“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.
Perhaps, if he really did plan to give the woman and her twins the money, which I seriously doubted, he was going to present it to Ludmilla at the house, who could then call her mother to report that everything had gone as planned. Then, presumably, Mom would drive back over and pick up her daughter, and me.
I did not want that to happen.
I suspected a fate similar to Brian Sandler’s—a deep-fry experience—awaited me. It’s hard to tell the authorities about a health department payoff scam, and other illegal business operating out of the back of a restaurant, when your lips have been melted off.
I had to ride this out, hope for something to go wrong for Merker, the smallest distraction, anything.
I had to get Katie out of this.
I had to get Sarah out of this.
If I could manage those two things, I’d start looking for a way to get myself out too.
Merker wheeled the truck around a corner, paying no attention to the stop sign. If only there’d been a cop in the vicinity. If he wasn’t careful, Merker would finally have his money, be set for life—or at least a good chunk of it—only to lose it all over a stupid traffic violation.
We were back on our street, Crandall. Merker slowed, not familiar enough with the street to know our house instantly. “Just up here,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” he said, and pulled in behind Trixie’s GF300, blocking it. “Okay, kids, we’re home. Everybody out.”
He was out first, his truck keys looped onto a finger of his left hand, which was carrying the bag of cash, the gun in his right. He came swiftly around to the other side, watched me and Sarah warily as we stepped down out of the Ford.
He ushered us along in front of him, up the front porch steps. Before we’d reached the front door, he shouted, “Leo! Hey, Leo!”
The door opened, but instead of being greeted by Merker’s partner, it was Ludmilla letting us in. Her eyebrows went up a notch when she saw Sarah, evidently surprised that there was a new guest coming to the party.
Katie was lying down on the couch, but not sleeping. As soon as Sarah saw her, she went to her. “Hey, you must be Katie. I’m Sarah.”
Katie looked at her with tired eyes and said nothing. She’d met too many bad people in the last twenty-four hours to trust anyone new right off the bat.
“I’m Zack’s wife,” she said, her voice full of reassurance. “How are you holding up? Do you need something to eat? Have they been feeding you?”
There was no sign of Merker’s associate.
“Where the hell is Leo?” he asked Ludmilla.
“Upstairs,” she said. “In the bathroom. He is not feeling well.”