Now that Jack was with them, to dart in doors and dart out windows like a shaft of light, they could take anything. They all seemed faster when they were around him. Suddenly they had money. When they had more than they knew what to do with, Jack went into Fourth Ward to buy a whore. Fiss smiled and said that he had more important business to take care of, but Namdi went with Jack eagerly. All the way there, Namdi talked about his various conquests. Some of the stories were probably true. Jack had no stories of his own, so he kept quiet. They found a place upstairs from a seedy bar on a street that was really just a cut between two tangled masses of crumbling brick. Jack and Namdi went to their separate rooms. At first, the girl reminded Jack uncomfortably of his sister, who had worked in a place probably much like this—although his sister would be older than this now, he thought. He put it out of his mind quickly, and soon it didn’t matter at all. He lay there shortly afterwards, feeling both proud and oddly sad.
