Stone Rain (41 page)

Run like hell before Merker could grasp what had happened and tried to grab me, or worse, shoot me.

I opened my eyes. My air bag, and the one that had exploded out of the steering wheel, had already deflated. I started twisting around the belt, my heart pounding, but fingers fumbling for the buckle.

But the sense of urgency seemed to have passed.

Merker was not moving.

His head was tilted forward, and there was blood dripping from his face onto his shirt and pants.

His eyes were still open, but they seemed lifeless.

Then I noticed something silver and pink and rubbery under his nose.

It was the yellow wooden pencil. The force of the airbag had driven it clear up Gary Merker’s right nostril.

The only thing left sticking out was the eraser. He had six inches of pencil in his brain.

“GARY?” SAID LEO,
who’d been tossed to the floor of the back seat and was getting himself reoriented.

I had my hands on the buckle, was pulling the belt through it. Once I had enough slack, I pulled it over my head.

“Gary, you okay?” Leo leaned forward between the seats and tapped Merker on the shoulder. Leo saw the blood, then saw the end of the pencil sticking out of his nose.

“Gary!” he shouted. He burst into tears. “Gary?”

I opened the door and stumbled out of the car. I could hear sirens coming from different directions. The elderly woman in the Honda had gotten out too, and was standing next to her car, shouting back at us, “Where’d you get your license, asshole?”

I took three steps over to the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and collapsed onto the perfectly cut yard of a two-story brick house.

Leo, gun in hand, got out of the back seat and opened the front driver’s door. His beltless pants were slipping down and he tugged them up with his free hand. “Come on, Gary! Wake up! Come on! Wake up.”

Gary Merker was not waking up. Not with a lead pencil through his head.

A police car barreled up the street from the direction we’d come, and a second one was screeching to a halt in front of the Civic. A cop jumped out of each, weapon drawn.

There were tears running down Leo’s cheeks. “Come on, Gary, jeez, come on.” He saw the cop approaching from the rear vehicle, and waved the gun at him, not intending to use it menacingly, I thought, but gesturing the cop to come up, to give them some help. “He’s hurt!” But the cop wasn’t reading it that way.

He screamed, “Put the gun down!”

But Leo was too busy crying and yelling to get the message. “He’s hurt, man, you gotta help him.”

“They ran into my car!” the old lady shouted, pointing, seemingly oblivious to the guns that were being waved about.

“Ma’am, get down!” the officer from the second car shouted.

“On purpose!” she said. “They ran right into me!”

“Ma’am, get down!”

The old lady stopped shouting, but she did not get down. She turned and started walking over to where I was. “Were you in that car?” she asked me. “They ran right into me!”

But instead of talking to her, I was back on my feet, shouting at Leo. “Leo! Do what he says! Put the gun down!”

Leo, however, overcome with despair, was still waving the weapon around. Everyone was shouting. The cops were shouting at Leo to drop the gun, I was shouting at Leo to drop the gun, and Leo was shouting that his friend needed help.

From my vantage point on the lawn, it seemed that all the clichés were true. It’s like it was happening in slow motion. Like a dream.

The cop shouted again for him to put the gun down. The other cop was braced against the open door of his cruiser, his weapon bearing down on Leo.

“Can’t you see he needs help?” Leo pleaded to the first cop, and waved the gun in the officer’s direction. Not pointing. It was more like he was making gestures of hopelessness, and forgot that he had this thing in his right hand that could kill people.

If I’d been the cop, I probably would have done what he did.

He fired. Leo went down.

Just like that.

E
ven before the massacre at the Burger Crisp—Merker had walked directly behind the counter, fired two shots into Mrs. Gorkin and one each into Ludmilla and Gavrilla—the police were hunting for us. Sarah, Katie in tow, had gone to a house on the street behind ours and called 911. She’d directed them to our house on Crandall, and when she heard the sirens approaching, had left Katie with the neighbor and run back. But by then, we were all gone. Sarah gave them a description of Trixie’s car and the hunt was on.

I spent the rest of that day explaining things to the police. Detective Flint from Oakwood was brought in so he could hear it too.

I told them they’d find the Bennets, dead, in their barn in Kelton.

I told them about Merker’s plan, to use Katie to extort money from Trixie. About our trip to the prison. How Sarah had been coerced into going into the bank to empty the contents of the safety-deposit box.

I told them Merker had also told me, in the course of our conversations, that he’d killed Martin Benson. That he and Leo, while hunting for Trixie, had encountered Benson looking for more evidence of Trixie’s operation. That Merker had killed Benson in his bid to get information out of him.

And then I did something I suppose I didn’t have to do. I’m not even sure that I should have done it. But it seemed right.

I mentioned, more or less in passing, that Merker had alluded, at one point, to the deaths of the three other bikers at the Kickstart in Canborough.

How he’d taken care of them too.

The police wondered whether he had told me why. I said no. Best to play dumb. But when they got in touch with Detective Cherry in Canborough, he’d tell him his theory that maybe Merker had worked out some sort of deal with the opposition, that he’d already been the prime suspect in the death of his former second-in-command.

The thing was, they were already able to tie half a dozen murders to Merker. Why not throw in another three for good measure?

Other stuff happened later.

Trixie was released from prison. They’d been holding her as the chief suspect in the Benson murder. There wasn’t much point in that anymore.

She let me know, quietly, that the gun she’d pointed at me in the basement of her house, the same one Eldon Swain had given her and which had the potential to connect her to the killings in Canborough, had been dropped into a river from a highway overpass on her way up to Kelton. She’d been scared to hang on to it.

Brian Sandler, the health department inspector that the Gorkins dumped into the fryer, didn’t die. But his recovery will be long and difficult. He was soon well enough to communicate everything he knew about corruption in the health department. About his boss, and others, who’d turned a blind eye, either for money or out of fear, to a number of establishments’ health violations, as well as other illegal activities that were being conducted on the premises.

Sarah wrote the story for the
Metropolitan
. I put her onto Sandler and turned over to her everything I had, all my notes, the audio file that Lawrence Jones found in his e-mail.

I thought if it was her story, it would get her out of Home! and back into the newsroom. After all, I was already on suspension. Better to rescue a career that still had a chance to be redeemed.

It worked. And Sarah’s version of the story was better than what I could have done.

Managing editor Bertrand Magnuson did call me, however. He’d had some sort of change of heart, given everything Sarah and I had been through. He said he was willing to rescind the suspension and let me write about tracking down Trixie Snelling, her subsequent exoneration, the Gary Merker affair, the biker massacre in Canborough—the whole nine yards, as they say. A first-person exclusive.

I said Dick Colby could do a good job with it. I’m too close this time, I said. Let someone with a bit of distance write about it. The thing was, I didn’t see how I could write a story that I wasn’t prepared to tell in full. I didn’t want my byline on a story I couldn’t write honestly.

I knew who’d really killed those three bikers that night at the Kickstart. And I wasn’t feeling fully committed to the public’s right to know.

What business did I have being a reporter for the
Metropolitan
with that kind of attitude?

“Well,” said Magnuson over the phone, “if you change your mind and want to come back to work for us, let me know.”

I told him I would think about it.

To the best of my knowledge, Frieda never did get anyone to write a series on linoleum. I never saw it in Home!

So many stories that go untold.

T
hings could be better on the home front.

I had failed to keep my promise—make that promises—to Sarah that I’d stop getting mixed up in these kinds of messes. It’s a knack I seem to have developed of late, and I’d like very much to lose it. Sometimes, you make one mistake, and it’s like knocking over that first domino. I’d already allowed a couple of dozen to tip over, and had no idea how far down the row I was.

Lawrence Jones phoned. “You should have called me,” he said.

“Believe me, if it had been possible, I would have,” I said.

“How’s it going?”

“Sarah mentioned the other night that maybe we should…that maybe we should try some time apart.”

“Jeez,” Lawrence said. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. I mean, I think she loves me. But look at what I’ve done, Lawrence. Look at the things I’ve fallen into. I’m a menace to my loved ones. Maybe I’ll just go back to writing science fiction novels. Keep to myself. Lock myself in a room someplace, where I’m not going to get into trouble, drag my family in with me.”

“I’d offer to let you bunk in with me for a while, but I think you’d drive me out of my mind.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I guess we’ll see how it plays out,” I said.

“Good luck, man,” Lawrence said.

A
couple of weeks after the dust all settled, and we had our own car back, and Sarah had returned to work every day and I was home, still trying to figure out what to do, Trixie—she’d actually gone back, legally, to Miranda Chicoine but I still have a hard time thinking of her by that name—dropped by with Katie.

It was after Sarah had gotten home from work, and we both got to the front door at the same time.

When Sarah saw who it was, she began to retreat into the house. “I’ll let you two talk,” she said.

But I took Sarah’s hand and pulled her, gently, to my side, preventing her escape.

“We just came by to say goodbye,” Trixie said.

“Where you off to?” I asked.

“Out west,” Trixie said. “Seattle, maybe San Francisco. I’m looking at a few things.”

Sarah and I stepped out onto the porch. Katie slipped away from her mother and ran her fingers along the posts in the railing.

“How’s she doing?” Sarah asked.

Trixie smiled sadly. “She’s been through a lot. She sleeps with me. She’s afraid to let me out of her sight. It’s going to take a long time for her to ever feel secure again. Everything I do now is going to be for her. I’m starting over, with Katie. I’m selling the house in Oakwood. And there’s Claire and Don’s estate to settle.” Her eyes were moist. “My lawyer, Niles, is trying to get my three hundred thousand back. The police still have it, they retrieved it from the car after the accident, but they’re holding on to it as evidence. Niles says eventually we’ll be able to get it back. They can’t prove that I’m not entitled to it. But you know what? Even if we don’t, we have plenty to start over with, get another house somewhere, close to a good school. I want to always be there for her, so I might try to get some sort of job that allows me to work from home.” She smiled again. “But something different this time. That other job, that’s over.”

Trixie’s GF300 car was parked at the curb. Sarah and I walked with her to the end of the driveway. Katie wandered in dizzying circles in the front yard, arms extended, like she was an airplane.

Trixie looked at Katie. Her lip trembled slightly, and then she looked at us.

“I came here to thank both of you. For saving Katie. For saving my daughter’s life.” She hugged Sarah, put her arms around her and held her close, and then hugged me, whispering into my ear, “Thank you for explaining things to the police. About what happened in Canborough.”

“Sure,” I said as she pulled away.

Then Trixie turned back to Sarah. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve brought into your life.”

Sarah started to say something, but Trixie, tipping her head toward me, continued, “I know you want to kill him.”

Sarah made no protests.

“If he were my husband, I’d probably want to kill him too. He’s very possibly one of the biggest pains in the ass I have ever known. And I envy you every day that you’ve got him.”

Sarah swallowed.

“If this helps,” Trixie said, looking right into Sarah’s eyes, “I’m going to make you a promise.” Trixie took a breath. “You’re never going to see me again.”

Neither Sarah nor I said anything. Trixie watched Katie playing in the yard, wiped a tear that was just starting to make its way down her cheek. “She’s my little girl. I hope, if I do right by her now, she can forgive me for all the mistakes I’ve made.” She clapped her hands together. “Katie! Let’s go!”

Trixie led her daughter to her car, buckled her into the safety seat in the back.

“Goodbye, Miranda,” I said as she got into the car.

As we watched the car disappear down Crandall, Sarah said to me, “She killed those three bikers, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Sarah thought about that for a moment, then said, “I would have too.”

As the car rounded the corner at the end of the street, Sarah turned to me and said, so softly I almost didn’t hear her, “I think there’s a bottle of Beringer chilling in the fridge. I could pour a couple glasses.”

It felt to me like the entire world was holding its breath.

“That would be nice,” I said. I tried to smile. “Are you going to put something in mine that’ll kill me?”