As they pulled up to the house, Jim’s truck was the only one left, and he was ready to jump out at it before the Explorer rolled to a stop.

“Thanks for the ride,” he shouted.

“What?” Adrian went for the volume and turned it all the way down. “What you say?”

In the acoustic vacuum, Jim’s ears rang like church bells, and he resisted the urge to try to shake the vibration out of his skull by slamming his forehead into the dashboard.

“I said, thanks for the ride.”

“No problem.” Adrian nodded at the F-150. “You okay to drive?”

“Yeah.”

After he got out, he and Eddie pounded knuckles, and then he walked over to his truck. As he went, his right hand searched out the pocket of the shirt the hospital had given him. No Marlboros. Damn it. But come on, like coffin nails were going to be a parting gift when you pulled out of St. Francis?

While Adrian and Eddie waited for him, he filled his cigaretteless hand with his keys and unlocked his—

A flash of movement by the back tire caught his eye.

Jim looked down as the dog he’d shared his lunch with limped out from under the security of the transmission system.

“Oh…no.” Jim shook his head. “Listen, I told you…”

There was the sound of a car window going down and then Adrian’s voice: “He likes you.”

The mutt did that curled-sit thing and stared up at Jim.

Shit. “That turkey I gave you sucked. You have to know that.”

“If you’re hungry, everything tastes good,” Adrian cut in.

Jim glanced over his shoulder. “Why are you still here? No offense.”

Adrian laughed. “None taken. Later.”

The Explorer reversed, its tires crunching over the cold ground, its headlights swinging around and hitting the half-done house before sweeping across the cleared acreage and the river beyond. As the illumination headed off down the lane, Jim’s eyes adjusted in the darkness, and the mansion presented itself as a jagged beast, the enclosed first floor its belly, the ragged second story framing its thorned head, the scattered piles of stacked brush and logs the bones of its victims. Its arrival had consumed the peninsula, and the more it gathered strength, the more it would dominate the landscape.

God…you were going to be able to see it for miles in all directions, from land and water and sky. It was a real temple to greed, a monument to everything Vin diPietro had obtained in his life—which made Jim willing to bet that the guy had come from nothing. People who had money inherited old houses this size; they didn’t build them.