While Southtown resembled the dregs in the bottom of a coffee cup, Northtown was the whipped meringue on top of a chocolate pie. You had to have money to live in Northtown. Lots of it, to afford one of the plantation-style mansions. Connections and a bloodline that went back a few hundred years didn’t hurt either. But for all their polish, the folks in Northtown weren’t any better than those in Southtown. They were all dangerous. The only difference was the people in Northtown would serve you tea and cucumber sandwiches before they fucked you over.

The Southtown hoods were much more efficient. They’d slit your throat, take your wallet, and be ready to do it again to someone else before you even hit the alley floor.

It took me about twenty minutes to wind my way from the downtown district out into the suburbs that lay northwest of the city. I drove past gated communities with cutesy names like Davis Square and Peachtree Acres and eventually turned onto a rutted, gravel road that wound up one of the ridges that slashed through the city.

I rode over the lumps and bumps in the road, used to the teeth-rattling sensation by now. Fletcher Lane had liked his privacy, which was why his house squatted on the side of a cliff so steep a mountain goat couldn’t climb up it.

I steered the car through the skeletal remains of the trees that flanked what passed for the driveway. Thirty seconds later, the Benz left the bare, clutching branches behind. I crested a hill, and the house popped into sight.

In addition to leaving me the Pork Pit in his last will and testament, Fletcher Lane had also bequeathed me his house—a three-story clapboard structure that had been built before the Civil War. Various improvements and additions had been made to the house over the years, none of which matched. Gray stone, red clay, brown brick. All that and more could be seen on the house, along with a tin roof, black shutters, and blue eaves. The whole thing reminded me of a pincushion someone had haphazardly stuck a variety of implements into, with no thought for whether they actually belonged together or not.

I parked the Benz and ran my eyes over what I could see of the yard. It stretched out a hundred feet in front of the house before falling away in a series of jagged cliffs. Beyond the dropoff, the surrounding Appalachian Mountains were coal smudges in a night sky covered with a blanket of diamond stars and the gleaming crown of a half moon. Hell of a view, especially at night.

I got out of the car and stooped down behind the Benz, keeping it between myself and the sprawling house.