Putting his palm to the small of his back, he unsheathed his knife and used his left hand to put the key to work.

Cracking the door amped up the tic-tic-tic’ing of Dog’s paws on the bare floor…and also sent up a soft scraping noise.

Jim waited, sifting through the sounds of Dog’s hello, searching for anything else. When there was nothing, he opened the door as sharply as he could without hurting Dog, and his eyes went around in a sweep.

No one was there, but as he stepped inside, he saw the cause of the tire tracks down below.

While Dog scampered around, Jim bent down and picked up a stiff manila envelope that was on the linoleum right under the mail slot. No name on the front. No return address. The thing weighed about as much as a book, and whatever was inside had a book feel to it, rectangular with clean edges.

“How’d you like to go out, big man?” he said to Dog while pointing to the great outdoors.

Dog trotted out with his telltale limp, and Jim waited at the door with the package in his hand as business was conducted on the fringe of bushes by the drive.

As he held on to Matthias the fucker’s version of fruitcake, he had to convince his stomach not to issue evac orders to those two roast beef sandwiches Vin had made him.

See, this was the problem: Your head could decide all kinds of things, but that didn’t mean your body was all jolly-jolly with the plan of the hour.

After Dog came up the stairs and through the door, he headed right for his bowl of water.

With a lightning lunge, Jim ditched the delivery and got there first, picking up the bowl, dumping it out, and washing the thing with soap. As he refilled it, his heart was beating in a grim, steady rhythm.

The thing was, the package was just slightly larger than the mail slot. So they had been in here. And although it was unlikely that they had poisoned Dog’s water, the animal had somehow become family in the last three days, and that meant any margin of risk was unacceptable.

As Dog had his drink, Jim went over to the bed, sat down and grabbed the envelope. The minute Dog was finished, he limped over and hopped up as if he wanted to know what was in the package.

“You can’t eat it,” Jim said. “But you could piss on it if you wanted to. I would definitely excuse the mess. Totally.”

Using his knife, he pierced the stiff, thick paper and opened a slit that stretched wide, pouching out and revealing…

A laptop the size of an old-school VHS tape.