“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.”