Time to go.

Part of his brain warned him to do just that, only that. Go. Just get away from these people, put some distance between him and them, and hope he never saw them again. In the most paranoid part of his brain, he had almost persuaded himself that he’d been set up, that the woman had sent her whipped boyfriend to go looking for him and drag him back here, knowing what he’d done. But naw, that couldn’t be. It was just his usual shitty-ass luck, the life of Lloyd. Try to make a buck, nothing more, end up with this gungho dude and his detective girlfriend, who seemed to know something that nobody was supposed to know. Why wouldn’t she stop saying that name? Youssef. Youuuuuuuuuuuuussefffffffff. Like she could read his mind. No, the smart thing was to get out.

Thing was, he had come over the threshold with plans, and Lloyd always fell in love with his own plans. If he pictured himself doing something or having something, no matter how small, he had to try to follow through. There had been a poem in school about how bad that was, putting off a dream. Lloyd had allowed this guy to bring him here because he thought there would be something in it for him, and he had been clocking stuff from the moment he got inside the house, calculating what he could carry, what he could sell. In his head he had already made fifty, a hundred dollars easy.

He retreated into the study and surveyed the portable goods available to him. It was some trifling shit. The jewelry would be in the bedroom, obviously off-limits now. He should have sneaked back there earlier. No, never mind, the woman didn’t look like someone who went in for good stuff, judging by her watch and the small gold hoops in her ears. But there was the laptop and a digital camera. Also some DVDs, although they didn’t look like the kind that would generate much cash. They all had the same title. He sounded it out silently: Cri-ter-ion Collection. Wasn’t that the guy who wrote the book about the dinosaurs? Lloyd had liked that book, even better than the movie, because the book didn’t let anyone off the hook. The mad-scientist dude was pecked to death by his own little monsters, while the movie made out that he was some white-bearded Santa Claus guy. Villains needed to be punished proper, in Lloyd’s opinion, although he didn’t always agree with the movies on who the villains were. Like, Spider-Man 2. That octopus dude had a right to be pissed.

No, wait: “Criterion Collection” must be the company that made these DVDs. The real titles were for sure bizarre. Yojimbo. Rashomon. Ran. Ran from what? They were in black and white, too, which meant they weren’t worth carrying out of here. Too bad, because they looked kind of interesting, like old-fashioned kung fu movies. Throne of Blood. That one he had to take, even if he didn’t have a DVD player his own self. Dub did.

There was a big jar of change, but it was too large to carry, and fishing out the quarters would make too much noise. The other electronics were all too big, too, and not at all up-to-date. No flat screen, no plasma, just a shitty-ass Sony no more than nineteen inches, although it would still bring a little something. Then again, he was taking the Lexus, so he could carry more. But he had to travel part of the way on foot, at the end. So this was all he was going to get, one armful’s worth.

At the last minute, he opened up a little box he had spied on her desk, a blue oval with a horned horse painted on it, to see if jewelry might be hidden in it. Unicorn, that was what you called it. Not horned horse, unicorn, and this unicorn was hiding a stash of weed. They had weed. Fuckin’ hypocrites, like all grown-ups. Okay, not exactly, it wasn’t as if they had been in his face, wagging fingers, saying no-no-no like his mama, who used to say yes an awful lot, pre-Murray. She was clean now, which should have been good, but it wasn’t somehow. Man, it pissed Lloyd off for reasons he couldn’t quite explain even to himself, this stash tucked away in a painted box. He pocketed the box, then headed out into the hall, laptop under his arm.

The big dog, the scary one, had nosed its way out of the couple’s bedroom and was now staring at him. Lloyd froze in place, petrified. He hated dogs. He expected this one to start barking and growling, giving him up. He began working on a story. But the dog just regarded him with sad, judging eyes, not unlike his mama’s. Oh, Lloyd, the dog seemed to say. Stupid Lloyd. Bad Lloyd.

The dog didn’t try to keep him from going, though. Again, just like his mama.

The alarm system in the house was no problem. He had made it a point to watch that Crow dude disarm it when they came in, so he punched in the code now, taking it off instant, then grabbed a set of keys from the hooks by the door and sailed into the cold night. It was creepy here, almost like country, super silent and darker than any night he had ever seen, even when he was out at Hickey, not that you were given a lot of chances to stare at the night sky when you were locked up.

Shit. Another car, a real piece-of-shit thing, was blocking the Lexus. He hadn’t counted on that, another car being in back of the one he wanted, but yeah, she had to drive something home. Worse, it was a stick, which was weak, unless it was a Maserati or something like that. Lloyd didn’t know how to drive stick. He’d just have to make it out on foot.

Still, again-it was so hard to abandon his beautiful plan, having already spent the money he planned to make five times over. The house was on a little rise. Maybe he could roll the hooptie out into the street by releasing the parking brake, then come back for the Lexus and head out the other end. What did he care if the Volvo blocked the bottom part? It was a weird-ass street, narrow as an alley. The houses on the opposite side, the ones whose backyards came up to the edge, were big and fancy, but the houses on this side were nothing great. Where the fuck was he anyway? He hoped he could find his way home from here. He had tried to pick out landmarks on the drive here, and he was pretty sure he could work his way back to Cold Spring Lane, which meant he could find Green-mount and then home, but he couldn’t swear which direction he needed to go. The dude had all but kidnapped him, forced him to come here. All he was doing was freeing himself, like a slave escaping the plantation.

He opened the door of the Lexus to stash the goods, and it shrieked. Fuck, that was alarmed, too, and the piercing sound filled the night. He had forgotten about the car alarm. He’d have to take the Volvo now, make a quick getaway. He’d driven stick on a video game at ESPN Zone. How different could it be? But while he managed to get the engine to turn over, release the parking brake, and roll back, the car stalled out as soon as he tried to put it in a forward gear. As he struggled with the gears, gravity took over, and he found himself rolling backward, faster and faster. At first he continued trying to start the car, then realized he might be better off applying the brake. But nothing happened, no matter how hard he pressed-shit, that wasn’t the brake. The brake was in the middle. He slammed both feet down on it hard and triumphantly brought the car to a stop in the middle of the cross street at the foot of the drive.

He sat there no more than a second, breathing hard from the rush of it all, trying to gather his thoughts, which weren’t at their sharpest. Go back? No. What, then? Get away. Go. Run. But even as he fumbled with the Volvo’s door, a huge old boat of a car appeared out of nowhere, bearing down on him. It was enormous, the biggest car-car that Lloyd had ever seen, almost as long as a limo, and strangely noiseless, but maybe his hearing was off-or stunned from the alarm on the Lexus. No, he could hear his own breath, he just couldn’t hear the approaching car’s engine. It was like a ghost car, drifting toward him, showing no sign of stopping. Slowly, gracefully, it rolled, rolled, rolled-and struck the Volvo smack in the side.