His heart was pumping just as much adrenaline as Vance’s. But in Hoyt’s case the hormone merely fed the merry gale, which now blew stronger than ever. He had deleted that sonofabitch! The way he had flipped that muscle-bound motherfucker over Vance’s back—ohmygod! He could hardly wait to get back to the Saint Ray house and tell everybody. Him! A legend in the making! He looked up and gazed at what lay just ahead of them, and he was swept by the male exhilaration—ecstasy!—of victory in battle.

“Look at it, Vance,” he said. “There it is.”

“There’s what, for Chrissake?” said Vance, who obviously wanted to move on, and fast.

Hoyt just gestured at it all.

The Dupont campus…The moon had turned the university’s buildings into a vast chiaroscuro of dark shapes brought out in all their sumptuousness by a wash of pale white gold. The towers, the turrets, the spires, the heavy slate roofs—all of it ineffably beautiful and ineffably grand. Walls thick as a castle’s! It was a stronghold. He, Hoyt, was one of a charmed circle, that happy few who could enter the stronghold at will…and feel its invincibility in their bones. Not only that, he was in the innermost ring of that charmed circle, namely, Saint Ray, the fraternity of those who have been chosen to hold dominion over…well, over everybody.

He wanted to impart this profound truth to Vance…but shit, it was such a mouthful. So all he said was, “Vance, you know what Saint Ray is?”

The total irrelevancy of the question made Vance stare back at him with his mouth open. Finally, in hopes of getting his accomplice moving again, he said, “No, what?”

“It’s a MasterCard…for doing whatever you want…whatever you want.” There wasn’t a single note of irony in his voice. Only awe. He couldn’t have been more sincere.

“Don’t say that, Hoyt! Don’t even think it! Whatever happened in the Grove, we don’t know what anybody’s talking about! Okay?”