I crossed the threshold and felt at once how cold the house had gotten without a fire. Our breath turned to white vapor in the air.
But in the glass ashtray on the old table were three fresh cigarette butts.
From outside we had seen only two shadows in the window. Three cigarette butts meant at least one more man had been in the room.
Thunder stopped just inside the door and pulled in the air through flaring nostrils. Then he moved slowly along the walls, sniffing the baseboards.
“What’s your dog doing?” Dennis asked with a crooked smile. “Marking his old territory?”
“No,” I said. “He’s figuring out who else has been here.”
Dennis twitched, just for a second, then smoothed his face again. “That would be my new business partner, Mr. Zane Rivers. He stepped into the next room. You’ll meet him in a minute.”
The name hit me hard. I knew of Rivers. Everybody around those parts did. Local racketeer. Former poacher. A man who’d made money from illegal mining and squeezing honest operators.
“So that’s your partner now?” I asked slowly.
Dennis gave a little shrug. “He has useful connections. In this line of work, that matters.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mike tighten his grip on the shotgun. His face had gone flat and hard.
Meanwhile Thunder had moved to the old buffet cabinet and started scratching at the floor beneath it.
“What’s he got there?” Mike muttered.
The wolf scraped out a small metal object. It rolled into the open.
A spent pistol casing.
It still smelled faintly of burnt powder.
“Dennis,” I said, turning to him, “why was someone firing a gun in this house?”
His face twitched again. “Rivers was messing around. Shooting mice, probably.”
The excuse landed with a thud in the cold room.
Then Thunder went to the table by the window, rose on his hind legs, and sniffed under the tabletop. I bent down and found a small black box with a blinking light and wires.
A listening device.
I peeled it loose and held it in my palm. “Explain this.”
The smile vanished from Dennis’s face. In its place came something colder—calculating, stripped clean of pretense.
“Drop the act, old man,” he said. “You’ve figured it out already.”
My chest tightened, but I kept my voice steady. “Then say it.”
He lit a cigarette—unfiltered. The smell made Thunder drop into a low growl.
“Your claim is worth billions,” Dennis said, exhaling smoke. “Not just because of the gold. There are rare earth deposits there too. I had deeper testing done in a private lab. You never knew.”
