“That’s perfect,” I said.
She wouldn’t look at me. Maybe there was no point worrying anymore about whether I might get out of this alive. Even if I did, I was still a dead man. But all that really mattered to me now was that Sarah survive this.
I had no idea how things would play out. Would she get into the safety-deposit box? Would the money Trixie said was there actually be there? Would something tip off the bank officials that she was not who she claimed to be? Would they call the police? Would Merker kill me when they showed up, and call Leo to tell him to do the same to Trixie’s daughter?
After Sarah walked into SunCap Federal, would I ever see her again?
As if reading my mind, Sarah reached out and touched my arm and looked at me.
“I can do this,” she said. “I don’t want anything to happen to Katie.” She’d never met the girl, but she didn’t need to set eyes on a five-year-old girl to be concerned for her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for everything.”
She looked as though she wanted to say something, but I knew she wasn’t ready to forgive me for the mess I’d gotten us both into, nor did she feel this was the time to tell me what a complete and total asshole I was.
I could only hope there’d be a chance later.
“Wish me luck,” she said.
And I watched her, in her red wig, gym bag in hand, stride across the street, open the door of SunCap Federal, and disappear inside.
It had taken less time to lay it all out for Sarah than I might have expected. At Annette’s place, after Merker had asked Sarah about her breasts, he handed the phone back to me.
“Zack, what’s going on?” Sarah said.
I had to concentrate a moment and employ what journalistic skills I had to boil everything down to point form. “The guys who’ve been after Trixie found her sister and brother-in-law up in Kelton. They killed them. They took Trixie’s daughter Katie. They want the money Trixie took from them, or they’re going to kill Katie. I went to see Trixie in prison. She has a plan for how we can get into her safety-deposit box, get the money, give it to these guys. One of them is holding Katie at our house. If anything goes wrong, he gets the call and kills her.”
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.