Fear Nothing

waiting inside, where the lights were dialed down to a comfortable murk. The fog was long gone. He locked the front door behind us.
        Looking around at the large panes of glass, Sasha said, “I sure wish we could nail some plywood over these.”
        “This is my house,” Bobby said. “I'm not going to board up the windows, hunker down, and live like a prisoner just because of some damned monkeys.”
        To Sasha, I said, “As long as I've known him, this amazing dude hasn't been intimidated by monkeys.”
        “Never,” Bobby agreed. “And I'm not starting now.”
        'Let's at least draw the blinds,' Sasha said.
        I shook my head. 'Bad idea. That'll just make them suspicious, f they can watch us, and if we don't appear to be lying in wait or them, they'll be less cautious.'
        Sasha took the two fire extinguishers from their boxes and clipped the plastic pre-sale guards from the triggers. They were ten-pound, marine-type models, easy to handle. She put one in a corner of the kitchen where it couldn't be seen from the windows, and tucked the second beside one of the sofas in the living room.
        While Sasha dealt with the extinguishers, Bobby and I sat in the candlelit kitchen, boxes of ammunition in our laps, working below table level in case the monkey mafia showed up while we were at work. Sasha had purchased three extra magazines for the Glock and three speedloaders for her revolver, and we snapped cartridges into them.
        “After I left here last night,” I said, “I visited Roosevelt Frost.”
        Bobby looked at me from under his eyebrows. “He and Orson have a broly chat?”
        “ Roosevelt tried. Orson wasn't having any of it. But there was this cat named Mungojerrie.”
        “Of course,” he said drily.
        “The cat said the people at Wyvern wanted me to walk away from this, just move on.”
        “You talk to the cat personally?”
        “No. Roosevelt passed the message to me.”
        “Of course.”
        “According to the cat, I was going to get a warning. If I didn't stop Nancying this, they'd kill my friends one by one until I did.”
        “They'll blow me away to warn you off!”
        “Their idea, not mine.”
        “They can't just kill you? They think they need kryptonite?”
        “They revere me, Roosevelt says.”
        “Well, who doesn't?” Even after the monkeys, he remained dubious about this issue of anthropomorphizing animal behavior. But he sure had cranked down the volume of his sarcasm.
        “Right after I left the Nostromo ,” I said, “I was warned, just like the cat said I would be.”
        I told Bobby about Lewis Stevenson, and he said, “He was going to kill Orson?”
        From his guard post where he stared up at the pizza boxes on the counter, Orson whined as if to confirm my account.
        “So,” Bobby said, “You shot the sheriff.”
        “He was the chief of police.”
        “You shot the sheriff,” Bobby insisted.
        A lot of years ago, he had been a radical Eric Clapton junkie, so I knew why he liked it better this way. “All right. I shot the sheriff - but I did not shoot the deputy.”
        “I can't let you out of my sight.”
        He finished with the speedloaders and tucked them into the dump pouch that Sasha had also purchased.
        “Bitchin' shirt,” I said.
        Bobby was wearing a rare long-sleeve Hawaiian shirt featuring a spectacular, colorful mural of a tropical festival: oranges, reds, and greens.
        He said, “Kamehameha Garment Company, from about 1950.”
        Having dealt with the fire extinguishers, Sasha came into the kitchen and switched on one of the two ovens to warm up the pizza.
        To Bobby, I said, “Then I set the patrol car on fire to destroy the evidence.”
        “What's on the pizza?” he asked Sasha.
        “Pepperoni on one, sausage and onions on the other.”
        “Bobby's wearing a used shirt,” I told her.
        “Antique,” Bobby amended.
        “Anyway, after I blew up the patrol car, I went over to St. Bernadette's and let myself in.”
        “Breaking and entering?”
        “Unlocked window.”
        “So it's just criminal trespass,” he said.
        As I finished loading the spare magazines for the Glock, I said, “Used shirt, antique shirt-seems like the same thing to me.”
        “One's cheap,” Sasha explained, “and the other isn't.”
        “One's