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leaky backwoods shacks and rusted mobile homes that were anything but mobile. All my clothes were hand-me-downs from strangers, and they were always too long or too short. At the time, I thought everyone ate day-old bread from bakery thrift outlets and shopped at stores that illegally traded food stamps for cigarettes, beer, and lottery tickets.
    So what I’d found at Calvin Barter’s house was like a bad trip down memory lane.
    The Drisko residence was a rat of a different color. A father and son duo who were so close in age and appearance that they seemed more like twins, Dave and Donnie Drisko were ardent four-wheeling enthusiasts, frequent guests of the Knox County Jail, and self-taught martial artists. Nor were they above scavenging a dead deer from the side of a road. My gut told me that if Barter wasn’t the ATV villain harassing Hank Varnum, then it was probably the Drisko boys.
    Their trailer was located at the dead end of a dirt road no sane person would dare travel. The property was walled with a makeshift fence, topped with barbed wire. The boards bore all the usual warnings about vicious dogs and the probability of trespassers being shot—although the Driskos were actually too cheap to buy real signs. Instead, they’d just spray-painted their fuck-off sentiments on the fence itself. The warning about the dog was legitimate. They owned a brindle pit bull that lived its entire existence on a rope spiked to the ground. As I drove up, it surged so fiercely against its collar that I thought its head would pop off.
    I chose discretion over valor and laid on my horn. I rested my elbow against the wheel until one of the Driskos—father, son, who knew?—finally opened the door. He was, of course, shirtless.
    “Jesus Christ! What the hell do you want?”
    I rolled down the window. “Can you restrain your dog, Mr. Drisko? I’d like to have a word with you.”
    “You got a warrant?”
    “I’m not here to arrest you.” Technically, this was true. Of course, if I found evidence of a crime, that might change. “I just want to ask you a question.”
    “All right! All right! Lemme bring Vicky around back.”
    Drisko—I’d begun thinking it must be Dave, the father—seemed in a surprisingly obliging mood. He dragged the dog forcibly around the trailer to some spot beyond my ability to see. I waited a moment, just to be safe, before getting out of the truck.
    A flatbed pickup was parked inside the fence, right beside a beat-up Chevy Monte Carlo and two mud-splattered ATVs. I took the occasion of Drisko’s absence to inspect the bed of the truck. The wood bore recent bloodstains—the cold weather had preserved the redness of the hemoglobin—and frozen hunks of deer hair. Bingo, I thought. This gave me cause to search the curtilage.
    Dave Drisko reappeared a moment later. He was scrawny as hell, with a black mustache and heavy bangs that fell so far down his forehead that he was constantly pushing his hair away to see out from under them. He looked like a runt, but at the Harpoon Bar in Seal Cove, the Driskos were known as the meanest drunks and dirtiest fighters in town.
    “Your dog’s name is Vicky?” I asked.
    “Yeah, you know. She’s named after that football guy, Michael Vick.”
    “Do you ever let her inside?”
    “Hell no. She’d eat us!” He wrapped his wiry arms around himself. “Yeesh, it’s a cold one, ain’t it?”
    “Pretty cold.”
    “You want a cup of Sanka or something?”
    I’d never been invited into the Drisko lair before, so the invitation raised my guard. Maybe I should have called in my location to Dispatch beforehand, but Drisko was being uncharacteristically amenable, and I didn’t want to spook him. And so, I proceeded into the heart of darkness.
    Imagine a bonfire fueled entirely by tobacco, smoldering cigarettes stacked twelve feet high. That was the equivalent amount of smoke I encountered within the Driskos’ mobile home. Five minutes cooped up inside and I would have