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breasts, and he didn’t bother to look at them. It was nothing for either of them, just the product they sold to keep the dollars coming in.
    The door opened again. The man who staggered through it was Roman’s size—six foot plus—but thinner and younger and much less sober. He put up one arm to steady himself against the brick wall of the club.
    “Where’d you go to,” he said, his words slurred and thick. “You’re s’posed to…to…dance.” This boy was no more than twenty, and Dolores’s bare breasts were not nothing to him. He stared fixedly at them as he spoke.
    “You see, doll?” Roman said, and swatted her on the rear. “Your public awaits.”
    She took another drag on her cigarette, thought seriously about quitting, but not for long. The end of the month was just two days away, and with it would come an envelope, a neat white envelope with nothing written on the outside, slipped under her door by her landlord. The envelope would contain a request for eleven hundred forty-three dollars and eighty cents, her rent for this month and last, plus interest. She didn’t have it, and she wouldn’t have it if she danced here two more nights. But she’d be closer to having it than if she didn’t.
    She looked up at Roman looming over her, a leer spread across his swarthy face, and then over at the boy by the door, the fly of his jeans unbuttoned, the bulge beneath straining at the fabric. One day. One day she’d do more than quit. She thought about the outfit she was wearing: the paint and headdress of a warrior. For an instant she imagined herself astride a palomino, gun barrel in hand, like the Indian brave whose costume she wore. She imagined chasing these two men down on the open desert plains,riding hard behind them till they dropped to their knees and begged, exhausted, for her mercy.
    Or, hell, forget the horse and war paint. The modern equivalent would do fine: a semiautomatic pistol in the front seat of her Pontiac. She pictured herself having a smoke and waiting for them to show their faces at the door. Then,
one, two
—a bullet for each.
    One day. But first she had rent to pay.
    “All right, big boy,” she said, dropping her cigarette in the dirt and grinding it beneath her bare heel. She pressed her palm to the crotch of the boy’s jeans as she passed. “Let’s give you what you came to see.”

    Charles Ardai has received the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Shamus Award for his crime fiction, as well as recognition as founder and editor of the Hard Case Crime line of novels, whose authors have included Stephen King, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Lawrence Block, and Donald E. Westlake. He is also a writer and consulting producer on the TV series
Haven.

FORTUNE
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    Erik Arneson
    “Y ou always smell like french fries, Putter. I can’t take it anymore.”
    “Give me a few minutes, Nat. I’ll shower.”
    “It doesn’t matter if you shower, baby. It’s in your pores or something. When you get out of the shower, you smell like Axe-scented french fries. Not an improvement.”
    “I’ll scrub, I’ll do, I’ll…what do they call it…I’ll…exfornicate.”
    A grin from Natalie. “Exfoliate. Look, I love you. I just can’t stand the odor right now. Take a few days off, you’ll smell great again. Call me.”
    With that, she was gone.
    Putter’s buddy Eli had come up with the idea to steal barrels of used cooking oil from restaurants. And Putter had to admit it was good money despite the fact it made him stink and he didn’t understand why people wanted to buy the stuff. Something about biodiesel fuel. Eli said even jets can use it. Crazy shit.
    But if the side effect was not getting any from his girl? No money was worth that.
    Although…it was nearly eleven o’clock on Sunday night, and in rural Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, that meant therestaurants were all closed. Maybe one last big score before he found a no-stink way to earn some cash.
    Putter grabbed his cell and dialed.