“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.”

I shrugged. “Well, I try. I’ve saved a lot of toys and things from my childhood, some better than others.”