But as he curls into sleep in his old bed—quiet, anciently familiar—his thoughts soften, and some deeper thing begins to reverberate, to come up from the old bedsprings, wiggling up from the past. Maybe over the course of a couple days, they’ll all warm up. Learn a little about each other. Maybe there’ll be some thin string of connection.

He opens his eyes in the middle of the night.

A figure is standing over him in the dark…

Its right arm coming toward him…

Fuck! How the fuck…?

Joey’s left hand forcefully slaps away the arm as his right hand grabs the Ruger from between his legs and brings it up out of the sheets, pointing it before he sees the figure’s two hands go up high in surrender and he sees that it is his father.

In Sam’s right hand is a roll of bills.

He holds it out to Joey.

“We can’t sleep with you here, Joey,” Sam says. “We’ve been lying in our bed, terrified, arguing about what to do about you.” He is shaking. “Here, take this. Three thousand, cash. Three thousand cash to get out of here now, right now, and not come back. I know you can use it, or why would you be here? And it’s worth it to us.”

Sam Richter watches as Joey gathers his few things back into the carton, pulls on his pants and shirt and shoes and leather jacket, lifts the carton, and heads for the door.

When they emerge from Joey’s old bedroom, Irma is sitting in her wheelchair in his parents’ bedroom doorway. She watches silently, hands in her lap.

Sam hands Joey the money roll.

Three thousand dollars. Probably enough to live on until Karloff gives him the call, and then he doesn’t need anything to live on anymore.

Three thousand dollars. The cost of getting him out of their house. He knows it’s a lot for them. A stash of cash kept hidden for an emergency. For them, this is that emergency. Three thousand. That’s how much his presence troubles them. Is that three-thousand-dollar sum a point of pride or a point of shame? Or both at once, in his twisted life?

Three thousand. Clients would typically pay him ten. Ten to kill another human being. To take a life.

Three to get out of a couple of lives that he’d never been in anyway. Three to just walk down a hallway and out a door.

Very different, of course. But something in it feels the same to Joey. A payoff. A transaction. With nothing more attached to it.

Carton under his arm, he heads out the door. For the last time. For forever, he assumes. They all assume.

36.

36.

The problem with GreenGirl—a busy GreenGirl—is that, well, people drink coffee.

People you know. People you never expect to see. People from your old life.