I walked past the door to the study, where the purse stuffed with cash was still stowed, and into the kitchen.
It was Rick, leaning up against the dishwasher, drinking an Amstel from our fridge. He was in his jeans and jean jacket, which he wore over a black T-shirt. Heavy black boots stuck out from the bottom of his worn jeans. He was smiling enough for me to see that one of his front teeth was chipped.
"What the hell are you doing here?" I asked. "And where's my candlestick, you son of a bitch?"
Rick lost his smile. "That's not a very nice way to talk to a guy you want to fix your shower."
"I don't want you to fix anything. I'm going to speak to Mr. Greenway about you, about the fact that you're a thief, that when you walk into someone's house to fix something, there's no telling what you'll walk out with. Just get out. We'll find someone else to fix our shower."
"I didn't even realize when I came here the other day," Rick said, "that your name was Walker. All they gave me was an address."
"Well, that's me. Walker. And I'm asking you to leave."
"Zack Walker. With a 'Z.' "
That's when it hit me that Rick wasn't here to work on the shower.
He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out the sheet of paper I had left behind at Stefanie Knight's mother's place, the one with my name and e-mail address.
"When I looked your name up in the book for an address, I thought, Shit, I know that house. I been in that house."
I said nothing.
"When I got here, I found the door was open. You really should lock up when you leave. You never know who's going to barge right in. But I had a look around the whole house this time. Haven't seen it since it was under construction. Nice place. Looks like you got a son, and a daughter. That right?"
I nodded very slowly.
"So I was trying to find Stef tonight, she had something of Mr. Greenway's I had to pick up, and went by her place, and when I couldn't find her there, I decided to drop in on her mom. You met her, right?"
"Her mother, yes. And her brother."
Rick nodded. "You meet Quincy?"
"We met."
"I gave them Quincy. It was a gift, like. I love snakes. I think they're really beautiful. Merle, that's Stef's mother? She's a nice lady. We got to be friends when Stef and I were a thing, you know?"
"Yeah."
"But Quincy's been giving them a lot of trouble lately. He's a bit of a handful, I admit, but he's a good snake. So they asked me to take him off their hands for a while. You want to come out to the car and see him?"
I felt a chill. "No, like I said, we met."
"I got him out in the trunk. Gonna take him back to my place. You're sure you don't want to come out, pet him?"
I shook my head.
"Because, if I don't leave here with what I want, then I might insist that you come out and pet him."
"I'm sure we can work something out."
"Merle and Stef, they don't talk that much, but Stef drops by once in a while, you know, so I thought, maybe she was over there. But she wasn't, but Merle started talking about this man who came by, saying he had something that belonged to Stef, but he was acting kind of funny, and I got a bit suspicious, you know. And he left this e-mail address. So they let me use their computer so I could send you a little message."
"Yes."
He smiled. "So if you've got something of Stef's, why don't you just hand it over to me, and I'll be on my way."
"Okay," I said. "That's fine. Follow me."
I led him out of the kitchen and down the hall to my study. He stepped into the room, looked around, his eyes landing on the various items of SF kitsch, and said, "Whoa, I missed this room when I took my tour. This is quite the setup you've got here."
He leaned in close to the shelves to admire the models and trinkets and action figures, stepped back to check out the posters on the walls. "This here, I know this is a Batmobile, but which one?"
"From the animated series."
"I always liked the one from the old TV show, you know, from the sixties, where they had the words 'pow' and 'bam' and everything, when they took punches at each other. It had the red pinstripes, and little bat symbols on the wheels? I always thought that one was cool. I had a little Dinky Toy of that one."
"It was a Corgi, actually," I said.
"Huh?"
"A Corgi toy, not a Dinky Toy. It's right there, on the shelf above."
He looked up. "Oh wow. Shit. That's it. That's the one I had as a kid." He took it off the shelf and admired it. "Fuck me. That's really cool." He felt the heft of the metal model in the palm of his hand. I wanted to tell him to be careful with it but held my breath instead. "It's a beauty, looks like it came right out of the box, still got the little antenna on it and everything."
"Yeah, it's mint."
"Where did you get this? My stuff, from when I was a kid, my mom just threw it all out, I guess. Fuckin' bitch."
"That's mine. I mean, it was mine when I was a boy. I've kept it all these years."
The man nodded, impressed. "You keep your stuff nice."