“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.

“She smart, your woman?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “A lot smarter than I am.”

“Yeah, well, that I can believe. How long she been in there now?”

“Only a couple of minutes,” I said. “It just seems like a long time.”

“How long should it take? You go in, you show them the key…”

“Just hang in. Maybe the bank is busy. Maybe it’s taking her a while to get someone to help her.”

Merker fidgeted nervously, scratched his nose, but, mercifully, stuck nothing in it for once. “She has to get the signature right. If she can do that, she’ll be fine.”

“She’s been forging mine for years,” I told him. “She can do this.”

But it was torture, sitting out there in the truck, having no idea of how it was going inside.

“Maybe I should go in,” I said. “Just watch from a distance, see that everything is going okay.”

Merker snorted. “Yeah, that’s a great plan. I sit out here all by myself, let the two of you just run off.” Merker turned on the radio, twisting the dial from station to station, then, deciding there was nothing interesting enough to take his mind off his current situation, turned it off.

“Shit,” he said, looking up the street. A police cruiser with two officers was approaching. “Shit shit shit,” he said. “She fucking told.”

I glanced down again at the handle of the stun gun. “Relax,” I said. “They’re just driving down the street. It’s not like they’re slowing down or anything. If they were-”

The police car slowed down.

“Shit!” Merker said through clenched teeth. He slammed his fist into the steering wheel. “She’s blabbed, I know it.”

“She won’t have done that,” I said. Unless, of course, she was unable to pass herself off as Marilyn Winter and had to confess to what she was up to, what was at stake.

The cruiser came to a stop in front of the bank, and the cop on the passenger side got out. He said something to the driver, held up two fingers, as if to say he’d only be a couple of minutes. Unless, of course, it meant to send for two more police cruisers.

Merker got out his cell phone, punched in some numbers. “Leo?”

“Jesus!” I said. “Nothing’s happened yet.”

Merker waved at me to shut up. “Just checking in, man. How’s it going there?” Merker listened, nodded, looking back and forth between me and the bank across the street. The cop had the door open and was going inside. It looked as though he was reaching into his back pocket.

“He’s going for his wallet,” I said. “He’s just going to the ATM.”

Merker was listening to Leo. “Okay, good, yeah, well, we’re just waiting on this end. What?” Leo was telling him something else. “Well, take some Pepto or something. Fuck, I got bigger things to worry about than your stomach. I’ll call you back if anything goes wrong here.”

He put the phone back into his pocket.

“Where’s the cruiser?” he asked.

“It kept on going. I think he’s doing a loop around the block. If there were a problem, he wouldn’t waste time looking for a parking spot.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He looked in his mirror, checking to see whether the cop car was still visible. “Hang on,” he said, opened the door, and stepped out so he could get a better view down the street.

I leaned swiftly across the seat, reached down and grabbed hold of the stun gun. I was back in position, holding the gun down by my right side, between my body and the door, by the time Merker was getting back in.

“I think he’s doing a slow drive around the block,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, maybe he’s just using the money machine. He better be.”

His eyes were trained on the doors of the bank. “Come on. Come on. I want to see somebody come out of there. Your wife, or that cop, and not together.”

I’d been waiting for my moment, some way to get the drop on Merker, and now it was at hand. Stunning him would only put him out of commission for a few seconds, but it would be long enough to wrest the gun away from him, to get his cell phone, to smash his goddamn fucking head in if I had to. Then I could wave down either the cop as he came out of the bank, with or without Sarah, or the other one doing a loop around the block. Once Merker was subdued, police could surround our house, get Katie out safely.

My mouth was dry, my heart was pounding in my ears.

There was nothing to say to Merker. No need to give him a warning. No need to tell him to freeze or drop his weapon.

I could just stun the bastard.

And so, while he sat with his back to me, focused on the bank doors, I steadied the stun gun in my lap and pointed it at him.

And pulled the trigger.

The gun went bzzzt.