over there. „Damn it,
Victor,? I says to him, „we?re never gonna get along and you know t. I?ll cut you high card. Winner
buys the loser out for a dollar.?
“Vie turned pale but he had guts, I?ll give him that. I told the bartender to bring us a deck of cards and
