Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Heap didn't have much money for the move.

His bank in Tallahassee had issued all graduating seniors and graduate students a Mastercharge card. He planned to use that until he got a temporary job. Good anywhere.

They weren't good anywhere yet. He had to drive around the French Quarter looking for a motel that took it.

The storm wasn't imminent, but it was heading for New Orleans, and squall lines, or feeder bands, out in front of the storm, were lashing the city with rain.

This made traffic perilous in the French Quarter, and Heap wasn't a very good city driver anyway. Especially in a strange city. A big city, compared to Tallahassee.

He finally found a motel that would take his credit card. I think it was called the Downtowner.

He found out later it was owned by Carlos Marcello.

That explained the people in the motel, getting ice, and visiting, from room to room, who looked like thugs and gun molls. Hookers and leg-breakers.

It was like Johnny Rocco and his henchmen in Key Largo. What Lionel Barrymore called "city filth."

They weren't any danger to anyone who didn't act stupid. They just looked funny.

Heap and Brenda stayed in the motel room, once they got back from dinner with a quart of rum.

Heap drank light run and tap water, like Chief.

Chief once dedicated a site report to Ron Metusalem.

The real thieves were the restaurant they ate in, The Paddock, where the waiter, seeing that Heap was a rube, a rube with a Mastercharge card, not good everywhere yet, just good at The Paddock, changed him à la carte prices for two table d'hôte dinners.

They cost twice as much as the prix fixe price Heap was expecting.

Heap put it on his Mastercharge.

What would Henry Chinaski do?

Heap missed Conflict Resolution and Negotiating Skills.

Of course, if the person you were in dispute with hadn't had Conflict Resolution, or Negotiating Skills, he might be hard to negotiate, or resolve conflicts, with.

Fight or flee? Or palaver?

What would Dr. Phil do? What would Oprah do?

Why couldn't Heap think? Why did being made a fool of put Heap in a blind rage?

Heap didn't know whether to disembowel the waiter or retreat, and sit shaking with an adrenaline hangover, sipping a Dixie cup of water. And those were the only two options in his repertoire.

Why didn't Heap know how to act?

Heap hadn't been to charm school. He'd been to the College of Hard Knocks.

Two hitches in the Air Force were his Harvard and his Yale.

That's where Heap learned what he knew about how to act in tense situations.

As an enlisted man in the Air Force. A yardbird.

The lowest enlisted rank. Buck private. Bucking for private.