She saw the blood on my pants and shirt immediately. ‘Jesus, Zack, what happened?’
‘Just get in,’ I said, and she climbed up into the truck with the bag and slid over, but she kept looking at me. I was a bit of a mess.
She turned on Merker. ‘What did you do to him?’
‘Oh, he’s fine,’ Merker said, grabbing the bag out of Sarah’s hands. He unzipped it, opened it wide. ‘Motherfucker,’ he said.
I almost said it myself. The bag was jammed with cash, made into bundles with rubber bands. Most of it, it appeared, in tens and twenties.
‘Is it all here?’ he asked Sarah accusingly.
‘No, I left half of it in the safety-deposit box,’ Sarah snapped. ‘Of course it’s all there.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Merker said. ‘Sheesh.’ He took out one packet of cash and handed it to Sarah. ‘For your trouble.’
‘No thank you,’ she said.
He tossed it back into the bag. ‘Okay, but don’t forget I offered. This is amazing. Did you have any trouble? They didn’t ask for more ID? They were okay with the signature?’
‘I was in and out,’ Sarah said. She went to touch my nose, but held her hand an inch away when I recoiled. ‘Are you okay? What did he do to you? What happened?’
‘I had a plan,’ I said. ‘It didn’t work.’
THIRTY-NINE
Merker was ebullient. So maybe he didn’t have half a million dollars in the bag. Maybe it was only three hundred thousand. Of course, he’d have to count it to be sure, but the thought that he had this much of his money back had planted an enormous grin on his face.
He was rocking back and forth behind the wheel, as though listening to the beat of a rock song, but the radio was off.
‘The living’s gonna be easy from here on,’ he said. ‘I think me and Leo’ll go south. Get a place in Florida or something. Or maybe we’ll go to Europe, one of those countries over there.’
‘South of France is nice,’ I said, not really knowing why.
Merker made a farting noise with his lips. ‘Fuck no, I hate the French. I’m gonna stick with Europe.’
‘Definitely not foreign editor material,’ I said to Sarah, who had taken off the red wig and tossed it down on the floor like a dead rat.
‘What’s that?’ Merker said.
‘You’ll have to get some foreign material,’ I said. ‘Like travel books. Read up on the places you want to go.’
Merker nodded. ‘That’s not a half-bad idea. Where would you find books like that?’
‘I’d probably try a bookstore,’ I said. I touched my finger to my nose, checked it for fresh blood. My wound seemed to be drying up, but I still looked as though I’d walked into a bus.
‘So all I gotta do now is pick up Leo, turn you over to the beauty queens, and we are on our way.’
‘You forgot to mention giving them their share,’ I reminded him.
‘Well, sure,’ Merker said slowly, like a kid who’d been asked whether he had his homework done. ‘Just sort of slipped my mind for a second.’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You’ve got what you want, right? This all worked out, I helped you out, I got my wife to help us, we’re good, right?’
Merker glanced over. ‘You mean, not counting when you tried to fucking zap me?’
‘Aside from that, yeah.’
Merker thought a moment. ‘I suppose. So what’s your point?’
‘First of all, we pull over and you let my wife go. She went in, she got you the money. The Gorkins don’t know or care about her. Just let her go.’ Sarah listened intently as I argued for her release, and momentarily reached over and squeezed my knee.
‘Well, shit, I don’t know about that,’ Merker said. ‘Maybe once Leo and I are on our way and this is all over.’
The thing was, how could he let us go? Look at what we knew. Particularly me. Merker knew that I knew he’d killed Benson, the Bennets, the biker who’d fathered Trixie’s child. And for all he knew, I’d passed all this information on to Sarah.
If I were him, right about now, I’d be thinking about how I was going to get rid of two more bodies.
And that didn’t even count Katie.
Jesus. What would he decide to do about Katie?
My mind started working again, looking for another way out of this. I wasn’t confident of my ability to leap from a moving pickup truck, and even if I could, I wasn’t about to leave Sarah with Merker.
I knew Sarah was doing the same thing, calculating the odds, looking for an opening. If she’d come up with anything, she certainly hadn’t found a way to communicate it to me. Merker was using one hand to steer so that he could keep his other hand on the gun. The only bonus for us from this arrangement was that it meant he was leaving his nose alone for a while.
There was no need to tell Merker how to get back to our house from the bank. He seemed to know where he was going, and he was driving with great purpose. I noticed he had not bothered to ask me where Mrs Gorkin’s Burger Crisp establishment was. We could drop by there on the way and give her the twenty-five thousand dollars he’d promised her for not taking me away before I could get his message to Trixie in prison.
Perhaps, if he really did plan to give the woman and her twins the money, which I seriously doubted, he was going to present it to Ludmilla at the house, who could then call her mother to report that everything had gone as planned. Then, presumably, Mom would drive back over and pick up her daughter, and me.
I did not want that to happen.
I suspected a fate similar to Brian Sandler’s – a deep-fry experience – awaited me. It’s hard to tell the authorities about a health department payoff scam, and other illegal business operating out of the back of a restaurant, when your lips have been melted off.
I had to ride this out, hope for something to go wrong for Merker, the smallest distraction, anything.
I had to get Katie out of this.
I had to get Sarah out of this.
If I could manage those two things, I’d start looking for a way to get myself out too.
Merker wheeled the truck around a corner, paying no attention to the stop sign. If only there’d been a cop in the vicinity. If he wasn’t careful, Merker would finally have his money, be set for life – or at least a good chunk of it – only to lose it all over a stupid traffic violation.
We were back on our street, Crandall. Merker slowed, not familiar enough with the street to know our house instantly. ‘Just up here,’ I said.
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, and pulled in behind Trixie’s GF300, blocking it. ‘Okay, kids, we’re home. Everybody out.’
He was out first, his truck keys looped onto a finger of his left hand, which was carrying the bag of cash, the gun in his right. He came swiftly around to the other side, watched me and Sarah warily as we stepped down out of the Ford.
He ushered us along in front of him, up the front porch steps. Before we’d reached the front door, he shouted, ‘Leo! Hey, Leo!’
The door opened, but instead of being greeted by Merker’s partner, it was Ludmilla letting us in. Her eyebrows went up a notch when she saw Sarah, evidently surprised that there was a new guest coming to the party.
Katie was lying down on the couch, but not sleeping. As soon as Sarah saw her, she went to her. ‘Hey, you must be Katie. I’m Sarah.’
Katie looked at her with tired eyes and said nothing. She’d met too many bad people in the last twenty-four hours to trust anyone new right off the bat.
‘I’m Zack’s wife,’ she said, her voice full of reassurance. ‘How are you holding up? Do you need something to eat? Have they been feeding you?’
There was no sign of Merker’s associate.
‘Where the hell is Leo?’ he asked Ludmilla.
‘Upstairs,’ she said. ‘In the bathroom. He is not feeling well.’
‘What do you mean, not feeling well?’
Ludmilla shrugged. ‘He is throwing up, and he is having trouble at the other end too, I think. I thi
nk it is maybe something he ate. That burger in the fridge. I think maybe it was bad.’ She looked at me accusingly. ‘You shouldn’t keep bad food in your fridge.’
I held back from telling where it had come from, that we’d been holding on to it in the hopes of turning it over to the health department.
Merker went to the bottom of the stairs, set down the gym bag, his keys resting on top. He shouted up the stairwell, ‘Leo!’
Edgars shouted back from behind the closed bathroom door. ‘Gary?’
‘Leo, get down here!’
‘I can’t! I’m sick! I think I’m gonna die!’
Merker rolled his eyes. ‘Honest to God,’ he said, more for our benefit than Leo’s.
Ludmilla said, ‘Did you get the money?’
‘Yeah,’ said Merker, annoyed. ‘We got the money.’
‘You give me our share, and I’ll go.’
‘Already taken care of,’ Merker said.
Ludmilla’s eyebrows went up again. ‘What do you mean, taken care of?’
‘On the way back,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you get the call?’
‘What call?’
‘From your mother. She didn’t call?’
‘No, she has not called.’
‘That’s funny. Well, she was pretty busy. Maybe she’s still counting it.’
‘You gave her the money? You were supposed to bring our share here, then I call her and then we are done.’
‘Fuck, sorry about that,’ Merker said. ‘I got confused. But anyway, you can go. Take off. We’re all done. I dropped by, gave your mom the twenty-five grand. Oh yeah, actually, she told me to tell you to come on back. I don’t think she was going to call you anyway.’
Even if English had never been Ludmilla’s first language, she knew bullshit when she heard it.
‘Leo!’ Merker shouted again. ‘We gotta get out of here!’
Sarah had knelt down next to Katie. ‘Come on, honey, talk to me. Are you okay? Has anybody hurt you?’ Katie shook her head no. ‘Would you like a snack or something? A drink of water?’
Leo shouted back, ‘I can’t get up yet! I feel terrible! Can you come up here for a second?’
Merker got a look on his face like he’d just bitten into a lemon. This was not his idea of a good time, having to go up and check on a friend suffering from a catastrophic intestinal disorder.
‘Just finish up and get down here as quick as you can!’ Merker said. ‘We got a few things to deal with.’
‘I’m going to call my mother,’ Ludmilla told Merker. ‘I will just check that she got the money.’
‘Sure,’ said Merker, his eyes dancing. ‘That’s what I’d do too, I was you. But your mom said she was having phone trouble, which is why she told me to tell you that everything was totally okay and—’
‘Gary!’ Leo sounded like he was going to die.
‘Ah, fuck,’ Merker said and bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time, to see what was wrong with his friend.
And suddenly, for the first time in hours, Gary Merker was not watching over us. He was out of the room. Sarah and I exchanged glances. Katie’s eyes went back and forth between us. Even she seemed to sense that there was an opportunity here, and we might be the ones to help her take advantage of it.
Ludmilla, however, was looking at the gym bag. She must have had a pretty good idea what it contained.
Upstairs, Merker shouted through the bathroom door, ‘Pull up your pants, we’re getting out of here!’
‘Could you come in here?’ Leo said. ‘I think I’m done, but I feel kind of weak.’
‘Jesus, no,’ said Merker. ‘Clean yourself up and come on.’
Ludmilla advanced on the gym bag, picked up the keys on top, and pulled back the zipper. Just a couple of inches, but enough to see the mountain of cash. She was turned away from me, so it wasn’t possible to see her expression, but I could imagine it.
But the sight of all that cash wasn’t enough of a shock that she forgot how to react. She kept the keys to Merker’s truck in one hand and grabbed hold of the bag’s straps with the other. She was out the front door without another word.
I made no move to stop her. This was my opportunity to escape not only Merker, but the Gorkins as well.
To Sarah, I said, quietly but with great urgency, ‘Go.’
She grabbed Katie by the hand. The girl seemed suddenly alive, swinging her legs off the couch and planting them on the floor.
‘Just run,’ I whispered. ‘Anywhere.’
Upstairs, Merker said through the bathroom door, ‘Smells like you died in there. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs.’
‘Come,’ Sarah said to me, her eyes full of pleading, already heading with Katie to the kitchen so she could sneak out the back door.
‘Right behind you,’ I said.
Out front, I heard the door slam on Merker’s truck, the engine turn over with a great roar. While Sarah and Katie slipped out the back way, I took a moment to peek through the glass in the front door to see Ludmilla backing out of the driveway.
It turned out to be a stupid thing to do. It was a moment I could not afford to take.
Merker came bounding back down the stairs. It took him a second to register that the bag was gone. ‘What the—’
Then he looked at me. He had the gun out, and while he was waving it around, it was pointed more or less in my direction.
‘Where is it?’ He’d become instantly maniacal. ‘The bag! Where is the bag?’
I made a motion with my thumb, like a hitchhiker, pointing out front. ‘Ludmilla,’ I said. ‘I think she wanted to be sure Mom got her share.’
He ran straight into me, shoved me up against the wall, and opened the front door. He stepped out onto the porch, looked down the street in time to see his truck receding into the distance, and got off a shot.
I started running back through the house. I got as far as the kitchen, saw that the back door was still open from Sarah and Katie’s escape. Then there was another shot. Ahead of me, the kitchen window that looked out onto the backyard shattered.
‘Hold it!’ Merker shouted.
I froze. He ran, caught up to me, put the barrel of the gun to the back of my head.
‘Where are they? The kid? Your wife?’
‘They’re gone,’ I said.
Merker pushed the barrel harder against my skull. ‘Jesus! Goddamn it!’
I could feel his hot breath on the back of my neck. This was it, I figured. He was finally going to blow my brains out. Part of me wished he’d just get it over with. I felt strangely at ease. The two people I most wanted to save were on their way to freedom.
They were safe.
‘Fuck them,’ Merker said. ‘I want the money. We’ve got to go after the money.’ He took a couple more breaths. He was trying to pull himself together. ‘You know where they hang out? Where the twins and the mother are?’
‘It’s a burger place.’
‘Show me. Take me there.’
The cold steel against my head made the decision a bit easier. ‘Sure,’ I said.
Leo, coming into the kitchen, was doing up the belt on his pants and walking like he’d just ridden in on a horse. He was white as a sheet. If he was surprised to see Merker and me alone in the kitchen, Ludmilla and Katie gone, and a gun to my head, he didn’t show it.
He asked me, ‘You got any, like, Alka-Seltzer or anything?’
I pointed to the pantry. ‘Bottom shelf,’ I said.
Leo opened the pantry door, found the tablets, ran some water into a glass and dropped two of them in.
He squinted at the bubbles as they rose off the water’s surface, then drank it down in one gulp. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and said to Merker, who was still holding the gun to my head, ‘Did you count the money yet?’
FORTY
‘Ludmilla left with the money?’ Leo said. He seemed genuinely shocked. ‘Are you sure, Gary?’
‘Am I sure?’ Merker said. ‘You see a bag of money around anywhere?
I left it at the bottom of the stairs, and not only did she take that, she stole my fucking truck.’
Leo was perplexed. ‘She seemed like such a nice person. We talked about all sorts of things while you were gone. Did you know that someday she wants to open her own beautician’s shop?’
Merker looked at Leo, dumfounded.
‘I know she’s not what you’d call a beauty herself, she could stand to lose a few pounds, but she has a nice way about her,’ Leo said. ‘I don’t see why she couldn’t make a go of it.’
Merker, who still had a gun at my head, said to me, ‘Keys.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Car keys.’
The only car left in the drive was Trixie’s, and if he wanted to take it and find his way to Burger Crisp on his own, that was fine with me.
‘In my pocket,’ I said, reaching in and dropping them onto the kitchen counter. Merker snatched them up.
Then he grabbed me by the back of my jacket and started leading me to the door. ‘Just take the car,’ I said. ‘What do you need me for?’
‘Navigator,’ Merker said. ‘Leo, come on.’
Leo said, ‘I feel like I might have to go to the bathroom again.’
‘Leo!’ Merker said. ‘We’re going! We’re picking up three hundred fucking thousand dollars. If you shit your pants, you can buy a new pair.’
Leo still looked uneasy, but followed as Merker and I went out the front door. He hit the remote button on the key to open the doors of Trixie’s sedan. ‘You,’ he said to me, ‘up front with me. Leo, you take the back.’
I got in the passenger side, Merker slid in behind the wheel, and Leo got into the back seat. He got in gingerly, favoring his ass.
‘Take off your belt,’ Merker said to Leo, who was just buckling up.
‘You don’t want me to wear my seatbelt?’
‘No, on your pants. Take off your belt and tie his head to the headrest.’
‘Aw, come on,’ I said.
Merker looked at me and pointed. ‘I don’t want you trying anything. I’m tired of getting fucked around. Letting your wife and the kid leave, letting that bitch run off with my money, that was wrong.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realize I was working for you.’