The darkness is indistinct at first, but there emerges a soft red glow. It’s the warm but unwelcoming light of a place intent on remaining hidden. He’s surprised he didn’t noticed it right away, but there is a squealing loop of jazz; either on a record or being played live, he can’t tell, “cause I’s never into that nigger shit.”

That’s where he is though: Las Vegas’s hideaway for the most disreputable among an unrecognized class of men. Sullen faces -black and smoky, like the club itself or even the night outside- stare at the hitchhiker as he feels his way further down the hall.

He comes to a main room, almost completely red except for a haze of blue coming off the main stage at the front. The music is blaring now, to the point where notes, or even pitches, can’t be distinguished one from another. It’s obviously not from a band because the stage is empty, or almost empty.

In a red-feathered boa, and nothing else, writhes a light brown girl with skin so rich and silky, it looks like it can be drunk through a straw. The hitchhiker is given a little bit of hope. Not due to the appearance of a sultry, declothed female (though the way she thrusts her pelvis into the boa, as if it were a stand in for a sought-after lover, is absolutely magnetic); but because it dawns on him that he might know where he is. Or at the very least, he is sure to know the one man most likely to be found in Vegas’s own Negro purgatory.

Though the citizens of Las Vegas look down as unrepentantly on their own dark-skinned sons and daughters as any Southern town, the white, criminal establishment allows a for a few black faces among their foot-soldiers; namely, those willing to be the most ruthless, cold-hearted, back-stabbing son of a bitch around. Of course, the odd Negro able to rise up through the ranks is still shat on by his white mobster superiors, as much as he is despised by the law-abiding gentry; yet he proves to be indispensable, criminally speaking, through his willingness to do the ‘dirty jobs’ self-respecting gangsters won’t go near. Exemplary of such a man is a one, Mr. Chantilly Laforge.

The hitchhiker only knows him as Smokey. That’s not his nickname, that’s just the derogatory name the hitchhiker gives to any Negro that happens to cross his path. This Smokey has crossed his path plenty enough times, but that was mostly in the days when the hitchhiker had just wandered down from Michigan. He didn’t know his ass from a rigged slot, but he had aspirations, and in a short while he got connected to the right people. Then he got involved with little Paula, and all the trouble started. Before he knew it, he was sucked back to Dearborn and facing either a shotgun wedding and a resentful, pregnant Paula –not to mention an intolerable father-in-law; or five to ten in the can for grievous assault. Paula lost the baby in the attack. If it weren’t for the intervention of that Mexican boy, beaten to paralysis, she would have died as well. The hitchhiker considers it telling of a failed criminal justice system that it was only able to postpone her fate, not prevent it.