"Take the next left, and you'll see it."
Following Pearl's direction, Rick veered left. What he and his brother saw was not quite what they had had in their minds.
They had imagined Pop and his clan lived in a rundown farmhouse, similar to the cabin they had been at but only larger.
The building at the end of the driveway was at least four or five times larger than A.J.'s home and appeared fairly new. It was also very modern. The brothers stared at it in stunned silence.
"Holy mackerel!" Rick exclaimed after a beat or two. "What does your old man do for a living?"
"Investment." She seemed a little uncomfortable discussing her father's finances. "It's not that we were rich growing up. After he received the life insurance payment upon my mother's death, he invested a portion of it. Before long, he quit his carpentry and cabinet making business and became a full-time investor. He seems to have an uncanny ability to pick winners when it comes to the stock market."
"Go figure," whispered Rick incredulously. "You said your family was away for some time. Does your father have vacation homes elsewhere?"
"He has a couple of rental properties in Corpus Christi where he grew up, a timeshare in Miami and a condominium in Palm Beach. He often goes to Florida to vacation and look for real estate investment properties."
As Rick braked to park his truck in front of the five-car garage, Pop appeared from the back of the house.
"P.J.!" He impatiently called to his daughter. "What took you so long?"
"You ordered so much food it took the restaurant staff a lot longer than usual to prepare it."
Pop nodded absentmindedly eyeing the mountain of bags and food containers.
"Thank you for inviting us, Mr. Bisser," said A.J. as he got out of the pickup. "You have a splendid home."
"Yeah, but maintenance's killin' me and my boys." Pop grumbled. "While we were down in Florida, someone snuck inside and broke some furniture. Then the man that's after my girl ransacked the place. And a part of the back fence is knocked down, so we're tryin' to fix it now. This used to be a real good neighborhood but not anymore. No wonder a coupla my neighbors sold their places an' moved out."
"It shouldn't take more than half an hour to warm up the food, so come inside in ten, fifteen minutes to clean up and set the table," said Pearl unloading the truck.
The three men helped her carry the food inside. She shooed them out of the kitchen once they were done unloading and the food was in the oven.
Walking back to the foyer, Rick looked around and said, "This is a real nice place you got here."
The praise, though absurdly understated, seemed to have tickled Pop immensely. "If you wanna pass the time till supper, you can shoot pool in the parlor back there." He pointed toward the hallway. "Just make yourselves at home, boys."
When Pop went outside to resume the repair, Rick spun around and headed down the hallway, curious to know what the rec room looked like.
The room Pop called parlor was enormous, but it was not the size of the room that impressed Rick. It had not only a pool table but also arcade game machines and a well-appointed wet bar among others. A low whistle escaped through his lips.
A.J. remained in the foyer, admiring a number of objets d'art big and small that adorned the tables and the shelves. As he was studying one of the minuscule yet intricate netsuke in the corner curio cabinet, Rick passed by him and started climbing up the stairs.
"Hey, Rick?" said he, his eyes still on the miniature carving. "A house this size must have a bathroom downstairs."
"I don't have to go to the bathroom."
A.J. was so deeply absorbed in the beauty of the artwork the implication of his brother's remark did not sink in right away. Suddenly he blinked a couple of times as if to come out of a dream.
"Rick?"
He whipped around and found the staircase empty.
"Where are you, Rick?" He called his brother's name again bounding up the stairs.
He reached the top of the stairs just in time to see Rick disappear into the room at the end of the hallway. He ran all the way to the entrance of the room and stuck his head in.
"Rick! Don't…"
His brother was nowhere in sight. The room seemed to be the antechamber of the master bedroom.
"Rick! Come back here right now, for God's sake!"
Though his tone was harsh, he did not raise his voice not wanting to alarm Pearl downstairs.
A few moments later, Rick emerged from the master bedroom.
"Hey, A.J.! You gotta see the jetted tub in the bathroom back there! And the shower stall has several showerheads in different places and directions—it's so big there's no need for shower curtains or doors!"
"Are you nuts? What do you think you're doing?"
Rick brushed past A.J. to get out of the room, eager to explore the house more.
A.J. tugged his older brother's sleeve. "Rick, you shouldn't be doing this." He sounded a little nervous. "You don't want to be on the wrong side of Mr. Bisser and his shotgun."
"You worry like an old lady, A.J. Pop told us to make ourselves at home. There's no harm in taking a look around." Rick shrugged and brushed him off.
When he opened the next door down, he unexpectedly got an eyeful of Pearl.
She was naked from the waist up.
They froze in total disbelief for a brief moment. Then came an ear-piercing scream from her classically trained pair of lungs. She slammed the door shut while he was standing at the doorway, petrified in shock—but not for long.
The doorknob squarely hit his nether region. The worst kind of pain for men exploded in his crotch.
Moaning, Rick collapsed on the floor in slow motion. It was too painful for him to be able to scream. As he writhed in agony on the floor, a pair of shoes came into view.
"You were saying?"
Reacting to his brother's gleeful voice, he slowly looked up. A.J. was smiling down at him and did not sound very sympathetic, not even a bit.
"Oh, shut up." Rick managed—just barely—to utter three little words between gasps. The debilitating pain in the groin was now shooting up to the abdomen.
Seeing Rick's hands stuck between the legs, A.J. realized where he was hurting and cringed with a phantom pain. His knees slammed together involuntarily.
"Ooh, that's gotta hurt," said he grimacing. "Can I get you an ice pack? Do you want anything?"
"Put me out of misery, why don't you?" whimpered Rick.
"P.J.! What's goin' on?"
Rick and A.J. looked at each other in panic when they heard Pop's voice downstairs. What had happened last night and his shotgun were still fresh in their memory.
The bedroom door jerked open, and Pearl's head popped out. "Nothing, Dad! I just saw a huge spider in my room!"
To their dismay, they all heard Pop's heavy footsteps; he was coming upstairs.
Dressed in a bathrobe, Pearl cursed in rather unladylike fashion and quickly dragged Rick, who was still lying on the floor, into her room by grasping the collar of his jacket.
The moment she put him in the bathroom and closed the door, Pop showed up at her bedroom door with his trusted shotgun in hand.
"You sure you're alright, girl? Spiders never scared you before."
"Well, like I said, it was huge, just as big as a tarantula!"
A.J. wanted to tell her there were no large arachnids native to the region at this altitude, but, considering the current circumstance, he wisely kept that tidbit of information to himself.
"Where'd it go?" asked Pop, still suspicious.
"Rick threw it out the window."
He looked around and saw only his daughter and A.J. "Where's he?"
"In the bathroom," she answered truthfully.
Before he could resume the interrogation, she assured him, "You worry too much, Dad. I'm safe with Rick and A.J."
He glanced at one half of the shamus brothers. The boy didn't look big and strong enough to beat his daughter in arm wrestling. And the look on his face wasn't too assuring either—he looked like a little rascal who had been caught with a broken Ming Dynasty vase. When Pop stared him down, he started blinking like a broken traffic light.
"Now, why don't you go tell Vance and Vaughn to come inside? Dinner will be ready in fifteen, twenty minutes, so wash up and set the table for me, okay?" Pearl said trying to send her father outside.
Although he was not quite convinced everything was kosher, Pop turned around and plodded downstairs mumbling something to no one in particular.
As they heard the front door open and close, Pearl and A.J. heaved a collective sigh of relief.
When their eyes met, they cried out simultaneously. "Rick!"
They opened the bathroom door and found him in an upright position—sort of. Though he was still in a lot of pain, he was taking baby steps to walk it off.
"Are you all right?" asked A.J.
"What do you think?" glowered Rick, chafed by his brother's stupid question.
"You should have knocked first, Rick." Pearl rebuked him.
"Hey, can it, will ya? Don't you think I suffered enough already?"
"Rick! Don't talk to her like that. She stuck her neck out to protect you from her father's itchy trigger finger in spite of whatever you've done. You should be thanking her instead."
When the Simon brothers began yet another argument, Pearl grabbed them both by the scruff of their necks and threw them out of her room.
"Hey!" Rick started to protest, but Pearl did not let him go on.
"I'm going to be busy with a lot of things to do till dinner, so be good. And don't get into any more trouble."
She slammed the door shut again in their faces.
"I don't believe this. She kicked us out of the room."
"I can't blame her. And she has every right to do so." A.J. gave his brother a little push on the back. "Come on. Let's go and wait downstairs."
Where I can keep you on a short leash, he mentally added.
By the time the Bisser men came in for dinner, the pain in Rick's groin had lessened to a dull throbbing ache, and he was able to help them set the table.
A.J. helped Pearl in the kitchen. She had changed into a dress that, he assumed, was tailor-made. It could not hide her statuesque build but flattered her nice features.
In the formal dining room, Pop and Pearl sat at each end of an enormous dinner table. Vance and Vaughn sat across from each other by their father. Rick and A.J. flanked her.
The younger Simon had been planning to thank the head of the household for the invitation once again at the commencement of the meal, but he and Rick were largely ignored at the table while Pop and his sons were busy piling up the food on their plates.
Pearl's twin brothers had no table manners; they were like a couple of wild animals ripping their kill apart. Even Rick, who didn't know or care which fork to use for what at snooty restaurants, was appalled. A.J. was rapidly losing his appetite. They now understood why the Bissers, especially Pearl, did not like to eat out.
Noticing Rick sneaking peeks at her siblings between bites and A.J. picking at the food on his plate, Pearl said, "Vance, Vaughn, will you stop stuffing your faces? You're grossing out our guests!"
One of the twins looked up from his plate. "They're not our guests; they're hired hands working for you," mumbled he with his mouth full.
The other twin snorted, "It's not our fault that they're so delicate. No wonder they're so runty."
Rick and A.J. were livid; they did not care for being called delicate, short, skinny—or runty for that matter.
"Shut up, Vaughn! Just because they're not as big as you, it doesn't mean they're runty, you big ox!" Pearl fiercely defended the Simons.
"They are too. They're smaller than you."
She turned red in the face. She had always hated to be reminded that she was big.
"Now, you kids hush up. I cain't enjoy this sumptuous meal when you're screamin' at each other." Pop spoke up for the first time. "We ordered lunch from Dotty's, an' it was plain horrible, I could hardly eat it."
"Ain't that the truth!" Vance agreed enthusiastically. "I think the sheriff feeds the stuff from Dotty's to the guys in jail as a form of punishment."
The twins laughed in perfect unison while shoveling food in their mouths.
A.J. stopped playing with his food all of a sudden staring at and beyond his plate. He put down his fork and lifted his gaze to look his brother in the eye.
"Rick." Though his voice was low, the tone suggested urgency. "We've got to go."
Rick furrowed his brow. "What? Where?"
"To the Pit, or more precisely, to the sheriff's office."
Rick cocked his head trying to figure out what his brother had meant. Then something clicked in his head. He nodded to let him know he was on board with the idea.
Overhearing their conversation, Pearl seemed devastated by this dinner fiasco. "Rick, A.J., please…"
A.J. shook his head. "No, it's not what you think, Pearl. We really have to go—to continue our investigation."
"Mr. Bisser," he addressed to Pop. "It's generous of you to have us over for dinner, and we'd like to stay and enjoy your hospitality, but something came up, and we must take our leave now. I hope you'll understand."
Pop only shrugged his shoulders. If he was offended, he did not show it. "Sure. When you gotta go, you gotta go, I s'ppose."
Rick was already on his feet tossing his napkin on the table.
Following suit, Pearl rose from her chair. "I'll pack some of the food to take…"
"No." He said cutting her off. "No time for that."
The Bisser twins were glad to see them take a hasty leave. There was more food to go around among only three men.
"They're definitely runty—and flaky too," declared Vance, making his brother laugh out loud.
As Rick shifted the gear into reverse, Pearl asked, "Could one of you please tell me what's all this about? Why do we have to be in such a hurry?"
"First of all, we're trying to locate the item the murderer's been trying to find for the last few days before he does," said A.J.
"You think it might be hidden somewhere in the sheriff's office?"
"It's a strong possibility," said Rick making a three-point turn. "That's a place no criminal wants to set foot in, and there's always someone manning the desk unlike a private home. When you think about it, it's an ideal place to hide something."
"Buy why do we have to go there now?"
"Well, there's a fifty-fifty chance that Roy was involved in an illegal activity," A.J. explained. "And if that's the case, it's also possible the sheriff may be mixed up in it."
Seeing Pearl's anxious face, he smiled assuredly. "As I said, it's just a possibility, but if he's involved, we need to find the evidence right away. He has access to the place at all hours; we don't."
She searched the brothers' faces as if to look for more assurance. "So, what are your plans? How do you conduct the search?"
Rick fingered his mustache and said casually, "Well, let's talk about that on our way."
