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This was not good. This was not good at all.

I WAS VAGUELY AWARE OF the sound of more duct tape being ripped from the roll, and of Sarah’s voice.

“Zack? Can you hear me? Zack? Zack, say something.”

It was like coming out of a deep sleep, except this time, while snoozing, someone had rearranged my body parts. My head, hanging down on my chest, was throbbing, and I could hardly see anything out of my left eye, or focus very well with the other.

“Zack, you there? He’s in the other room. Zack, what’s happening?”

I went to stretch, like I normally do when coming out of a deep sleep, but very little of me moved. My legs were held in place, and my left hand was trapped at my left side. Only my right arm was free.

My right eye was starting to focus, and I saw that I was pushed up to the kitchen table. I found the strength to lift my head up slightly, and confirmed that all that had happened before wasn’t some bad dream. I was still in my kitchen, Sarah was still tied up in a chair across from me. And I was tied into a chair, too.

I was in a great deal of pain.

I looked over at Sarah and tried to smile, but using those muscles made me wince.

“Zack,” she said. “Zack, can you understand me? Can you hear me?”

I nodded. God, it hurt.

“Who is that man? Why does he want to kill us? What’s this ledger he’s talking about? What on earth is going on?”

“Fucked up,” I mumbled. “Big time.”

“What? What did you do?”

“The purse. I took that woman’s purse, at the grocery store. I thought it was yours.” I paused. “Big mistake.”

Sarah took it in. “My God,” she said. “But I was wearing my fanny pack. You were trying to teach me a lesson and…”

“If it had been anybody else’s purse,” I whispered. “Any purse but that one…”

“Zack, stay awake. We’ve got to get out of here. This guy’s crazy. I think he’s going to kill us, even if you give him this ledger he’s asking about. Do the police really have it? Because if they don’t, just give it to him. Give him whatever he wants.”

I nodded weakly. “I’ve got some more bad news,” I said.

“What?” she said, holding her breath.

“I don’t have anything for your birthday. I know you thought I was up to something, you know, about a gift. But I haven’t gotten to it yet.”

Sarah’s eyes glistened, and she sighed. “That’s okay,” she said. “It’s not actually until tomorrow.”

I attempted another nod. “We’ll pick something out later today. Something nice.”

“Sure,” she said, fighting to keep it together.

“And maybe after that, we’ll go out for dinner, come home and celebrate. I’m okay, you know.”

“You’re not okay. You need to get to a doctor.”

“No no, I mean, you know. My plumbing. It’s perfectly operational. I just had a lot on my mind, earlier.”

“Hey,” said Rick, strolling back into the kitchen. “This it?” he asked, and dumped a stack of white paper, several hundred pages’ worth, on the kitchen table. I struggled to look at it.

“Is this what?” I asked.

“The book. I was looking around in there, found this, it’s lots of typed pages, so I figured that was it.”

I knew that was it. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s yours. Go somewhere and read it.”

“Naw, I’ll just take it with me. But just tell me, since the last chapter’s missing, how does it end?”

I blinked to get some blood out of my eye. “It turns out there is no God after all,” I said.

Rick nodded. “Fuck, is that supposed to be some sort of surprise ending? I could have told you that.”

27

“I HOPE YOU DON’T MIND BUT I’M also going to take some of your toys with me,” Rick said, motioning in the direction of my study. “You’ve got some of the neatest stuff in there. I love that Klingon warship, and you’ve got some terrific little Star Wars spaceships.” He came over, looked at me. “Can I ask you a question?”

Still taped into the chair, I raised my head feebly. “Go ahead.”

“Which do you think is better? Star Trek or Star Wars?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking at Sarah, tied up in her chair across from me on the other side of the kitchen table, who’d already seen too much to be surprised by this line of questioning. “Which do you think is better?”

“I think Star Trek.”

“Me, too.”

“Really? You know why I like it better? More chicks in little short outfits. At least in the original one. The Next Generation, they toned it down a bit. Until that Voyager show, and the Borg chick, with the really tight costume. Man.”

Suddenly, as if he’d forgotten something, he went back into the study. A moment later he returned to the kitchen holding a model of the saucerlike spacecraft from Lost in Space, the Jupiter 2. Actually, he was flying it more than holding it, carrying it a couple of inches away from his eyes. One was closed, the other squinting, like he was picturing the craft zooming through the galaxy.

“Okay, I’m taking this, too, but there’s a part that’s broken off it.”

“It’s the door,” I said. “It needs to be glued back on. It’s on the shelf right where the model was.”

And then he was gone, looking for it. He returned with the model ship, the door, and a small container of liquid plastic cement he’d found on my modeling table.

“I want you to fix it,” he said. “I was never very good at this sort of thing. I always put on too much glue and ruin it.”

“I’m kind of tied up at the moment.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to let you use your right hand.” He began to unwind the duct tape that held my right wrist to my chair.

“I’m gonna need both hands,” I said. “If I’m going to glue it and then hold the door in place.”

“I look stupid to you? You can do it with one hand. I’ll help you, and then we’re going to talk about finding that ledger for Mr. Greenway.”

He unscrewed the cap on the liquid cement. With my free hand I set the door on its back side so I could apply cement to the parts that would come in contact with the ship.

“How about this,” I said to Rick as I dabbed a bit of glue onto the door. “I’ll tell you more about that ledger, but you have to let me tell you about another story I’m working on first.”

“What? Like another science fiction book?”

“No, this one’s a bit different. It’s sort of a mystery, about a double-cross.”

“Oh yeah? I always like those. Like you think the guy is your friend, but then you find out he’s your enemy.”

“This one’s about a guy who does all the dirty work for his boss, takes all the risks, but gets shafted in the end.”

Rick eyed me warily. “Go on.”

“He even kills for his boss, that way the boss is protected, you know? There’s some distance between him and the crime, so that if he has to, he can deny knowing anything about it.”

Rick frowned. “Doesn’t sound like something that would interest me.”

“No? It should. I’m basing it on you. Here, press the door into place, now hold it for a few seconds till it sets. In this story, you’re the central character. You’re the one getting double-crossed.”

“Sure I am.”

“You know what your boss Greenway said to me-I don’t even know how long ago, I got no idea what time it is now. But earlier tonight, he said something very interesting to me.”

“What he say?”

“He said, ‘What if we gave you Rick?’”

Rick ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “Whaddya mean, what if he gave you Rick?”

“He said, ‘What if we give you Rick for the murders of Spender and Stefanie? We get him to take the fall for that, and then we give you whatever you want.’”