Now footsteps descended the stairs.
"Where's Aunt Eva?" Rick yelled. "She's my aunt!"
"Who's that?" came the man's voice. "Come out of there."
"That Sal?" Rick yelled. "Don't fucking shoot me, Sal!"
The baby was crying upstairs. "Come out of there!"
"Sal?"
"Sal lives in New Jersey. Who the fuck are you?"
"I'm a member of the family."
"The fuck you are. You come out here."
He was still holding the tub of chimney cement. He flung it down the hallway to see what would happen. The shotgun exploded, tearing away the plaster, splintering the door frame, making the woman scream and the baby cry louder.
The guy is jumpy, Rick thought. "What the fuck you doing?" he called, smelling the smoke from the gun.
"Who is that? You come out here, you motherfucker." Then he yelled up the stairs. "Beth, call the cops!"
"It's Rick!"
"Rick? Who's Rick?"
"Rick Bocca, Aunt Eva's nephew. Tell Beth it's her cousin Rick Bocca."
"Beth," called the voice, "guy says his name is Rick Bocca!"
He could hear her make some kind of answer. Then he heard footsteps.
"Rick?" came Beth's voice. "Is that you?"
"Beth, it's me-tell your husband not to fucking shoot me!"
"He's not going to shoot you."
"Come out of there, you fucker!" came the man's voice again.
"I'll-" she began.
"No, no, don't go get him, let him come out!"
"You're not going to shoot?"
"Come out of there!"
He put his hand out, waved. Nothing happened.
"Come on, goddammit!"
He stepped into the hallway. A small, hairless man in a T-shirt and stained underwear held a double-barreled shotgun. Beth stood behind him, in a short nightgown.
"Ricky?" she cried, still scared. "Is that you?"
"It's me."
"You look so different. Beard and everything."
"It's me, Beth."
"Why you down there?"
"I just needed to get something, Beth, something I left."
"Why didn't you call?" she cried, upset all over again. "I mean, this is crazy, you woke everybody up and scared us and-"
"I thought Aunt Eva was still here."
"She's in a nursing home, three months."
"Oh." He still hadn't taken a step.
"This is Ronnie."
"Hi, Ronnie. You mind putting down the gun?"
But Ronnie was a small man threatening a big one. A rare thrill, and one not to be concluded too quickly. "What did you need to get?" he said.
"Just something I left, Ronnie. Personal."
"What?"
It was ten steps to the door, and if he got near enough, maybe Ronnie wouldn't take a second shot with his wife so close.
"Look," he began, taking one step, his hands up, "Aunt Eva said I could leave something down there, and she let me have a copy of the key. Here." He held up the key.
"We heard you was way out on Long Island, fishing."
"I was, Beth, but I needed something so I came back." He looked into her eyes. "I was out there, and I-"
"I fucking want to know what you were getting!" said Ronnie, waving the barrel at him.
"Hey, Ronnie, wait a minute, I know you don't like this, but you got to see it my way. I didn't want to disturb Aunt Eva."
"What do you have down there?"
It was greed he saw in Ronnie's face now, and this gave him his answer. "You're never going to believe this-"
"Try me."
"Ronnie, for God's sake, put down the gun," said Beth.
Ronnie pointed the gun at Rick. "No. I want to hear this. He came back for something, Beth, he came back and wanted something."
"Okay, Ronnie. You're probably familiar with the furnace, the exhaust vent, right?" He could feel the line coming but didn't know what it was yet. "I used to help Aunt Eva around the house, and one day, couple of years ago, I hid a big toolbox up the chimney, leaving enough room so that the smoke can still go up no problem."
You could pack hundreds of thousands of dollars in a toolbox.
"Where's the box?" Ronnie demanded.
"Well, I didn't get it out yet, see, it's still-"
"What's in it?"
Rick waited, listening to the baby's angry fit upstairs. He needed the line. "Hey, Ronnie, that's my money down there," he cried. "All of it. Aunt Eva-"
"Come here. Step back," Ronnie said to Beth.
"What?" she cried. "What are you going to do? Don't hurt him!"
"Get up the fucking stairs, bitch!"
"Ronnie, wait a minute-"
"You can fucking just walk out of here, right now," Ronnie ordered Rick. Holding the gun with one hand, he opened the front door with the other. "Go. Get out."
"Wait, I can't do that," Rick said. "I need all of that cash, man, I'm in trouble-"
"It's his money," Beth said.
"Shut up!" Ronnie screamed. "Get up the stairs." He motioned to Rick with the gun. "Get out. Get the fuck out of this house now."
Rick looked back toward the basement stairs.
"I mean it! Get the fuck out now!"
"You got to let me have some of it, at least," he said.
"I don't have to let you have shit!"
"Just let me have sixty or seventy thousand. You can have the rest."
"No!"
"It's my money!"
"It's in my house."
"The house actually belongs to me," Beth cried.
"Shut up, I said, shut up!"
"Let him have forty thousand," came Beth's voice. "It's his money, Ronnie."
Ronnie didn't answer. Instead he advanced toward Rick, leveling the shotgun at his head in the narrow hallway.
"Get down. Get down on your stomach."
Rick knelt down.
"I said stomach."
He got on his stomach, face touching bits of plaster and paint. It would take Ronnie a good ten minutes to tear apart the chimney with a sledgehammer and crowbar, looking for money that wasn't there. By then Rick would be on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in his truck, the money a fat pad in the glove compartment.
"Crawl. Crawl to the door."
He wormed along Aunt Eva's old patio-turf runner that Uncle Mike had trimmed with a box cutter thirty years ago, until he got to the door, knowing that Ronnie couldn't see the cash in the front of his pants. He looked up at Beth, who was still cowering in the stairwell. She looked like hell, even taking into account that it was six-thirty in the morning.
"Beth-"
She shook her head, eyes fearful. "I can't do anything, Ricky."
Ronnie came over and put the gun into Rick's face. "You come back, I'm going to do this."
Ronnie lifted the gun and blasted the hallway again. The sound of the gun hit Rick in the head, and for a moment he felt deaf and sick, but then he realized Ronnie had emptied the second barrel. He jumped up and grabbed Ronnie by the throat. He drove him backward against the stairwell, knocking his head on the wall, with Beth screaming, and he took his other hand and slipped a thumb under Ronnie's lip and pulled upward.
"What?"
Ronnie couldn't talk.
"What was that, Ronnie? Say it again, what?"
Ronnie made some kind of noise when Rick pulled again.
"You're tearing his face!" cried Beth.
He looked at her.
"Please, Rick."
He let go. Ronnie collapsed to the floor holding his mouth.
An hour later he found a parking garage that was just right-in Chinatown, tucked into the south side of the Manhattan Bridge. Unless you were looking for it, you'd never find it, which was the idea. He could sleep in the truck or move around the cheap hotels nearby, and if he had to get out of the city fast, then all he had to do was pull out of the parking garage and keep turning right until he was on the bridge. He eased the truck in next to a phone-booth-sized bunker made out of construction block. The attendant, a black man with a Knicks baseball cap, sat in an old bucket seat, eating sweet pork and watching television. The man turned, eyes dull, face diseased by car exhaust. "How long?"