42
“GARY?” SAID LEO, who’d been tossed to the floor of the back seat and was getting himself reoriented.
I had my hands on the buckle, was pulling the belt through it. Once I had enough slack, I pulled it over my head.
“Gary, you okay?” Leo leaned forward between the seats and tapped Merker on the shoulder. Leo saw the blood, then saw the end of the pencil sticking out of his nose.
“Gary!” he shouted. He burst into tears. “Gary?”
I opened the door and stumbled out of the car. I could hear sirens coming from different directions. The elderly woman in the Honda had gotten out too, and was standing next to her car, shouting back at us, “Where’d you get your license, asshole?”
I took three steps over to the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and collapsed onto the perfectly cut yard of a two- story brick house.
Leo, gun in hand, got out of the back seat and opened the front driver’s door. His beltless pants were slipping down and he tugged them up with his free hand. “Come on, Gary! Wake up! Come on! Wake up.”
Gary Merker was not waking up. Not with a lead pencil through his head.
A police car barreled up the street from the direction we’d come, and a second one was screeching to a halt in front of the Civic. A cop jumped out of each, weapon drawn.
There were tears running down Leo’s cheeks. “Come on, Gary, jeez, come on.” He saw the cop approaching from the rear vehicle, and waved the gun at him, not intending to use it menacingly, I thought, but gesturing the cop to come up, to give them some help. “He’s hurt!” But the cop wasn’t reading it that way.
He screamed, “Put the gun down!”
But Leo was too busy crying and yelling to get the message. “He’s hurt, man, you gotta help him.”
“They ran into my car!” the old lady shouted, pointing, seemingly oblivious to the guns that were being waved about.
“Ma’am, get down!” the officer from the second car shouted.
“On purpose!” she said. “They ran right into me!”
“Ma’am, get down!”
The old lady stopped shouting, but she did not get down. She turned and started walking over to where I was. “Were you in that car?” she asked me. “They ran right into me!”
But instead of talking to her, I was back on my feet, shouting at Leo. “Leo! Do what he says! Put the gun down!”
Leo, however, overcome with despair, was still waving the weapon around. Everyone was shouting. The cops were shouting at Leo to drop the gun, I was shouting at Leo to drop the gun, and Leo was shouting that his friend needed help.
From my vantage point on the lawn, it seemed that all the cliches were true. It’s like it was happening in slow motion. Like a dream.
The cop shouted again for him to put the gun down. The other cop was braced against the open door of his cruiser, his weapon bearing down on Leo.
“Can’t you see he needs help?” Leo pleaded to the first cop, and waved the gun in the officer’s direction. Not pointing. It was more like he was making gestures of hopelessness, and forgot that he had this thing in his right hand that could kill people.
If I’d been the cop, I probably would have done what he did.
He fired. Leo went down.
Just like that.
Even before the massacre at the Burger Crisp-Merker had walked directly behind the counter, fired two shots into Mrs. Gorkin and one each into Ludmilla and Gavrilla-the police were hunting for us. Sarah, Katie in tow, had gone to a house on the street behind ours and called 911. She’d directed them to our house on Crandall, and when she heard the sirens approaching, had left Katie with the neighbor and run back. But by then, we were all gone. Sarah gave them a description of Trixie’s car and the hunt was on.
I spent the rest of that day explaining things to the police. Detective Flint from Oakwood was brought in so he could hear it too.
I told them they’d find the Bennets, dead, in their barn in Kelton.
I told them about Merker’s plan, to use Katie to extort money from Trixie. About our trip to the prison. How Sarah had been coerced into going into the bank to empty the contents of the safety-deposit box.
I told them Merker had also told me, in the course of our conversations, that he’d killed Martin Benson. That he and Leo, while hunting for Trixie, had encountered Benson looking for more evidence of Trixie’s operation. That Merker had killed Benson in his bid to get information out of him.
And then I did something I suppose I didn’t have to do. I’m not even sure that I should have done it. But it seemed right.
I mentioned, more or less in passing, that Merker had alluded, at one point, to the deaths of the three other bikers at the Kickstart in Canborough.
How he’d taken care of them too.
The police wondered whether he had told me why. I said no. Best to play dumb. But when they got in touch with Detective Cherry in Canborough, he’d tell him his theory that maybe Merker had worked out some sort of deal with the opposition, that he’d already been the prime suspect in the death of his former second-in-command.
The thing was, they were already able to tie half a dozen murders to Merker. Why not throw in another three for good measure?
Other stuff happened later.
Trixie was released from prison. They’d been holding her as the chief suspect in the Benson murder. There wasn’t much point in that anymore.
She let me know, quietly, that the gun she’d pointed at me in the basement of her house, the same one Eldon Swain had given her and which had the potential to connect her to the killings in Canborough, had been dropped into a river from a highway overpass on her way up to Kelton. She’d been scared to hang on to it.
Brian Sandler, the health department inspector that the Gorkins dumped into the fryer, didn’t die. But his recovery will be long and difficult. He was soon well enough to communicate everything he knew about corruption in the health department. About his boss, and others, who’d turned a blind eye, either for money or out of fear, to a number of establishments’ health violations, as well as other illegal activities that were being conducted on the premises.
Sarah wrote the story for the
I thought if it was her story, it would get her out of Home! and back into the newsroom. After all, I was already on suspension. Better to rescue a career that still had a chance to be redeemed.
It worked. And Sarah’s version of the story was better than what I could have done.
Managing editor Bertrand Magnuson did call me, however. He’d had some sort of change of heart, given everything Sarah and I had been through. He said he was willing to rescind the suspension and let me write about tracking down Trixie Snelling, her subsequent exoneration, the Gary Merker affair, the biker massacre in Canborough-the whole nine yards, as they say. A first-person exclusive.
I said Dick Colby could do a good job with it. I’m too close this time, I said. Let someone with a bit of distance write about it. The thing was, I didn’t see how I could write a story that I wasn’t prepared to tell in full. I didn’t want my byline on a story I couldn’t write honestly.
I knew who’d really killed those three bikers that night at the Kickstart. And I wasn’t feeling fully committed to the public’s right to know.
What business did I have being a reporter for the
