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?'
'A week, maybe. Could be longer.'
'Put you down two weeks.'
Something was wrong with the man's breathing, and it was hard to hear him. Rick cut the engine. 'You want to stick it in back, I don't care.'
The man nodded contemplatively. 'You want it in the back? Most people want it out front so we don't have to move ten cars.'
'I don't care if you bury it back there.'
The attendant leaned forward and turned the television off, and, as if the box had been sucking the life out of him, now his gray face brightened strangely. 'You trying to hide this truck, my brother?'
'It's my truck.'
A smile of brown teeth, pork wedged against the gums. 'Question still pertains.'
'Yes, the answer is yes.'
'Repossession? We get that a lot.'
'Nope. Wife's attorney.'
The attendant frowned. 'Them fuckers gone want every dollar-yes sir, I see you got yourself a situation. You want me, I can stick it down in the basement. Way in the back.'
'As a favor?'
The man rubbed his chin theatrically. 'See, I always thought a situation require a consideration.'
'I need access.'
'What you mean by access, my brother?'
'I want to be able to get to it. Not move it, just get to it.'
He shook his head. 'We don't do that. I'll stick the truck in the basement for you, but I can't have you coming and going ten times a day, chicks back there, parties, barbecue, whatnot.'
'It wouldn't be ten times a day. Just once.'
The attendant picked up his food. 'I suppose we was discussing the consideration.'
'Hundred bucks a week, you keep the truck way in the back, let me go in and out.'
The man stirred his fork around in the carton. 'Now, hundred dollars a week is just fine for me, buddy, but I's the day man. Six to six. There's also the night man. Big dog like you coming in here at night's going freak him out. He going think you going kill his ass. If you explain your deal with me, he ain't going believe you, and if I explain it, he's going want his cut.'
'I'll go one-fifty, seventy-five for each of you. But I get to sleep in the truck.'
'You can go ahead and take a shit in there, far's I's concerned. Just keep the windows rolled up.'
'What about the air down there?'
'It's bad.'
'You better show me.'
They walked into the car elevator and descended to the basement. The dark space stretched about half the size of a football field, and the status of the cars went up appreciably: Mercedes, three Lexuses with dealer stickers on them, Cadillacs like Tony Verducci drove, a cherry-red Hummer, a vintage T-bird.
'You've got some nice cars down here.'
'Yo, this ain't parking down here, this is security.'
