“What do you mean, not feeling well?”
Ludmilla shrugged. “He is throwing up, and he is having trouble at the other end too, I think. I think it is maybe something he ate. That burger in the fridge. I think maybe it was bad.” She looked at me accusingly. “You shouldn’t keep bad food in your fridge.”
I held back from telling where it had come from, that we’d been holding on to it in the hopes of turning it over to the health department.
Merker went to the bottom of the stairs, set down the gym bag, his keys resting on top. He shouted up the stairwell, “Leo!”
Edgars shouted back from behind the closed bathroom door. “Gary?”
“Leo, get down here!”
“I can’t! I’m sick! I think I’m gonna die!”
Merker rolled his eyes. “Honest to God,” he said, more for our benefit than Leo’s.
Ludmilla said, “Did you get the money?”
“Yeah,” said Merker, annoyed. “We got the money.”
“You give me our share, and I’ll go.”
“Already taken care of,” Merker said.
Ludmilla’s eyebrows went up again. “What do you mean, taken care of?”
“On the way back,” he said. “Didn’t you get the call?”
“What call?”
“From your mother. She didn’t call?”
“No, she has not called.”
“That’s funny. Well, she was pretty busy. Maybe she’s still counting it.”
“You gave her the money? You were supposed to bring our share here, then I call her and then we are done.”
“Fuck, sorry about that,” Merker said. “I got confused. But anyway, you can go. Take off. We’re all done. I dropped by, gave your mom the twenty-five grand. Oh yeah, actually, she told me to tell you to come on back. I don’t think she was going to call you anyway.”
Even if English had never been Ludmilla’s first language, she knew bullshit when she heard it.
“Leo!” Merker shouted again. “We gotta get out of here!”
Sarah had knelt down next to Katie. “Come on, honey, talk to me. Are you okay? Has anybody hurt you?” Katie shook her head no. “Would you like a snack or something? A drink of water?”
Leo shouted back, “I can’t get up yet! I feel terrible! Can you come up here for a second?”
Merker got a look on his face like he’d just bitten into a lemon. This was not his idea of a good time, having to go up and check on a friend suffering from a catastrophic intestinal disorder.
“Just finish up and get down here as quick as you can!” Merker said. “We got a few things to deal with.”
“I’m going to call my mother,” Ludmilla told Merker. “I will just check that she got the money.”
“Sure,” said Merker, his eyes dancing. “That’s what I’d do too, I was you. But your mom said she was having phone trouble, which is why she told me to tell you that everything was totally okay and—”
“Gary!” Leo sounded like he was going to die.
“Ah, fuck,” Merker said and bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time, to see what was wrong with his friend.
And suddenly, for the first time in hours, Gary Merker was not watching over us. He was out of the room. Sarah and I exchanged glances. Katie’s eyes went back and forth between us. Even she seemed to sense that there was an opportunity here, and we might be the ones to help her take advantage of it.
Ludmilla, however, was looking at the gym bag. She must have had a pretty good idea what it contained.
Upstairs, Merker shouted through the bathroom door, “Pull up your pants, we’re getting out of here!”
“Could you come in here?” Leo said. “I think I’m done, but I feel kind of weak.”
“Jesus, no,” said Merker. “Clean yourself up and come on.”
Ludmilla advanced on the gym bag, picked up the keys on top, and pulled back the zipper. Just a couple of inches, but enough to see the mountain of cash. She was turned away from me, so it wasn’t possible to see her expression, but I could imagine it.
But the sight of all that cash wasn’t enough of a shock that she forgot how to react. She kept the keys to Merker’s truck in one hand and grabbed hold of the bag’s straps with the other. She was out the front door without another word.
I made no move to stop her. This was my opportunity to escape not only Merker, but the Gorkins as well.
To Sarah, I said, quietly but with great urgency, “Go.”
She grabbed Katie by the hand. The girl seemed suddenly alive, swinging her legs off the couch and planting them on the floor.
“Just run,” I whispered. “Anywhere.”
Upstairs, Merker said through the bathroom door, “Smells like you died in there. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs.”
“Come,” Sarah said to me, her eyes full of pleading, already heading with Katie to the kitchen so she could sneak out the back door.
“Right behind you,” I said.