“You kidding? Anything to get that cat piss smell out of my nostrils.”
Jeff chuckled as he lit a cigarette. “Luckily I don’t smell it.”
“Upstairs in my dad’s office, that’s where it’s bad. Plus, we’ve got critters living inside the walls.”
Jeff exhaled twin plumes of smoke. “So what do you think?”
Rick was quiet for a long moment. He thought, What the hell. This could be fairly painless. “When could you start?”
“Anytime. Like now.”
“Business slow?”
“Always slows down in the winter. I mean, I’ve got a couple of big jobs lined up starting March or April…”
“It’s an interesting idea. If we can work it out, I mean.”
“Well, so think about it. Meanwhile, let me check out what that smell is upstairs. I got a pretty good idea I know.”
Jeff followed Rick up the stairs. “Jeez,” he said, toeing the condom wrapper. “Can’t even clean up their own shit.”
When they got to the study, Jeff said, “So that was the crash I heard.” He snorted. “Oh yeah, I smell it now. That’s nasty. Hold on, I’ll be right back.”
He galumphed down the staircase. Rick was picking up the larger pieces of glass when Jeff appeared in the doorway, a shop broom and dustpan in one hand and a crowbar in the other.
“Thought you could use this.” He handed Rick the broom and dustpan. Then, waggling the crowbar, he said, “If you’re serious about doing work on the place, I can open up the wall and see what the problem is.”
Rick shrugged. “Go for it, why not.”
Jeff walked carefully to the middle of the room, weaving around and through the broken glass. Then he stood, head cocked, listening. A moment later, the rustling started up again. Jeff followed the sound to the back wall, then stood still for a few seconds more. He opened the closet door, heavy and paneled, with an ornamented brass knob. He noticed the dangling string, the pull cord, and tugged it to switch on the bare bulb mounted on the canted ceiling.
Jeff nodded, smiled. “They’re in the crawl space. Squirrels, I betcha. They get in through roof vents or they chew holes in the soffit. Evil little buggers.”
He hoisted the crowbar and slammed its hooked end into the back wall of the closet. A chunk of the wall came away with a screech. It wasn’t plaster and lath, Rick saw, but a flat piece of plywood, ten or twelve inches across, a couple of feet long.
“Here she comes,” Jeff said. “Easy.”
Jeff stepped aside as the long board toppled to the closet floor in a cloud of plaster. A tall hole had opened in the back wall of the closet, too narrow to get through, but enough to glimpse the dim interior. There was a scree sound and a quick pitter-patter, like rain on the ceiling, the mad scrambling of small creatures.
“Squirrels,” Jeff announced. “Knew it.” He coughed. “Whoa. Gross.”
Rick stepped closer to get a look.
“Hate squirrels,” Jeff said. “Nothing more than furry-tailed rats.”
Then he jammed the crowbar into the wall once more and ripped out the adjoining board. It squealed as it came out, nails screeching against wood, and clattered to the floor.
“No plasterboard here,” Jeff said. “Strange. Like they just painted over this plywood.”
“What is it, a nest?” Rick asked. “I don’t want the goddamned squirrels running around inside the house.”
“Nah, if there’s a nest, it’s probably on the other side of the house. This right here is their latrine.”
“Latrine?”
“Squirrels don’t soil their own nests usually.”
“Think they’re still in there?” Rick asked.
“Maybe, maybe not. If they’ve got babies in the nest, they’re not leaving.”
“So now what?”
“Trap ’em, that’s the best way. Or chase ’em out of here. Then seal up the holes with hardware cloth or steel mesh.”
Rick could now see into the crawl space a little more clearly. In the faint, dappled light-from a lot of little holes in the roof, he guessed-a pile of some sort was silhouetted, a heap a few feet tall.
“Careful where you walk, there, dude,” Jeff said.
Rick took a few more steps, through the opening, into the crawl space. He hunched over-because of the steeply pitched roof, there wasn’t enough room to stand.
“You know,” Jeff said, “if you want to open up some of these walls up here, we can get some more square footage on this floor. Bedroom nook, a kid’s room, whatever. Could even put in skylights-that would be nice. I’ve had good luck with Velux Cabrio balcony roof windows.”
As Rick’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he moved closer to the pile. A black plastic tarp, on top of what were probably boxes. Now the boarded-up section of the closet wall made sense. At some point in the century or so of the house’s history, the crawl space, normally wasted space, was used for storage. Maybe it was accessed through the closet. A trapdoor, a removable panel, was put in. Maybe it was part of the original construction.
“Careful in there,” Jeff said. “I’ve seen squirrels attack people, you know. They don’t even have to be rabid. You invade their nest…”
Rick tugged at one corner of the tarp, but it wouldn’t lift up; it was stapled to another piece of tarp. He yanked harder this time, and a couple of staples popped and sprinkled to the floor, and now he could see inside.
“Jesus,” he said.
He looked again. What he saw didn’t register.
“You get bit?” Jeff said with a cackle.
The light in there was bad, but there was just enough to make out the engraved number 100 and Ben Franklin’s face. It seemed a mirage. He stuck his hand into the hole in the tarp and pulled at the first thing he could grasp.
A wad of hundred-dollar bills, it looked like. A band bisecting the packet, printed twice with the number $10,000.
His hand was actually trembling, he realized.
“Dude, what is it?” Jeff said.
“Nothing,” Rick said.
2
His first instinct was to conceal. Without even thinking about it, he swiveled, placing his body between Jeff and the tarp-covered heap, blocking Jeff’s view.
… view of what?
Whatever was in that hulking pile, a couple of feet high by maybe four feet wide, Rick knew what was on top of it: packets of money. Packets of hundred-dollar bills. Maybe not the whole pile; that would be crazy, flat-out inconceivable. Packets of money atop… what? A pile of papers, maybe files.
The whole pile couldn’t be cash. That wasn’t possible. He tossed the packet back onto the heap.
He couldn’t think clearly. He needed to look again, but without Jeff around. Because what he’d seen had blown his mind. He’d held, in his very own hand, ten thousand dollars. A hundred hundred-dollar bills. In one single packet. And that was just the top of the pile.
Money that obviously wasn’t his father’s, because Len had no money.
“Looked like cash you were holding there,” Jeff said. Something about his tone, lower and insinuating, had changed. He sounded more aggressive.
A shadow obscured his face. Rick couldn’t see his eyes.
Rick tried to give a dismissive chuckle, but his mouth was dry and it came out hah, more scornful than he intended. “I wish.” He clambered out of the opening in the wall, forcing Jeff to back up out of the way. “Bunch of old register receipts is what it is.”
“Well, let’s drag it out here into the sunlight.”
“Another time.” Rick sounded weary and bored. He glanced at his watch. “I’m going to need to get going.”
“Well, now, hold on a sec-do we have a deal?”