Stone Rain (38 page)

I waited for Sarah to say something, but then heard another voice.

“How’s the linoleum thing coming along?”

Frieda, the Home! editor.

Then Sarah. “I’m on the fucking phone, Frieda. Zack?”

“I’m here.”

“Where are the kids?”

“Not at home. Angie’s downtown at a class, Paul’s at school, both of them said at breakfast that they weren’t going to be home after school today.”

“Most of the time, they don’t show up when they say they’re going to. Not the other way around.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

“Are you okay?”

“I guess you could say I’m a bit rattled. But otherwise, yeah, I’m okay. But once this is over, if it goes off as planned, there’s a deal to hand me off to another set of bad guys. Or bad gals, actually.”

“What?”

“Let’s not worry about that now. The immediate problem is getting into the safety-deposit box.”

“How are you going to do that without Trixie?”

I paused. There was no easy way to do this. “Gary wants you to do it. He saw your picture on the fridge, when we were at the awards dinner, and he thinks you can pull it off. We have Trixie’s red wig, which is part of her Marilyn Winter persona. That’s the name she used to get the safety-deposit box. You’d have to go in, pretending to be her, with the key, sign in as her. Then you get into the box, transfer all the money into a bag, and bring it back out. Give it to Gary, Katie gets released.”

Sarah said nothing.

“Honey?” I said.

“I’m here.” Another pause. “Tell me about Katie.”

“She’s scared to death, Sarah.”

“Do you think they’ll actually let her go?”

I felt a wave of hopelessness wash over me. “I’m just going along for now, Sarah, hoping this works out the way it’s supposed to.”

Merker said, “Can we get this show on the road? Tell your lady we’re coming to pick her up. Where’s she work?”

“The
Metropolitan
,” I said.

“Where’s that?”

“Sarah,” I said into the phone. “Don’t do it. This has all gone far—”

Gary Merker snatched the phone back. “Hey, lady, you don’t do it, he’s dead, the kid is dead. You in?”

“I’m in,” I heard her say.

Twenty minutes later we picked her up out front of the paper. And now Merker and I were sitting in the Ford pickup, waiting, wondering how it was going for Sarah inside the bank.

As I sat in the truck, I spotted something just barely sticking out from under Merker’s seat. It was a handle for something.

It was the stun gun. The one he’d used on me and one of the twins at our house.

He had his real gun sitting in his lap, his right hand resting on it, but without a finger looped around the trigger.

“She smart, your woman?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “A lot smarter than I am.”

“Yeah, well, that I can believe. How long she been in there now?”

“Only a couple of minutes,” I said. “It just seems like a long time.”

“How long should it take? You go in, you show them the key…”

“Just hang in. Maybe the bank is busy. Maybe it’s taking her a while to get someone to help her.”

Merker fidgeted nervously, scratched his nose, but, mercifully, stuck nothing in it for once. “She has to get the signature right. If she can do that, she’ll be fine.”

“She’s been forging mine for years,” I told him. “She can do this.”

But it was torture, sitting out there in the truck, having no idea of how it was going inside.

“Maybe I should go in,” I said. “Just watch from a distance, see that everything is going okay.”

Merker snorted. “Yeah, that’s a great plan. I sit out here all by myself, let the two of you just run off.” Merker turned on the radio, twisting the dial from station to station, then, deciding there was nothing interesting enough to take his mind off his current situation, turned it off.

“Shit,” he said, looking up the street. A police cruiser with two officers was approaching. “Shit shit shit,” he said. “She fucking told.”

I glanced down again at the handle of the stun gun. “Relax,” I said. “They’re just driving down the street. It’s not like they’re slowing down or anything. If they were—”

The police car slowed down.

“Shit!” Merker said through clenched teeth. He slammed his fist into the steering wheel. “She’s blabbed, I know it.”

“She won’t have done that,” I said. Unless, of course, she was unable to pass herself off as Marilyn Winter and had to confess to what she was up to, what was at stake.

The cruiser came to a stop in front of the bank, and the cop on the passenger side got out. He said something to the driver, held up two fingers, as if to say he’d only be a couple of minutes. Unless, of course, it meant to send for two more police cruisers.

Merker got out his cell phone, punched in some numbers. “Leo?”

“Jesus!” I said. “Nothing’s happened yet.”

Merker waved at me to shut up. “Just checking in, man. How’s it going there?” Merker listened, nodded, looking back and forth between me and the bank across the street. The cop had the door open and was going inside. It looked as though he was reaching into his back pocket.

“He’s going for his wallet,” I said. “He’s just going to the ATM.”

Merker was listening to Leo. “Okay, good, yeah, well, we’re just waiting on this end. What?” Leo was telling him something else. “Well, take some Pepto or something. Fuck, I got bigger things to worry about than your stomach. I’ll call you back if anything goes wrong here.”

He put the phone back into his pocket.

“Where’s the cruiser?” he asked.

“It kept on going. I think he’s doing a loop around the block. If there were a problem, he wouldn’t waste time looking for a parking spot.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He looked in his mirror, checking to see whether the cop car was still visible. “Hang on,” he said, opened the door, and stepped out so he could get a better view down the street.

I leaned swiftly across the seat, reached down and grabbed hold of the stun gun. I was back in position, holding the gun down by my right side, between my body and the door, by the time Merker was getting back in.

“I think he’s doing a slow drive around the block,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, maybe he’s just using the money machine. He better be.”

His eyes were trained on the doors of the bank. “Come on. Come on. I want to see somebody come out of there. Your wife, or that cop, and not together.”

I’d been waiting for my moment, some way to get the drop on Merker, and now it was at hand. Stunning him would only put him out of commission for a few seconds, but it would be long enough to wrest the gun away from him, to get his cell phone, to smash his goddamn fucking head in if I had to. Then I could wave down either the cop as he came out of the bank, with or without Sarah, or the other one doing a loop around the block. Once Merker was subdued, police could surround our house, get Katie out safely.

My mouth was dry, my heart was pounding in my ears.

There was nothing to say to Merker. No need to give him a warning. No need to tell him to freeze or drop his weapon.

I could just stun the bastard.

And so, while he sat with his back to me, focused on the bank doors, I steadied the stun gun in my lap and pointed it at him.

And pulled the trigger.

The gun went
bzzzt
.

Merker did not suddenly go into spasms. He did not crumple into his seat or fall against the steering wheel. He did not scream in pain.

All he did was turn around and ask, “What was that?”

And then he saw the stun gun in my hand. Fear flashed across his face briefly, but then he smiled. “You dumb fuck. Once you’ve fired that thing three times, it has to be all reset.”

He reached across the seat, grabbed the stun gun out of my hand, and hit me across the nose with it. Blood sprayed out onto my shirt.

“You’re really starting to fucking annoy me,” Merker said. “I’ve already got enough on my mind without having to worry about you trying to be some sort of fucking hero.” He shook his head in disgust and shoved the stun gun back under his seat.

I cupped my hand under my nose to catch the blood. There was a steady trickle. I didn’t think he’d broken anything, but it hurt like a son of a bitch.

“Hold on,” Merker said. He was looking at the bank again. “It’s our cop.”

I wiped my bloody hand on my pants, dug a tissue out of my jeans pocket, and held it gently around my nose. I looked across the street to see the police officer come out, alone, walk out between two parked cars, and look down the street to flag down his partner when he reappeared.

“Yes!” Merker said. “You were right! Probably just getting some cash. So they can go buy some doughnuts.”

The cruiser appeared, slowed, and the cop got back in. It drove away, taking away not only the two officers, but my immediate hopes of being able to get us out of this mess.

“Yes,” said Merker gleefully.

My tissue was soaked with blood. I tossed it onto the floor, found one more in my other pocket and held it to my nose. “Hey, don’t make a mess,” Merker said, glancing over.

The moment he looked at me, Sarah came out of the bank, clutching the gym bag. “There,” I said.

Merker whirled around. “Oh my God, I don’t believe it. This is fucking fantastic.”

Sarah checked the traffic and then crossed, coming around the back of the pickup and then up to the passenger door. I opened it and stepped out so she could get back in between us.

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.”

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.