I had seen that mood in him before, over the years, after a deal closed his way, and I had always taken it for simple good cheer.

Only now did I understand what it actually was — the specific, bottomless pleasure of a man watching a plan come together, a pleasure that had nothing to do with the people at his table and everything to do with his own cleverness, and I sat across from it and smiled and felt, for the first time, how cold a thing it had always been.

Jim was the hard part.

Jim was gray under his sunburn, and he drank too fast, and twice I caught him staring at nothing with the fixed look of a man listening to something only he could hear.