He shrugged and said my chickens were coming home to roost. Quote, unquote. I grumbled about the enigma of cornpone aphorisms.

“Consult the foolproof Getting Old Checklist,” he said. “Has your dick stopped responding to commands? Do you moan when leaning over to fetch a beer from the fridge? Cluck-cluck-cluck, amigo.”

“The goths and the decadents had it one hundred percent correct,” I said. We sat on the porch, watching snowflakes gather in the dusk. A storm was coming; a storm was always coming.

“Which ones?” He sipped a beer and patted my dog, who sat between us, panting contentedly. She was blanketed in pine needles and dead leaves from romping after rabbits in the nearby woods.

“Poe, Baudelaire, Camus. The usual suspects.”

“They think we should spend that dough too?”

“They think a man is going to suffer no matter which way he jumps.”

When I thought of the treasure, all I could picture was the Croatoan’s gangrenous features welded to the mask he’d worn while slaughtering all those mobsters, prostitutes, and hapless jerks who’d stumbled across his path.

“Are you okay?” Lionel studied me intently.

“Meg stopped what she was doing and stared at me, like you’re staring. She said, ‘You’ve changed.’”

“Was it a compliment?”

I didn’t know.

CHAPTER TWO

Seventy-two hours before the Feds brought the hammer down on Badja Adeyemi, a right bastard of an ex-NYPD cop, he summoned me to his cabin on Elkhorn Lake. He offered my day rate and some Glenrothes 18 to hear his spiel, so I cleared the decks and made the hour drive upstate from my residence in the hinterlands of New Paltz and Rosendale.

The call intrigued me on its face; the offer of scotch and money didn’t hurt. A man with his clout had access to every detective in the book. We weren’t acquainted and my agency was in the Catskills bush league. Yet it was doubtful that he picked my name out of a hat. What I said about nature having a plan counts here too. The machinery of the universe is always grinding. Now and again, we fleas intersect with the gears’ teeth.

Normal people hadn’t heard of Adeyemi; however, if you were a criminal, political junkie, or partial to tri-state high society, the name likely rang alarm bells. Hop a time machine back a couple decades on the mean streets of New York where Adeyemi toiled as a patrol cop, detective, and lieutenant, respectively, and you happened to operate on the wrong side of the law, his size thirteen jackboot might well have trod your face in the name of justice. His latest résumé highlights included ex-bodyguard and majordomo to a world-renowned business mogul turned politician. U.S. Senator Gerald Redlick, aka Mr. Charisma, CEO and owner of the Redlick Group. Him, everybody knew.

Adeyemi had been holed up in the sticks since August. That summer, he’d participated in the epic public foreign corruption trial of a former Redlick Group CFO. RG specialized in real estate. As with any other heavyweight corporation, its subsidiaries and affiliates extended the mother ship’s reach into dozens of techs on multiple continents. Laundering filthy, filthy Russian dough was the key indictment against the CFO. Due to his history with the organization, Adeyemi got tagged as a minor player, although everybody figured he knew more than he’d proven willing to divulge. His cooperation hadn’t extended past invoking the Fifth Amendment.