You’re ruining everything, I’d said. Why do horror movies always preface the main story with a curse that began years, if not decades or centuries, in the past? Does evil need to steep like a tea bag before it can manifest? Didn’t get an answer, but one of Meg’s enigmatic smiles, as if to say I needed to pay more attention.

“Every rock in the state of New York is in this goddamned hole.” Lionel Robard tipped back his safari hat. He leaned on a pickax. It was chilly; steam rose from the sweat on his brow and his matted hair. Rawboned and sinewy, he was built for marathon bouts of hard labor. His Monte Carlo’s headlights were on so we could see what we were doing, like a pair of resurrection men in a graveyard after the world had gone to sleep. He needn’t have bothered, what with all that nickel-plated moonlight spilling through the mist and the trees.

I wiped my face and popped the top of a beer.

“The wages of sin are digging rocks when you go to bury your ill-gotten treasure.” I eyed the inky shadow of a man crouched near an Austrian pine. The longer I peered, the more closely the shadow-man resembled a stump.

Last year, we’d snatched a bunch of money from the secret cache of a notorious murderer romantically dubbed the Croatoan, since deceased. North of one and a half million dollars. Held it and waited. First, to see who might creep in from the woodwork searching for the loot, and for us. Second, because the bills were minted in the 1960s and ’70s. Changing that filthy lucre into contemporary currency without tipping off the authorities, or other Wrong People, presented a challenge. Our best bet was to launder the trove via one of my underworld connections at a substantial cost and the risk of alerting the aforementioned Wrong People; in this case, the Albany mob.

I kept other items from the Croatoan’s cache. Tools of murder, documents, and videocassettes, chiefly. These were buried too, although closer to home in my own backyard. I was tempted to destroy these evil mementos. Yet, what if I needed them one fine day? That possibility stayed my hand.

Sinister home videos and killing knives weren’t the issue right then. One and a half mil was the issue. Lionel had proven a good sport so far. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, stay cool forever. Prudence and temperance weren’t his watchwords. The Marines taught him other skills, other bellicose virtues.

Thus, here we were in the sneaking hours, burying the money once again (we’d originally stashed it near home and then decided a lonely plot in the hills was wiser) with an eye toward a more permanent solution and only the gods knew when that might be. I set aside a portion for a sample, should a sample become necessary. We sweated a hunter or hiker stumbling across our handiwork and leaving an empty pit for us to find later. Far-fetched, yet eminently reasonable to our minds—which spoke volumes about the state of those minds, I suppose.