I sat up and shouted through the racket:

“I wasn’t in on this.”

The shooting dwindled, stopped. Door and window blinds were dotted with gray holes. A husky whisper said in the darkness:

“Tod, you and Slats keep an eye on things down here. The rest of us might as well go upstairs.”

We went through a room behind the store, into a passageway, up a flight of carpeted steps, and into a second-story room that held a green table banked for crap-shooting. It was a small room, had no windows, and the lights were on.