Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Marco Schmidt: A Safe Place

Monty told us there was a safe in her house, where her dad kept pretty valuable stuff. One of those high-tech systems that has a dozen different failsafes to call the police if it's tampered with, and a private security firm too. She said it was where Daddy kept his sword, and that immediately got my attention.

I knew very little about Monty's family, you know. She didn't talk about them much, but I'd already got the impression that relations between her parents were strained. Sometimes she was on her own here, sometimes she lived with Daddy while Mother was on some lavish foreign holiday, sometimes Mother ruled the roost while Daddy was staying in a little apartment in the City, close on hand in case the company's finances needed him in a hurry. When her parents were both around, I didn't hear much because those were the days Monty always stayed on campus. She didn't say that, of course. I just guessed because sometimes she was around more often. I had to wonder if there was something very wrong in her family life, but I was no psychologist, and I didn't want to pry.

Anyway, this was the first time I'd heard about Daddy having a sword. I'd always thought the family were fairly well off. The kind of people who wouldn't lift a pen if they could pay someone else to do it, and certainly not sporting types. My first question, though, was about the safe. If she meant a lockbox like the club used for storing swords, there was no way it would be big enough for the Box. But she named the company that made it, and Dwayne was immediately impressed.

I was kind of shocked, to be honest, that those two had the power to geek out and start using words I didn't understand. Dwayne, yes. He's more of a gamer than me, and goes way into the technical side with his computers, so it's fairly easy for a conversation to drift into impenetrable jargon. But Monty was the expert at putting all kinds of philosophy and literary theories into everyday words. Now, maybe this time the unfamiliar words and acronyms were features of this safe, things she'd heard Daddy reel off a dozen times out of pride. Maybe she didn't even know what all the terms meant, but Dwayne was familiar with the technology and he was satisfied.

I could tell Ferrari was getting a bit frustrated with waiting. As soon as there was a break in the conversation, she started asking about what had happened to get everybody there, who'd been pursuing. We told her a little bit of the story, and then the quaint doorbell rang again and Monty tossed the keys down to let Kris in. Then the bell rang again, and this time it was Sam with the Box. Monty tossed me the keys and I rushed down.

I knew I had to be quick. They'd be down any minute so Monty could show off her dad's safe, and we'd finally have this thing locked up securely. I opened the front door and waved to Sam to come around the back. I knew there was a basement garage, and Monty had said when we came in that one of these keys opened it so we wouldn't have to bring the muddy Box through the hallway.

I locked the door again, grabbed my boots in case I needed to go outside, and tried a couple of doors until I found the one that concealed a stairway. The carpet ended like three steps down, and gave way to bare concrete with metal strips along the edge. This was Daddy's domain, I was sure, a place where no interior decorator was allowed. The æsthetic was functional warehouse, from concrete slab floor to metal-clad pillars. I quickly scanned the utility room, and saw that a shelving unit in the alcove between two pillars was actually hinged at one side. Was there a safe hidden behind there?

I didn't have time to investigate, though. I could see the truck pulling up outside, and I rushed to open the garage door. More haste less speed, I guess, because I was so agitated that I fumbled and almost dropped the keys twice before I actually got it open.

"Your car's pretty beat up, can't be driven like it is," the driver, Sam, was standing beside the vehicle waiting for me, "I took it straight back to Kerrigan's, like you said. Probably cost a grand or so."