Which was not good. It was the little widows peeking sleeplessly out their windows who would call the cops or blab it to Aunt Eva and maybe someone else. They all talked to one another, standing out there with a bag of rolls from the baker. He hurried along the street with his head down, carrying the chimney cement. At Aunt Eva's door, he slipped his old key into the lock-it went right in-and entered silently. She slept in the back bedroom upstairs, he knew. The table next to the door was piled with mail. It would be interesting to examine, but he didn't want to waste time. In and out, Rick-o, in and quickly out.
He glanced up the stairs next to the front door-darkness, no sound. He slid his feet along one side of the hallway, where the floorboards were not so loose from people walking on them for a hundred years. Somebody had fixed the basement door at the end of the hallway. He carried the chimney cement down the basement stairs, turning on only one light, enough to see the boxes of rotting letters and photographs, broken patio furniture, piles of Uncle Mike's clothing, mouse-eaten, moldy, and unworn in twenty years, a tangle of rusted bicycles and wagons, some of which Rick had ridden as a kid. The furnace, so old it had been installed back when Aunt Eva was still getting regular action from Uncle Mike, sat at one end of the narrow, rectangular space, its asbestos-wrapped air ducts octopused out to the ceiling above. Rick noticed a new box of air filters for the furnace. Somebody was changing the filters for Aunt Eva. He slipped behind the furnace, next to the party-wall foundation that she shared with the house next door, the Marinaros', and then put his hands around the sheet-metal exhaust tubing that coiled from the furnace into the chimney. The vent was sealed with chimney cement where it went into the brick orifice, to protect against carbon monoxide backdrafting into the basement. He cracked the old seal as he yanked the vent tube from its space. Before him appeared the black circular hole that opened the chimney. Everything looked okay. He reached into the sooty space, ran his hand along the wall. All he had done before was pull a brick out of its mortar, chisel away another crumbly brick behind it, stick in a thick envelope wrapped in waterproof duct tape, and replace the first brick, hammering it with the heel of his hand until it was flush with the others in the chimney. Then he'd jammed in a few pieces of wood to replace the mortar. The next time the furnace fired, he'd figured then, it would belch black soot over his stash, obscuring any changes in the chimney's interior surface. And anyway, the brick was tight in there, not loose at all. Even if Aunt Eva had hired a chimney sweep, highly unlikely given her age and condition, he would have had no reason to poke around. Now Rick found that same brick and pulled hard, sliding it out. Was the envelope back there? Yes. Blackened by the soot forced into all the crevices. He slit it open with his pocketknife, just to be sure. Three inches of one-hundred-dollar bills came to forty-eight thousand six hundred dollars. The old kind of hundreds, with the small portrait of Benjamin Franklin, but still good. This was the last cash from the all-time best Jersey mall job, money that Christina had helped him make. They had dropped three new Cat bulldozers at a sprawling construction site over the river. Keys in the ignition, hauled on three different canopied trailers from a housing development being built in suburban Atlanta. Nighttime drop-off, trailers immediately driven to Buffalo and parked at a scrap yard for a month. Rick had maneuvered the bulldozers off the rigs himself, taken the briefcase handed to him. Big money. Maybe he could spend some of what was left on Christina, buy her a dress or shoes, whatever. Jewelry, underwear. Cigarette lighter. Women loved little Italian cigarette lighters.
He wanted to take all of the cash, but that meant he had no backup position if things didn't go well, if the money got stolen or he blew it. On the other hand, he had been sitting in the woods for four years, and a little fun wouldn't kill him. You had to have a little fun or you didn't understand life. He split the stack of bills in two, shoved one half in his pocket and the other back into the envelope, which he replaced in the chimney. The brick might be a little loose, but who would know? He wrenched the exhaust tube back in place and opened the tub of chimney cement. The stuff looked like oatmeal, and he troweled it around the tubing, sealing the wall again. This would take extra time, but it was the right thing to do. I did bad things, but I never killed anybody. He had to protect against the furnace's backdraft; didn't want to asphyxiate Aunt Eva, death seeping through the house. The cement would be dry in a day, undetectable. Like him. The whole point was to be undetectable.
He finished the job, picked up the bucket, and on the stairs up from the basement heard a baby making cranky noises one floor above. "Oh, chickie-bee, I'm coming," called a woman sleepily. He stopped on the stairs. Aunt Eva was seventy-something years old. A baby meant young people, a young guy living in the house. Some guy who might notice new furnace cement when he changed the air filters and become curious about what was in the chimney. The baby cried again. Get the rest of the money. Rick turned back down the stairs, moving loudly, slipped around to the back of the furnace, and pulled on the exhaust vent. Nothing-he'd done too good a job cementing it in place. He savagely clubbed it with his arm. He had to hit it twice to dislodge it. Naturally the sound went through the house like a drum. The vent sagged to the floor. He reached in, grabbed the brick, threw it behind him, pulled out the envelope, and slipped it into his other pocket.
Now he could hear footsteps. He hurried back to the stairs and climbed them three at a time, but stopped at the open door to the first-floor hallway.
"Yo, whoever's down there, I got a shotgun!"
The guy was probably hunched at the top of the stairs leading from the second floor to the front door-not twelve steps from where Rick stood in the basement doorway. If the guy came down the stairs from the second floor, he might get a clean shot into the back of Rick's head as he opened the front door.