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.

The hard wooden floor. The polished hard wooden floor. The gleaming polished hard wooden floor. Probably the last floor, wooden or otherwise, I will ever see. For an instant it produces in me powerful feelings of love for the floor.

Don’t kill me yet, I think, I’m not done looking at this beautiful floor.

The dildo rattles on the transcendent floor, frisking between my ankles like a contrite puppy. Instinctively I bend over to pick it up and then: bang. I am showered in splinters and the glossy confetti made from the shotgunned pages of the Taschen collection. The fantastic hole in the bookcase is where only nanoseconds ago, it seems, my head was located.