“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.

Bang. Then bang bang. And then one more. Bang.

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 Suburban.

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.”

I wondered just how many witnesses there were to Merker’s misdeeds, other than myself. Sarah and Katie, the customers at the Burger Crisp, the other drivers out in Oakwood who’d seen him bulldoze another car out of the way with his pickup truck. And that was just today. The evidence and eyewitness testimony that could be used against Merker and Leo-clearly not a couple of rocket scientists-had to be overwhelming. You didn’t have to be a genius to bring misery to a great many people. The question was how many more people’s lives they’d ruin before it all caught up with them.

“What are we gonna do with all this money?” Leo asked.

“Retire,” Merker said, reaching down into the console for Trixie’s yellow wooden pencil. “We’re going to retire.” He turned the pencil around so the eraser end was pointed away from him. An extraction aid. I couldn’t look.

“I like the sound of that,” Leo said. “I don’t have much of a pension, you know.”

The sirens were getting louder. Merker glanced into the rearview mirror. “Leo, I can’t take my eyes off the road. Whaddya see behind us?”

“Nothing much,” Leo said. “Nobody’s coming after-hang on.”

“What?”

“I can see a flashing light way back there.”

Merker turned abruptly down a side street. The car was made to corner. He’d only gone a block when he turned again. The belt cut into my neck as the tires squealed. I made a hacking noise.

We’d been having coffee, Trixie and I, in one of those joints where if you order just a regular coffee they look at you like you just got off the boat. She’d just picked up her mail. Said something about how, in her line of work, a post office box was the way to go. The less mail coming to your actual house, the better.

“I think you lost him,” Leo said. “Nice going.”

But Merker wasn’t slowing down. We’d wandered into a residential area, and he was taking a left and then a right and then a left. I don’t think he had any idea where he was-I certainly had no idea where we were-but as long as he wasn’t being followed, that was all that mattered.

There were a number of envelopes Trixie had dumped onto the table. One of them, I remembered, was from a car company. The words “Recall Notice” had been stamped on the front.

German cars, Trixie had said derisively. Great to drive, but they were always having little things going wrong with them. Fuel injection, power seats-

The sirens, having faded briefly, were getting louder again. It almost sounded as though they were ahead of, instead of behind, us.

“Hear that?” Leo said.

“Shit!” Merker said, wheeling the car down another quiet residential street. “I don’t even know where the fuck we are.”

I’ve never been a very good passenger. Not with Sarah, not with friends, certainly not with Angie when she was learning to drive. I spend a lot of time pressing my right foot into the firewall, thinking that maybe, if I press hard enough, a brake pedal will miraculously appear, the car will slow down.