Malone pulled himself up to the sofa. Ellen fell down beside him.
“Now,” Furia said. “Payup time, folks. Where’s that twenty-four grand?”
“Do you think I’d pull a stunt like this and put my family in danger of getting shot?” Malone said. He sensed a hairline advantage, a sliver of crack in the doom. He tried to keep the thump and throb of his head and jaw out of his voice, you don’t show weakness to an animal. “Just to get somebody’s payroll back because I’m a cop? Or even to keep it for myself? You can beat up on us, torture us, kill us, we can’t tell you what we don’t know. We’re telling the truth. Somebody sneaked in here today and half brained my wife and took the bag. She didn’t even get a good look at him.”
Furia pounced. “Then why’d she say it was me? Huh? Huh?”
“Because nobody knew the money was here except us and you three. We didn’t take it, so we figured it had to be one of you. As my wife was falling she saw he wasn’t a big man. If he wasn’t a big man we didn’t see how it could be anybody but you. Anyway, that’s what we figured. Maybe we were wrong, Mr. Furia. Maybe it was some housebreaker who just happened to pick our place today to see what he could steal and hit the jackpot. But that’s the way it happened. That’s all we know.”
The eyes in the mask blinked uncertainly.
“He’s a real con, this cop,” Goldie said. “A regular mouthpiece. You going to swallow this, Fure?”
“See?” Hinch said. “He says it couldn’t of been me.”
“No,” Furia said. “No, I ain’t, Goldie! It’s a stall, all right. You and Hinch turn this dump upside down. After we find our dough I’ll learn this smartmouth who he’s dealing with.”
The first search was slapdash. Malone saw half a dozen places in the parlor where the money could have been hidden that Hinch missed. And from the sounds of Goldie’s hunt upstairs, the rapidity with which she went through the bedrooms told the same story. The Malones sat with clasped hands under Furia’s gun, straining for the first whimper of Barbara overhead, but she slept through the noise.
At one point in the dream Ellen asked if she could go get ice for her husband’s jaw and something for his head, but Furia sneered, “You’re breaking my heart,” and Malone had to lick the blood off his lips. It was still trickling down from his hair.
Hinch was crashing around in the cellar when Goldie came downstairs lugging Malone’s rifle and the boxes of ammunition.
“Look what I found, Fure.”
She offered it to him like a mother with candy. He grabbed it with a snarl of pleasure. But he had regressed, it was not the sweet thing he wanted, and he flung it back at her.
“A lousy.22! No dough?”
“I couldn’t find it.”
Furia ran over to the landing under the stairs and yelled down, “Any sign of it, Hinch?” and when Hinch came clumping up shaking his head Furia ran back and jabbed Malone’s throat with the Colt and squealed, “Where is it, you mother lover?” while Ellen, eyes starting from her head, tried to cover him with her body and to Malone’s surprise the woman Goldie took hold of Furia’s arm with her free hand and pulled him off.
“Shooting them now won’t get us our money, Fure. Fure, you listening to me? What good are they dead?” which sounded true to Malone and left him feeling gratitude, that was the New England tradition talking, her good old Yankee horse sense. Bless you, Goldie Whoever-you-are.
Furia tore the mask from his face and for the first time Malone and his wife saw him in the flesh, a corpse-face with the shine of corruption and ears like the White Rabbit’s in Barbara’s tattered
He seemed to need air.
“You okay, Fure?” Goldie asked. She sounded concerned.
Furia batted her hand away and dropped into the rocker breathing like a fish. He kept hugging the revolver. Hinch and the automatic were holding up the arch looking at Furia with anxiety and a little something extra. A doubt?
Malone shut his eyes.
When he opened them Goldie was saying, “Why not, Fure? We can hole in here for a day or even two and like really take the place apart. That money’s here, it’s got to be. Right?”
She had taken her mask off, too. Her hair was just-polished brass. The mask had smeared her makeup, it gave her features a blurred look like the TV sometimes when it pulsed. Malone squinted, trying again to place her, but she kept just out of reach. She was younger and must have been fresher then, not runny around the edges, maybe that’s why I can’t put my finger on it.
He stopped trying because Ellen was leaning her head on his shoulder and her face was turned up, her eyes were faraway glass. Even if we get out of this she’ll never be the same, she’ll have nightmares the rest of her life, she’ll make a nervous wreck out of Bibby, she won’t let the kid out of her sight… and never, never forgive me. Not because all this is my fault but because I somehow didn’t rise to it like one of her heroes, Sean Connery, Peter O’Toole, Michael Caine, or her special favorite Spencer Tracy on the Late Late Show the two or three nights a month when the cramps keep her from sleeping. I’m the dropout of her dreams, a smalltown hick who can’t make it even medium-sized. And the cop tag a big gas.
Malone hauled himself back to what was going on. Furia had recovered, he was the boss man again. “Didn’t you hear what I said, fuzz? You pay attention when I speak!”
“I’m sorry,” Malone said. “What did you say? My head aches.”
“I said we’re moving in on you till we find that bread. You got nosy neighbors?”
“No,” Malone said.
“How about delivery men?”
“Just milk. He leaves it on the porch around eight a.m.”
“The rube who delivers the mail.”
“He drops it in our mailbox near the gate.”
“That’s all?”
Malone nodded with caution. His head felt like a bongo drum.
“Well, just in case. Anybody comes to the door and asks, we’re relatives from out of town. How’d you like me for a relative, missus?”
Ellen almost said something.
“Not good enough for you, ha?”
“I didn’t say that,” Ellen said.
Furia laughed. “You got it, fuzz?”
“Yes,” Malone said.
“You, too, missus?”
Ellen gulped something and finally nodded.
“And don’t let me catch you trying to use the phone, I’ll break your dainty ladyfingers one at a time or, hell, why not? I’ll sick Hinch onto you. You like that, Hinch?”
“Mama mia,” Hinch said. “What I could do with her.”
Malone was hit by ice water. I never thought of that. I never thought of that danger to Ellen.
“Now Hinch,” Furia said. “This is a nice lady. Don’t go thinking none of your dirty thoughts about Mrs. Fuzz.” Goodhumored now, the thing was settled for him by Goldie and he can act the big brass with the reverse of responsibility-ordering the tactics after the chain-of-command below works out the strategy, a hell of a way to run a war. But it was a cockeyed war. Malone kept his eyes on Hinch.
Hinch took off his bear mask, too. No doubt to give Ellen the benefit of his manly beauty. He was looking pleased. Malone’s glimpse of that Neanderthal face in the clearing had hardly prepared him for the reality of the closeup. He could imagine how Ellen was feeling at her first look, especially with thoughts of rape trembling in her head. He felt her shudder and he wanted to tell her that gorillas were peaceable animals, it was the sort of thing he would have said to Barbara to hush a fear. But Ellen shuddered again and burrowed closer, a big smart girl who knew the difference between a fairy tale and seeing it like it is, baby. Malone found himself fumbling around with a prayer.
“That goes for both of you,” Furia said. “If the phone rings you don’t answer without me or Goldie listening in.
