Stone Rain (33 page)

It took me a moment to recognize him. Even though I’d heard so much about him, I’d only seen him once in person, at the stun gun demonstration.

Gary Merker. Arms down at his side, one hand, his right one, held slightly behind his back. Beyond him, in the driveway, I could see an old Ford pickup with one adult in it, on the passenger side, and possibly a child in the middle.

“You Zack Walker?” he said.

“Uh,” I said, wondering how much crazier things could get. “Yeah, that’s me.”

Then Gary Merker raised his right arm, and I saw that there was something gun-like in it, but not a gun exactly.

Okay, now I knew what it was. A stun gun.

Merker squeezed the trigger, and then I had, and I hope you’ll forgive me for this, the most shocking experience of my entire fucking life.

I DROPPED TO THE FLOOR.

I went down without any accompanying theatrics. This was no Broadway death scene where I clutched my chest and staggered across the stage in tiny steps whimpering that the end was near.

I simply dropped. Like a Thunderbirds puppet with the strings cut.

All the little messages my brain had been sending to my legs to keep me standing, to my hand to keep holding the doorknob, to my mouth to keep asking questions I hoped would buy me some time, all were abruptly interrupted.

Fifty thousand volts has a way of doing that to you, I guess. When the charge from Merker’s stun gun hit me, the effect was instantaneous, and I don’t believe there are words to adequately describe the sensation. It was like my entire body was a tooth with a filling, and it had just bitten into the world’s biggest piece of tinfoil.

So I hit the floor, and lay there a moment, and was only vaguely aware of the commotion going on around me. But there was plenty of it. As best as I can recall, Mrs. Gorkin was the first to start shouting.

“Drop it!” she screamed.

“Fuck are you?” Merker shouted back.

Then one of the twins—like it matters which one—appeared out of nowhere and slammed Merker up against a wall. He took another shot with the stun gun—it being one of those newfangled ones, he was able to fire it more than once—and caught the other twin, who screamed and dropped to the floor as quickly as I had, but, and I’m not just saying this to be nasty, with a much more resounding thud. Then Merker fired the gun a third time, but failed to connect with anyone.

There was another shot, but from a real gun. It had come from Mrs. Gorkin, who fired wild, sending a bullet into the wall next to Merker.

“Be frozen!” Mrs. Gorkin shouted.

And then everything went quiet, except for some whimpering from both me and, as it turned out, Ludmilla. We were the two stunned ones.

“Okay, let’s everyone just calm down here a moment,” Merker said, catching his breath. For all he knew, these three lovely ladies were members of my family, and the Walkers were just waiting for someone like Gary Merker to show up so we could toss him about and fire bullets at him.

But he must have also been able to sense that something was amiss here. That he’d actually walked in on something out of the ordinary.

“Who are you?” Mrs. Gorkin said, keeping her gun trained on Merker but moving across the room to check on Ludmilla, who was struggling to her knees. “You okay, sweedie?” she asked.

“Who the fuck are you?” Merker said.

“Listen,” I said, trying to sit up. “Give me a second here and I’ll try to introduce everyone, shall I?” Merker glanced at me, surprised, perhaps, that I would be able to introduce him. I wasn’t certain he recognized me from the stun gun demo he’d done for the cops, and it occurred to me after I’d offered to do introductions that maybe it was a mistake for me to let on that I knew who he was.

The fifty thousand volts might have interfered with my mental processes.

“Gary Merker, this is Mrs. Gorkin, and her daughters Ludmilla and Gavrilla, and they run the Burger Crisp across town, and it seems that if they haven’t come here to kill me, they certainly intend to cause me a great deal of harm. And ladies, this is Gary Merker, who’s trying to unload a bunch of stun guns to the police, and who also seems bent on doing me some sort of harm too.” I took a breath. “I guess you’ll have to fight over me.”

“What do you want with him?” Merker asked Mrs. Gorkin.

“He had file. We come to get it.”

“What fucking file?”

“About health inspection.”

“Health inspection?” Merker said. “What fucking health inspection?” He was twitching his nose about, like it itched. He stuck a pinky finger in one of his nostrils, dug around a bit.

Mrs. Gorkin looked taken aback by Merker’s blatant display of nasal inspection. It was nice to know that even she had standards. “You don’t know about dat?”

“Lady, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” He pulled out his finger, examined what was stuck to the end of it, and wiped it on his trousers.

“Den why are you here?”

“Because this son of a bitch”—he pointed down at me—“is going to help me get back some money that was stole from me.”

“Dat’s too bad, because we’re taking him with us,” Mrs. Gorkin said.

“Why do you need him?” Merker said.

“Because we have to make sure he make no more trouble for us,” Mrs. Gorkin said.

That didn’t sound good. I was wondering whether I should start rooting for Merker, who had his finger back in his nose to get what he missed the first time.

“You shouldn’t shoot my daughter like that,” she said. “What that thing?”

“It’s just a stun gun,” Merker said. “She’ll be fine. Be glad I didn’t use my real gun on her. And Jesus Christ, lady, you nearly shot me with that thing.” He was pointing at Mrs. Gorkin’s weapon. “That some sort of Soviet piece? Looks kinda different.”

Mrs. Gorkin didn’t answer him. She was helping Ludmilla get up.

Gavrilla said, “Maybe we can work something out. What’s this money you got stolen from you?”

Merker thought a moment. “This guy knows someone stole some money from me, and I think if he talks to her for me, I can get it back.”

“There’s nothing I can do for you,” I said.

“Really? According to the news, you know Candace, or Trixie or Miranda or whoever the fuck she is this week, very well. Went all the way up to farm country to try to get her to come back before the cops got her. Am I right?”

I nodded wearily.

“So I need you to talk to her, explain to her the situation, and I think once you’ve done that, she’ll tell you where you can find the money, and you and I can go and get it.”

“Are you crazy?” I said. “She’s in
jail
. If you listened to the news, you know that.”

Merker nodded his understanding. “You’ll have to go visit her. I can’t do it. People might be looking for me. Last place I want to walk into is a prison. They might not let me out. But I bet you can get in to see her.”

“So I’m supposed to just walk in,
into the jail
, and say hey, where’s that money, and she tells me, we go find it, and you walk off with it.”

Merker smiled, delighted that I had grasped the concept. “Yup.”

Gavrilla interrupted. “How much money did she steal from you?”

“A lot,” Merker said. I knew it to be about half a million, but clearly he didn’t want to tip his hand.

“Then here is a deal,” Gavrilla said, glancing out the front door. “We let you take him to get the money, but we get a, what do you call it, a cut.”

“Yeah, right,” Merker said. “That’s a plan.”

Mrs. Gorkin turned her gun on me. “We kill him now then.”

“Whoa, hang on, wait a minute,” Merker said. “Let’s not get crazy.”

“Who’s that man in the truck?” Gavrilla asked.

“That’s Leo,” Merker said.

“Okay, so you leave Leo with us,” Gavrilla said, her mom watching her curiously, “and we let you take this guy to get your money, then you come back with the money, you give us our cut, Leo can go and you give us back this guy.”

“What, Leo’s, like, a hostage?”

“No, no. He just stays with us.” Gavrilla shrugged. “We’ll hang out.”

Ludmilla, on her feet now, said, “I could stay here.”

“There’s somebody else,” Merker said. “In the truck, with Leo. She’d have to stay too.”

“How much money?” Mrs. Gorkin asked.

“Like I said, a lot,” Merker said.

“Don’t give me this sheet, a lot,” she said. “We not letting you walk off with him we don’t know what’s in it for us.”

“The thing is,” Merker said, “I don’t know exactly how much she’s got. I know what she took, but she probably spent that, but she’s probably made some back. I’m betting she’s got it stashed away someplace and I want it back. With fucking interest too.”

“How much she take?”

Merker didn’t even hesitate. “A hundred thousand.” I couldn’t see any advantage, at the moment, in pointing out that he was underreporting potential income. I was not the tax man.

“Whoa,” said Mrs. Gorkin. “Okay then, we want thirty percent.”

“Thirty percent?” said Merker. “You fucking joking? What’s fucking thirty percent of a hundred thousand?”

Trixie hadn’t been kidding when she said Merker wasn’t very good at numbers. I said, “I think that would work out to about thirty thousand dollars.”

Merker shook his head disapprovingly. “That’s just ridiculous. I’ll give you five. Five thousand bucks.”

Mrs. Gorkin pointed her weapon at me again. “You must not need him very much.”

“Okay, okay, ten. Ten thousand. That’s as high as I’m willing to go.” Mrs. Gorkin’s gun was still trained at my head. “Fuck, all right, what about twenty-five thousand? That would work out to, that would be…”

“Twenty-five percent,” I said.

“Okay, how about that?”

Mrs. Gorkin lowered the gun. “Dat okay.”

Gavrilla was smiling proudly. This had been her strategy, after all. “That’s good. That’s great. So, you should call Leo in.”

Merker went to the open door, made a waving motion. I heard a pickup door slam, and then Leo Edgar was walking up the porch steps.

He was leading, by the hand, a child. A little girl, probably no more than five years old. Curly haired. Quiet, walking as if in a daze. Dried tears visible on her cheeks.

Katie Bennet. Trixie’s daughter.

I WAS BACK UP
on my feet now, the residual effects of a punch to the gut and fifty thousand volts to my entire body momentarily forgotten as Katie Bennet stepped into the house. She looked at me with a glimmer of recognition, but no joy.

“Katie,” I said, moving toward her and going down on one knee. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

She half-nodded. I put my hands on her shoulders, and she tensed. I pulled them away. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her, but they were only words. If she was here, with Gary Merker and Leo Edgars, there was no way that things were okay.

I looked up at Merker. “What the hell’s going on?”

“You didn’t think her mother would just
give
us the money, did you?” he asked. “We need a bit of leverage.”

“Are we almost done here, Gary?” Leo asked. “I could really use a bite.”

“Leo, fuck’s sake, I got a situation to deal with here,” Gary said.

Leo, somewhat dimly, took in everyone else present. His eyes bounced off Mrs. Gorkin and then her two daughters. Ludmilla stepped forward, extended a hand. “Hi,” she said, smiling. “I’m Ludmilla. Aren’t you a handsome one?”

Maybe, to someone like Ludmilla, Leo was a prize specimen. Gavrilla insinuated herself between Leo and her sister, extending her hand as well. “I’m Gavrilla, Ludmilla’s younger sister,” she said. By what? Fifteen seconds? Five minutes?

“Hi,” Leo said. “What’s going on, Gary?”

“I’m gonna need you and the kid to stay here with one of the girls while this guy”—he waved his stun gun in my direction—“helps me get that bitch’s money.”

“Why I got to stay here? I need to get something to eat.”

“Fuck, Leo, would you relax? I’ve worked out a deal with the ladies here. You stay here with—which one are you?”

“Ludmilla,” said Ludmilla.

“You stay here with Ludmilla.”

“I could stay,” Gavrilla said. “Why don’t you go back to the restaurant?” she said to her sister.

“I already said I would stay,” Ludmilla said. “Didn’t I, Mom?”

Mrs. Gorkin wasn’t going to tolerate this for a minute. “Gavrilla, you come with me. Ludmilla, you stay, make sure this man stay till
this
man here comes back with the money. Here.” She handed Ludmilla her gun.

“Hey,” said Leo. “What’s she need a gun for?”

“To shoot you,” Gary said offhandedly. “If you try to leave before I get back with the money.”

“Oh,” said Leo.

Ludmilla took the gun and ran the barrel down the side of Leo’s arm. “Don’t worry, honey. It just keeps everyone honest.”

“I guess,” Leo said. “Why do I have to keep the kid?”

Katie had gone over to our couch, sat down. She looked ahead vacantly. I wondered whether she was in some sort of shock.

“Look at her,” Merker said. “How much trouble can she be?”

“Well, okay. How long you going to be?”

“I don’t know. That depends on shithead here,” he said, pointing at me. “You gotta get us into that jail to see what’s-her-face. You know her as Trixie, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So start setting it up.”

“How on earth am I supposed to do that?”

Merker shrugged. “Maybe you should figure something out. If you can’t, we can always have some fun with the kid.”

I swallowed. “Let me think,” I said. Trixie had mentioned the name of her lawyer when she’d been arrested at the Bennet farmhouse. I closed my eyes, tried to think of it. It had something to do with a dog. Something dogs do. Not bite, not sniff, not—

Wag. Wagland. Niles Wagland.

“I have an idea,” I said. “I can call her lawyer. Maybe he can get me in. Let me go check on the computer, I can probably find an office number online—” I stopped myself. “No.”

“What?” asked Merker. “What do you mean, no?”

I tilted my head toward Mrs. Gorkin. “She kind of disabled my computer.”

“What the fuck did you do that for?” Merker asked her.