Frowning, Jay grabbed his duffel bag and notebook computer as he hopped to the ground. He let the dog outside, waited as Bruno sniffed, then lifted his leg on one of the live oaks in the front yard, before locking the Toyota. Turning his collar against the rain, he hurried up the weed-strewn brick path to the front porch, where a light glowed against the coming night. The dog was right on his heels, as he had been for the six years that Jay had owned him, the only pup in a litter of six who hadn’t been adopted. His brother had owned the bitch, a purebred bloodhound who, after going into heat, hadn’t waited for the purebred of choice. She’d dug out of her kennel and taken up with the friendly mutt a quarter of a mile away whose owner hadn’t seen fit to have him neutered. The result was a litter of pups not worth a whole helluva lot, but who’d turned out to be pretty damned good dogs.

Especially Bruno of the keen nose and bad eyes. Jay bent down, petted his dog, and was rewarded with a friendly head butt against his hand. “Come on, let’s go look at the damage.”

“Folsom Prison Blues” replayed through his mind as he unlocked the door and shouldered it open.

The house smelled musty. Unused. The air inside dead. He cracked two windows despite the rain. He’d spent the last three weekends here, repainting the bedrooms, regrouting tile in the kitchen and single bath, and scraping off what appeared to be years of dirt on the back porch where an ancient washing machine had become the home to a nest of hornets. The rusted washer along with its legion of dead wasps was now gone, terra cotta pots of trailing plants in its stead on the newly painted floorboards.

But he was far from finished. It would take months to get the house into shape. He dropped his bags in the small bedroom, then walked to the kitchen, where an ancient refrigerator was wheezing on cracked linoleum he had yet to replace. Inside the fridge, along with some cheese that had dried and cracked, he discovered a six pack of Lone Star that was only one bottle shy, and grabbed a long neck. It was strange, he thought, how Baton Rouge, of all places, had become his haven away from New Orleans, the city where he’d worked and grown up.