"No, not specifically. Just generally, you know?"
"Sort of like, I know this guy, but it's not necessarily my husband, who's got erectile dysfunction?"
Rick grinned, made a drooping finger.
"No, don't worry about it. You seem really touchy."
"I'm sorry. Maybe I'm just a bit hungry."
"You must be starving. Throw on the other steak, have something to eat."
"Maybe so. Listen, I gotta go, I think I've got to do a pickup at the mall."
"Oh yeah, did Angie get some money from you?"
"Yeah, she did."
"Okay, look, I gotta go too, things are starting to heat up around here. Love ya." And she hung up.
I replaced the receiver.
"Chatty broad," Rick said. "What did she want?"
"Just to check in and say hi. She's at work."
Rick nodded. "Let's have it."
I swept away the instructions for the Seaview model, revealing the purse. "Here it is," I said. "Just take it and get the hell out of my house and don't come back."
Rick grabbed it from me, turned it upside down, and dumped the contents on the floor. "Where is it?" he asked. "It better fuckin' be here."
"Here," I said, bending down and grabbing the two thick white envelopes. I opened the flap of one of them and fanned my thumb across the fifties. "There's $150 missing. I'll give that to you."
Rick stared at the cash, dumbfounded. "Jesus," he said. "That's a shitload of money. Where the fuck did that come from?"
And I thought, not for the first time that night, that it was possible I did not have a firm grasp of what was really going on.
I heard the front door open. "Dad!" someone screamed.
Angie. Home from the mall.
Chapter 17
It was unlike Angie to call out my name upon arriving home.
It was unlike Angie, upon returning from an outing of any kind, to call out for me or her mother. It was rare for her to shout out so much as "Home!" When Angie came through the door, she tended to head into the kitchen for a snack or straight up to her room to phone somebody. More often than not, coming into the house was something both the kids conducted with the utmost stealth. They did not always want to advertise what time they returned home, and would open the front door like bomb deactivators, making sure the knob made no sudden latching sounds, moving through the hall without turning on the lights, creeping up the stairs and slipping into their rooms undetected. When Sarah or I awoke at midnight, wondering why we hadn't heard one of them come in, we'd get up and find them in bed, feigning sleep, in all likelihood fully dressed under the covers, pretending to have been there for at least an hour when they'd only been home ninety seconds.
So for Angie to shout out my name, that could not mean anything good.
My mind raced. Did Rick have an accomplice? And weren't things already going downhill fast enough with one bad guy in the house? How might things proceed with two?
I don't know quite how to explain what happened next. I think it was a primal thing. A father's instinct kicking in, I don't know. I just knew at that moment that I had to do whatever I could to protect my daughter. When Angie screamed, it caught Rick by surprise as it had me, and he turned away from me, looking to the study door, and at that moment - don't ask me the brain processes that went into this - I grabbed my Lost in Space Robot statue off the shelf and swung. Hard.
I'd picked it up two years ago, in that store in New York, in the Village. A comic shop that had every SF model and souvenir you could think of. I hadn't much liked the sixties series, but as with a lot of crappy fantasy shows, I still loved the hardware. This was a solid resin model of Robot, the one who was always shouting "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!" and it stood a good foot high on its stand. It had a bit of weight to it, and it felt formidable in my hand as I grabbed it.
It crumbled into several pieces as it connected with the back of Rick's head, and I guess I was expecting him to whirl around and kill me right there, but darned if he didn't drop right to the floor. I stood over him, ready to club him a second time with the remnant of Robot that was still attached to the base, but he wasn't moving. "Jesus," I said, under my breath, "I've killed him."
"Daaad!"
I put the busted model back on my desk, threw the two envelopes and everything else Rick had dumped onto the floor back into the purse, came out of the study door and rounded the corner into the laundry room, where I stuffed the purse into the empty washing machine.
I arrived in the front hall sweat-soaked, my heart pounding, wondering who I'd have to hit in the head next.
Evidently, it was going to be Officer Greslow.