“I want to take over Ernie’s part of the town. Hurst won’t stand for it, but I guess if I did it he’d have to stick by me an’ like it.”
“What’s that to me?” Roxy asked cautiously.
Dillon looked at him hard. “The whole town’d be too big for me to handle. I gotta have a guy I could trust. You’d get in on this on the ground floor.”
Roxy said, “Maybe Hurst wouldn’t stand for it.”
Dillon got up and walked to the door. He opened it and glanced outside, then he came back and put his head close to Roxy’s. “Maybe what Hurst says won’t count any more.”
Roxy looked up into his black eyes. He shifted uneasily at the malevolence there. He hastily turned his eyes, and studied the grey ash of his cigar. “Got the mob at the back of you?” he asked.
Dillon nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Those guys out there see me all the time. I tell ’em to do this an’ that an’ they do it. Okay. When the time comes, an’ Hurst fades away, those guys ain’t asking questions. They’ll just go on takin’ orders from me… get it?”
Roxy thought a little, then he said, “You’ve got somethin’ there.”
Dillon nodded. “Yeah, I guess I got somethin’ there all right.”
Roxy said, “I bet Myra thinks that’s a good stunt.”