“Tire irons? Sure, I got tire irons. Got more than I know what to do with, I suspect. Thought I’d be out of business for good when the place burned down. Blew up, more like, but that raises questions I ain’t sure I wanna answer even now. Anyways, turns out my niece got the place covered. Insurance got things up and runnin’ again, I guess, but it were the money from the Jasper Improvement Society’t made it what it is. Now I’m up to my eyeballs in tire irons. Hell of a thing. Who can explain it. Ah, I’ll tell you: Frank Tilghman, that’s who. When the smoke cleared after that bad bit o’ business with Brad Wesley, look whose name was on the Improvement Society’s paperwork? Oh, it’s all legal-like. Stipulation in the contracts saying whoever owned Jasper’s most lucrative business owns the Society too, lock stock and so on. Well, with my place in ruins, and Strodenmire still vacuuming up the shattered glass from what went down during Wagon Days, and Emmet’s moonshine distillery up in smoke, the Double Deuce was the last place standing. He gave me the loans, made the place ten times bigger and better than it ever was, and all I owe him is a piece of my soul. Makes you wonder how much ol’ Frank knew when he hired that boy Dalton to clean house. Him? Good kid. M’niece, she thinks he hung the moon and stars. Couldn’t come through in the clutch, though, when the time came. Left it to me and the other old farts to finish what he started. Then again, maybe that was part of Tilghman’s plan too. Make us all complicit, if you don’t mind me usin’ a Sunday puzzle word. Blood on everyone’s hands, so to speak. We’d’a gotten nowhere if it hadn’t been for Dalton taking out Wesley’s goon squad. Maybe that was the plan all along. Now instead of me kicking Wesley some money under the table, Frank Tilghman reaches across the table and takes it right out of my pocket. Thought about bringin’ it up with Dalton during a family dinner, but the kid had about as much as he could take, losin’ his mentor and all. Who’s gonna tell him he did it all for a worse villain than Wesley was? Not me. I seen enough men broken down to ever relish the idea of breakin’ down another one. Hell, I see one every time I look in the mirror. Don’t that beat all. In fairness, Frank lost someone close to him too. We all seen the way he looked at that Pat McGurn kid before things went south. Don’t know why he felt he had to keep it a secret. We’re a forgiving bunch. When the fire department discovered Emmet’s collection of hand-drawn erotica, why, we all just let it slide. Didn’t even tell him the Milo Manara influence was too pronounced, and that woulda been the god’s honest. And hell, when I was married, how do you think my wife found the ugly man she left me for? “The lifestyle,” that’s what we called it. I don’t know about the style part, not when the fella’s wearin’ crushed velvet shirts every damn day, but it was a life alright, that it was. Worked out for the best, I suppose. They’re ugly ‘n’ happy together, just like Dalton and Elizabeth are pretty ‘n’ happy together. ‘Together,’ that’s the important thing I guess. God bless ’em. Not that I’m a religious man, you understand. Been doin’ that tai chi with Dalton in the mornin’, though. Clears the head. Maybe that’d be the time to tell him about Tilghman. Hell, I dunno. That’s a sacred time, if you ask me. Probably best just to let it be. Like I said, some questions don’t want answerin’. Valvoline’s in aisle three.”

This handsome devil right here is Oscar. He owns the Bandstand, the New York nightclub where Dalton’s working at the beginning of the film. As such he serves as two separate object lessons. First, he provides us with a solid point of comparison for just how creepy Frank Tilghman looks in this opening scene. Take a look at the man above, then at the man below, and consider what it takes to make the man above look like the more pleasant alternative.

The second lesson pertains to something Dalton says moments before Oscar enters the room: “When the job’s done I walk.” He says this to Tilghman as a condition of taking the job at the Double Deuce; this is worth keeping in mind during the film’s final reel, as just up and walking away is not unheard of for Dalton and presumably for his mentor Wade Garrett too. The only issue is whether fixing up the Double Deuce but leaving Brad Wesley in control of Jasper constitutes the job being done. (I personally lean towards no, but then I’m not a cooler.)

Point is, you can look at the Bandstand—all that gold plastic, all those hundreds, no chickenwire around the stage—and deduce that, despite the fact that he was stabbed moments earlier, Dalton has finished the job. Certainly his bouncers are competent enough to help escort the knife nerd who cut Dalton outside and then just…prevent him from returning—an ideal bouncing maneuver according to Dalton’s Three Simple Rules. There’s nothing left for those men to learn from Dalton, ergo he can take Tilghman’s offer and split on the spot.

But there’s a world out there somewhere in the multiverse where Dalton continues to work at the Bandstand, fending off further attacks from the knife nerd. Perhaps he’s a low-level drug runner for one of the Five Families, and the mafia tries to move in on Oscar. Maybe Dalton winds up having to fight off various assassination attempts from hardened killers instead of Wesley’s goon squad. Maybe a horse’s head winds up in his bed. Dalton vs. the mafia is a movie I’d watch, and a prequel we deserve.

“You scared him last night. Brad Wesley, he’s not afraid of anything, right? Well, last night that son of a bitch was afraid. Have you ever seen fear in a man’s eyes, Dalton? Ever smelled fear’s musk? Ever felt the gooseflesh rise to meet your touch? You never forget it once you’ve seen it…smelled it…tasted it. It’s like a song that gets stuck in your head, demanding you return to your hi-fi to play it one more time. You played that song last night, Dalton. A familiar melody of terror, with Brad Wesley’s mortal body as its brass band. Sometimes I think it’s the sweetest sound I’ve ever heard—the sound a man makes when he looks you in the eye and sees nothing—no pity, no contempt, no mercy, no cruelty, just the cold dead fact that you’ve come to hurt him, and nothing he can do will stop the hurting from happening. Brad Wesley, he loves to taste the fear, doesn’t he? Well, last night you took that fear, warm and throbbing and oh so insistent, and you fed it to him. And he drank every drop, didn’t he, he gorged himself on the fear you inflicted until his guts were fit to burst. Have you ever seen a man’s guts, Dalton? Ever dipped your hands in another man’s body and squeezed whatever you found inside? Felt the incredible human machine, miraculous in its evolutionary purpose, begin to break down between your fingers? Well, last night I had a vision of you, Dalton, I had a vision of you, small as a churchmouse, lethal as the cobra, plunging your arms elbow-deep into man after man, pulling out viscous tubes and bladders rendered useless by your relentless probing. I saw you reach deep inside Brad Wesley and open up his works to the world outside. I saw birds, black as soot, fly out in a great gust, like the wind, like a firestorm. As I looked up, I felt their warm white shit rain down on me, covering me like a thin alkaline film. And when I raised my hands to wipe my face clean of their excretion, those hands pulled away hundred dollar bills, Dalton. I wiped and wiped and the money kept falling into my hands, until there was more than I could hold, until the pile of it reached my knees, my thighs, my sex. I was neck deep in cash, Dalton, and still I knew Brad Wesley’s body was somewhere in this deluge, and you were somewhere in Brad Wesley’s body, tasting its fear, rolling it around on your tongue, suckling on its terrible teat. Anyway, I’m looking forward to Wagon Days.”

Boardwalk Empire, Terence Winter’s underrated Prohibition Era gangster drama, featured many real-world figures of underworld renown, though mostly at ages much younger than the ones at which they’d become famous. They’d be mixed in with entirely fictional characters, or heavily fictionalized analogues of actual people. Often you didn’t realize until halfway through a scene that, oh my god, that’s Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone all hanging out together. The resulting frisson was a thrill.

In his lamentable mega-series The Dark Tower, Stephen King officially introduced the concept of ka-tet, a group of people drawn together by the benevolent force that partially orders the universe for a specific purpose. I say “officially” because if you’ve read his work you know that this is a recurring feature everywhere from It to The Stand. Often the characters themselves recognize that something has happened when they’re all finally assembled together—that the final piece of a puzzle they didn’t even know they were solving has slipped into place, that the whole of them is somehow greater than the sum of its parts, that when faced with other people there’s a palpable sense of belonging and un-belonging. Great deeds can be done in ka-tet.

Here you see Emmett, Red Webster, Frank Tilghman, and Pete Strodenmire, together for the first time. Until now Emmett had never been seen off his ranch, and Strodenmire had only been seen one time before in total. They’re watching Brad Wesley walk away, having proclaimed “This is my town—don’t you forget it.” Red is about to bust Strodenmire’s balls by repeating what Strodenmire said to him after his auto parts store was destroyed: “You got insurance, don’t you?” Tilghman is, as always, very peculiar.

Yet something looks right here, doesn’t it? Something about this configuration of four weird old men staring into the middle distance rings true. When ka-tet is formed, how can any JC Penney magnate hope to stand against it?

Frank Tilghman is having scotch on the rocks at the “village worthies meet at Red Webster’s house as he packs up to move following the destruction of his place of business and the subsequent barfight instigated by the arsonist” function, as a totally normal innocent normal man could be expected to do. But he has more to offer than the jolly sound of ice tinkling in his glass. “You scared him last night,” he says to Dalton regarding Brad Wesley, who we’ve just learned from Red Webster has the police department in his pocket, hence the lack of official inquiries when people are beaten half to death in front of hundreds of other people. “Brad Wesley, he’s not afraid of anything, right?” he asks rhetorically. “Well, last night, that son of a bitch was afraid.”

“No he wasn’t,” Dalton retorts, smiling. Normal conversation with normal reactions all around.

Dalton is right, of course. Brad Wesley oozed confidence out of every pore in the Double Deuce the night before. He had his girlfriend or kept woman or whatever poor Denise is strip to prove his prowess. He then ordered his boy Jimmy to fight the bouncers and Wade Garrett for the same reason. Finally, he fired a gun to call the fight off, showing that the action starts and stops on his say-so. He really could not have been more empowered, and more sure of his empowerment, even before we get to the whole “getting away with arson” thing. Christ (as Wesley would say), he went to the Double Deuce for the express purpose of rubbing his role in the arson in everyone’s face!

So once again we must wonder, what’s Tilghman’s angle here? Why is he having a drink? Why is he smiling? Why is he touting a nonexistent weakness in Brad Wesley’s armor to the man he wants to attack that nonexistent weakness? Why would he instigate further hostilities given the tremendous cost incurred by everyone involved other than himself?

One of the several hypotheticals Pain Don’t Hurt has entertained at length is my belief that Frank Tilghman is the Emperor Palpatine figure of the story, the secret puppet master behind Brad Wesley who engineered the conflict with Dalton and brought it to a head by orchestrating the murder of Wesley and his associates when they were no longer of any use. Another theory Pain Don’t Hurt has espoused is that Frank Tilghman and Pat McGurn, Brad Wesley’s nephew and Double Deuce bartender, were once romantically involved and that he is therefore and visibly upset about having to fire him. They seem mutually exclusive propositions.

But this is true only if you believe that Tilghman is not just sinister but supernatural. No one can control for all variables, and it’s entirely possible that Frank’s Pat-shaped blind spot prevented him from thinking through the consequences of hiring a man to keep everything on the straight and narrow when your ex-lover is a transparent thief and ringer for the very stooge whose downfall you’re plotting. It’s also possible that Frank knew full well that Dalton would exile Pat from the Double Deuce, and that he deemed this an acceptable loss in service of the larger plan. Indeed, he could have considered it a form of alibi—after all, what kind of man would fire his own ex, for whom he clearly still had feelings, if he himself weren’t morally unimpeachable?

What kind of man, indeed.

It’s okay. It’s okay, Frank. You’re okay. Just calm down. Everything went according to plan. Wesley did just what he told you he would. No one was injured. You still need Red for Phase 5, and this gets him one step closer. You need Dalton too, and he didn’t get wounded in the blast—despite his best efforts, the crazy sonofabitch. Don’t be nervous, don’t be scared. No one can connect you, and even if they could, no one would believe it. Wesley will be here any minute now with his men—who’d believe he’d show up to intimidate his own boss? Nobody, that’s who. Your alibi is rock solid. But quick, lower the blinds, just in case anyone looks up and sees. Put that poker face back on. Then practice looking concerned, not worried, concerned. How could such a thing happen? Oh, Red, I’m so sorry for your blah blah blah, that kind of thing. They’ll eat it up, the saps. They always have. They always do. But from now on, let’s steer clear of these…incidents. Strodenmire is next on the list, yes. Best not to show up to Wagon Days, then. Let Wesley handle it on his own. He won’t mind, the sad sociopathic bastard. And by the time he notices the money’s been diverted from his account…Phase 5. No one will ever be the wiser. Calm down, Frank. Have another drink or something. Just gotta keep telling yourself, I did it. I pulled it off. Nobody knows anything. No one saw a thing that I didn’t want shown. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing at all, really. Just Frank Tilghman, illuminated by the chiarascuro of red light and black shadow of horizontal blinds, spending the last few moments before his friend and neighbor Red Webster’s auto parts store succumbs to arson by holding a drink and tensely gazing out over what anyone who didn’t know a major crime was about to be committed would think is a happy nighttime crowd at the bar he owns. Definitely no Bad Guy shit going down here, no siree bob. Why, if you were to show up with a posse of Jedi Masters to arrest him he certainly wouldn’t scream UNLIMITED POWER before blasting you through that window to your doom, no way no how.