Merker did not suddenly go into spasms. He did not crumple into his seat or fall against the steering wheel. He did not scream in pain.

All he did was turn around and ask, “What was that?”

And then he saw the stun gun in my hand. Fear flashed across his face briefly, but then he smiled. “You dumb fuck. Once you’ve fired that thing three times, it has to be all reset.”

He reached across the seat, grabbed the stun gun out of my hand, and hit me across the nose with it. Blood sprayed out onto my shirt.

“You’re really starting to fucking annoy me,” Merker said. “I’ve already got enough on my mind without having to worry about you trying to be some sort of fucking hero.” He shook his head in disgust and shoved the stun gun back under his seat.

I cupped my hand under my nose to catch the blood. There was a steady trickle. I didn’t think he’d broken anything, but it hurt like a son of a bitch.

“Hold on,” Merker said. He was looking at the bank again. “It’s our cop.”

I wiped my bloody hand on my pants, dug a tissue out of my jeans pocket, and held it gently around my nose. I looked across the street to see the police officer come out, alone, walk out between two parked cars, and look down the street to flag down his partner when he reappeared.

“Yes!” Merker said. “You were right! Probably just getting some cash. So they can go buy some doughnuts.”

The cruiser appeared, slowed, and the cop got back in. It drove away, taking away not only the two officers, but my immediate hopes of being able to get us out of this mess.

“Yes,” said Merker gleefully.

My tissue was soaked with blood. I tossed it onto the floor, found one more in my other pocket and held it to my nose. “Hey, don’t make a mess,” Merker said, glancing over.

The moment he looked at me, Sarah came out of the bank, clutching the gym bag. “There,” I said.

Merker whirled around. “Oh my God, I don’t believe it. This is fucking fantastic.”

Sarah checked the traffic and then crossed, coming around the back of the pickup and then up to the passenger door. I opened it and stepped out so she could get back in between us.

She saw the blood on my pants and shirt immediately. “Jesus, Zack, what happened?”

“Just get in,” I said, and she climbed up into the truck with the bag and slid over, but she kept looking at me. I was a bit of a mess.

She turned on Merker. “What did you do to him?”

“Oh, he’s fine,” Merker said, grabbing the bag out of Sarah’s hands. He unzipped it, opened it wide. “Motherfucker,” he said.

I almost said it myself. The bag was jammed with cash, made into bundles with rubber bands. Most of it, it appeared, in tens and twenties.

“Is it all here?” he asked Sarah accusingly.

“No, I left half of it in the safety-deposit box,” Sarah snapped. “Of course it’s all there.”

“Okay, okay,” Merker said. “Sheesh.” He took out one packet of cash and handed it to Sarah. “For your trouble.”

“No thank you,” she said.

He tossed it back into the bag. “Okay, but don’t forget I offered. This is amazing. Did you have any trouble? They didn’t ask for more ID? They were okay with the signature?”

“I was in and out,” Sarah said. She went to touch my nose, but held her hand an inch away when I recoiled. “Are you okay? What did he do to you? What happened?”

“I had a plan,” I said. “It didn’t work.”

39

MERKER WAS EBULLIENT. So maybe he didn’t have half a million dollars in the bag. Maybe it was only three hundred thousand. Of course, he’d have to count it to be sure, but the thought that he had this much of his money back had planted an enormous grin on his face.

He was rocking back and forth behind the wheel, as though listening to the beat of a rock song, but the radio was off.

“The living’s gonna be easy from here on,” he said. “I think me and Leo’ll go south. Get a place in Florida or something. Or maybe we’ll go to Europe, one of those countries over there.”

“South of France is nice,” I said, not really knowing why.

Merker made a farting noise with his lips. “Fuck no, I hate the French. I’m gonna stick with Europe.”

“Definitely not foreign editor material,” I said to Sarah, who had taken off the red wig and tossed it down on the floor like a dead rat.

“What’s that?” Merker said.

“You’ll have to get some foreign material,” I said. “Like travel books. Read up on the places you want to go.”

Merker nodded. “That’s not a half-bad idea. Where would you find books like that?”

“I’d probably try a bookstore,” I said. I touched my finger to my nose, checked it for fresh blood. My wound seemed to be drying up, but I still looked as though I’d walked into a bus.

“So all I gotta do now is pick up Leo, turn you over to the beauty queens, and we are on our way.”

“You forgot to mention giving them their share,” I reminded him.

“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.