The exit was a couple of hundred yards up, so Merker rode the shoulder until we reached the ramp. “When you get to the light at the end,” I said, “hang a right.”
Merker’s face was full of fury. He wanted his money, and he didn’t appreciate anything, like other drivers and traffic lights, that delayed our arrival at the prison and moving forward with his plan. At the light, we waited behind a white Civic, its right blinker going. I couldn’t make out the driver, sitting up high as I was in the pickup. But it was a timid one. Several times, there was enough of a gap in the traffic for the Civic to go, but the car held back.
“Fuck! Come on!” Merker shouted, gunning the accelerator while he held his other foot on the brake. The moment he let his foot off it, we’d shoot ahead like a rocket.
“Just take it ea—”
I didn’t have a chance to finish. Merker let his foot off the brake, trounced harder on the gas, and rammed the rear right corner of the Civic, shoving it out of our way.
“Christ!” I shouted, throwing my hands forward and bracing myself against the dashboard.
“Stupid bitch!” Merker shouted, even though he couldn’t see into the Civic any better than I could.
The car lurched forward into the street, forcing an oncoming SUV to slam on its brakes. Merker steered the truck around the Civic and headed north, the pickup’s shattered exhaust system sounding like a round of gunfire.
“Honest to God,” Merker said. “Some fucking drivers. How many chances did she have to pull out but she just sat there?”
I craned my neck around, saw a man get out of the Civic, a woman stepping out of the SUV, both of them pointing as we vanished into the distance. What if Merker got us both killed before we even got to the prison? Who’d tell Leo to let Katie go then?
I dropped my hands from the dash and gripped the door handle with my right one. The fingers of my left hand dug into the vinyl upholstery, unable to get a secure grip.
“So how far up here?” Merker asked, his nose twitching.
“Uh, three lights up, turn left. The prison’s up on the right.”
Merker scratched his nose, glanced over, grinned. “You sure are a nervous passenger.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me.”
I glanced back again, expecting to see a police car in pursuit, but no one was coming after us. At least not yet.
“Let me ask you something,” I said.
“Shoot,” Merker said.
“Martin Benson.”
“Who?”
“Benson. The man in the basement of Trixie’s house.”
“Oh yeah, yeah, I remember him.” Like he was an old acquaintance, someone from his school days. Not someone whose throat he’d slit.
“What happened there?”
“Well, after I got word from one of my old buddies that our friend Trixie had been spotted, Leo and I tracked down her house and we find this guy there, snooping around, peeking in the windows. We thought maybe he was her boyfriend or new husband or something, didn’t know at first that he was the guy what wrote about her in the paper. So we zapped him, got into the house. That little basement business Trixie has going, it had all the equipment we needed to conduct an interrogation, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” I said.
“So we tried to find out from him where Trixie was, when she was coming back, where she had my money. That kind of thing.”
“But he didn’t know, did he? All Benson knew was that she was running a little S&M parlor.”
“Yeah, so it seems. He was actually pretty useless.”
“So why’d you kill him?”
Merker shrugged. “I dunno.” He pointed. “This where I turn?”
I was so dumbfounded by his response that it took me a moment to register where we were. “Yeah,” I said. “Turn here.” There were no other motorists blocking our way, so Merker didn’t have to bulldoze any cars out of the way. He even signaled.
“Benson’s death was a warning, wasn’t it?” I asked. “A way to let Trixie know you were serious about getting your money back.”
“Well, yeah. Now that I think about it, that is why I did it. Do you ever find, as you get older, you start forgetting little things?”
“But killing Benson, that backfired, didn’t it? Because you killed him in Trixie’s house, left him there in her mock dungeon, that made Trixie an instant suspect with the police, and she took off. She disappeared. Made it a bit difficult to get the money from her.”
Merker shrugged again. “Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a perfect plan. I generally know what I’m doing, you know, but even Einstein made the odd slip-up.” He brightened. “Shit, there it is. This is it, right?”
The Clayton Correctional Facility. It looked like a community college behind high barbed-wire fencing.
“Yeah,” I said. “This is it.”
36
OF COURSE, some of this I’ve already told you. We’re back to where we started.