“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

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?