Maybe killed by his conscience.

Then the footsteps retreat. Schermer’s reflection turns his back to me and enters the bedroom. Herk makes avid shooing gestures at me, urging me to the mask, and I make a madcap, tiptoe dash to the Cupid and run back behind the bookshelf, for which I at first congratulate myself. But Herk isn’t celebrating. In fact, during my daring expedition across the room and back I see Herk waving me off like a baseball manager. He wants me to do something else. But I can’t think on more than one thing when I’m tempting death, and it isn’t until I return to my hiding spot behind the bookcase that I notice Herk pointing wildly at the sofa. I pull the ski mask on and shrug at him. What does he want me to do this time? Stuff my shirt with pillows?

Then his hand assumes the shape of a gun.

The Glock is in the bag, he’s telling me. The bag is on the sofa. The sofa is thirty feet away from Herk. It is five feet away from me.

Vigorously I shake my head, but then, with the chick-CHICK! of the shotgun echoing in my ears, I nod. I make a tentative half-step out from behind the bookcase then chicken out and go back. I brave another few steps, my fingertip tickling the polished leather of the sofa, then I high-step back again. I go back out and am bending fully extended over the sofa, within inches of the bag, when I hear footsteps and bolt behind the bookcase again.

“I don’t want to kill anybody tonight, but I will,” Schermer says, sounding like he means it. “I heard you. There aren’t many more places you can be. Come out now and I’ll let you live.”

Herk is mouthing something urgent at me. He has the dildo in his hand and is making fervent clubbing movements with it. I wave him off. No, I mouth back. Hell no.

Hell yes, he says, conking the dildo at his head to demonstrate its exemplarity as a bludgeon.

I try to communicate that my reluctance is not just predicated on cowardice but on the fact that I am not renowned for the refinement or alacrity of my motor skills, and that there may be a risk-reward factor that should be considered before he throws at me what is at best an improvised cudgel that would, at any rate, be outclassed by even a much smaller firearm than the head-vaporizing 870.⁵⁵

But Herk is not deterred. He points at Schermer, illustrating that his attention is focused elsewhere momentarily and, while previewing for me his gentle underarm swing, pantomimes one . . . two . . . three . . .

And then the dildo is airborne. As it rotates, spins, and tumbles through the air in a nightmarish, Kubrickian slow motion, the memory of all the things that have ever been tossed to me and dropped—car keys, brewskies, small items of fruit—flashes before my eyes. It is not any kind of positive visualization and, consequently, when the dildo encounters my palm, flattened by terror, slicked with sweat, it squirts like a greased water balloon out of my grasp and clatters to the wooden floor.