“It was written right on the box.”
Leo didn’t have anything to say about that.
“Here?” Merker asked. We had come to the stop sign. I nodded and he turned right. The car surged forward again.
“At the light, a left on Welk,” I said. “It’s up five or six blocks on the right. Burger Crisp.”
“Gotcha.”
“You going to let them keep twenty-five thousand dollars?” I asked.
Merker smiled. “Oh, I’m going to give them something. I’m definitely going to give them something.”
“Maybe when we get there I could use the washroom,” Leo said.
“You’ll be staying in the car, watching this asshole,” Merker said. “We can stop somewhere else, after.”
“Okay,” Leo said, but he sounded pretty uncertain.
And that was pretty much how I felt too. A few minutes earlier, I’d felt good that Sarah and Katie had managed to get away. But now, I was, literally and figuratively, feeling my neck. I was, once again, looking for an opportunity, a way out. It was something that I had shown myself, so far, to not be very good at.
My cell went off. This, I knew, would be Sarah. She’d have gotten Katie and herself someplace safe, and would want to know where I was.
“Give me that,” Merker said, and I reached into my pocket and handed him my still-ringing phone. Merker punched his power window button, tossed the phone out the window.
Merker pointed ahead and to the right. “That it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”
Merker pulled into the Burger Crisp lot. There were three other cars there, and, best as I could tell, business was light. It was midafternoon, the lunch crowd had thinned.
“Check it out,” Merker said.
Parked down around the side of the restaurant was his Ford pickup. “We gonna get the truck back?” Leo asked.
“Fuck the truck,” Merker said. “We’re keeping this.” He had his left hand on the door handle, the gun in his right. To Leo, he said, “Keep an eye on him. Hang on to the belt. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
Leo grabbed the belt and pulled it taut as Merker got out of the car, leaving it running, and strode toward the Burger Crisp, the gun down at his side and slightly to the back.
“I can’t breathe,” I said, the belt cutting into my neck.
“Okay,” said Leo, loosening it only slightly. “I just don’t want you doing anything dumb. Gary’ll be really mad at me.”
“Leo, listen to me,” I said. “This is your chance. Let me go, and just walk away. The police are going to be after you guys, but especially Gary. He’s the one killed Martin Benson, right? He’s the one cut his throat.”
“Gary’s better at those kinds of things.”
Gary Merker opened the door of Burger Crisp and disappeared inside.
“Exactly,” I said. “You’re not like him, are you? He’s the violent one. The police will understand that, especially if you go to them, tell them what he’s done.”
“He’s my friend. He looks after me. I was riding with him one time, on his Harley, and he turned too sharp and I fell off and I hit my head and he’s been real good to me ever since then because ever since then things have been a bit cloudy, you know?”
“He’s a friend that’s getting you into a lot of trouble. You don’t kill people, do you, Leo? I’ll bet, when you and he found Katie, I’ll bet you didn’t kill those people who were looking after her.”
“I waited outside the barn when Gary shot them. I had Katie with me. I put my hands over her ears.”
“There you go. That was good of you. You see? You’re not like Gary. You’re actually a pretty gentle guy, am I right?”
“I like animals,” Leo said, still holding on to the belt but not quite as tightly. “I like all kinds of animals, but probably dogs the most. You like dogs?”
“Oh sure,” I said. “Who doesn’t like dogs?” To be honest, I had some bad, fairly recent memories concerning dogs, but I didn’t see much sense in getting into that. “Dogs are great. And I think I know something else about you, Leo. You wouldn’t even join in, would you, when Gary and others, back at the Kickstart years ago, were raping Candace. The woman I know as Trixie.”
“That was mean,” Leo said. “She’s actually pretty nice, you know?”
“I know. And her daughter, she’s nice too, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. So where did she go, exactly?”
“She went off with my wife. She’s going to be fine.”
“That’s good.”
I felt I didn’t have much more time. “Leo, you have to let me go. It’s the right thing to do. And you should go too. Just get out of the car and get out of here.”
“Gary’d be really pissed if I did that. He’d say-”
And then we heard the shots from inside the Burger Crisp. Five, it sounded like, in quick succession.
There were screams inside the restaurant, people throwing themselves to the floor, it looked like, through the window.
And then the door burst open and Gary came running out, gun in one hand, gym bag in the other.
Looking like a crazy person.
He set the bag on the roof, opened the door, grabbed the bag and tossed it into the back seat with Leo, got in and closed the door.
“Whoa!” he shouted, nose twitching. “Holy shit!”
I didn’t want to ask what had happened.
In the back, Leo said, “There any chance I still might be able to use the washroom?”
41
MERKER SLAMMED THE CONSOLE SHIFTER into drive and sped out of the Burger Crisp parking lot without considering Leo’s request for a pit stop. As the car fishtailed onto the street, I tried to keep my upper body from whipping about too severely to avoid being choked by the belt around my neck. I had one hand gripped onto the door armrest, my nails digging into the plastic, the other onto the edge of the leather bucket seat. It helped a bit that once Merker got back into the car, Leo released his grip on the belt, so I had a bit of slack.
I turned my head enough to see a few people running out of the Burger Crisp, screaming. I did not see, however, any of the Gorkin ladies among those fleeing.
“Did you see Ludmilla?” Leo asked.
“I saw them all,” Merker said, weaving from one lane to another, trying to put a lot of distance between us and the Burger Crisp as quickly as possible.
“I know this is crazy, after being sick and all,” Leo said, “but all of a sudden I feel a little bit hungry.”
“Look in the bag,” Merker said. “That’ll take your mind off food.”
I heard the zipper of the gym bag, then Leo say, “Holy shit. There’s lots and lots of money in here! Like, even more than I thought!”
“Pretty good, huh?” Merker’s nose was twitching.
My last-ditch plan, to turn Leo Edgars against Gary Merker and persuade Leo to let me go, had failed. I had pretty much run out of ideas.
But there was something in the back of my mind. Something Trixie had mentioned. When we’d first gotten together and she’d told me about her problems with a reporter from the
Somewhere behind us, I thought I heard sirens.
“Hey, Gary, you hear that?” Leo said.
“Yeah, I hear it. Nobody’s going to catch us, buddy. We got ourselves a kick-ass getaway car here today.”
