Linwood Barclay - Stone Rain

“Shit,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m even considering this.”

“And I can’t believe they’re gone,” Trixie said, wiping her nose again. “I did it all. I’m responsible for all of this. Gary didn’t really…they’re not really gone, are they? Claire and Don?”

I nodded.

“How…Did Katie see?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t ask her that.”

“You’ve seen her?” Trixie brightened. “You’ve seen Katie?”

“Yes. She’s okay. But she’s pretty shook up.” The truth was, I didn’t want to know whether Katie had seen Don and Claire murdered. “She asked me to tell you,” I paused, having a hard time getting it out, “that she needed you to be her mother all the time now.”

Trixie dropped the phone, put both hands to her face. Her body shook. The guard took note but didn’t move. Inmates getting bad news, of one kind or another, had to be a pretty regular occurrence.

“Trixie, listen to me,” I said, the handset still resting on the counter. I rapped the glass. She pulled her hands away, her eyes red and raw, and picked up the handset. “Trixie, you can tear yourself up about this later, but right now, we have to get this money to Merker.”

She nodded, pulled herself together. “It’s in the box. He can have it all.” She paused. “I need you to let me know when it’s done. When they let go of Katie. I need to know that she’s okay.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said. If I was alive to, I thought.

The guard opened the door, the signal that Trixie’s time was up. She touched her fingers to the glass. I put my hand up, mirroring hers.

“I gotta go,” I said, looking into Trixie’s eyes. “I gotta do this thing. It’s going to be okay.”

She looked away. She had to know I had next to no faith in my own words.

“You were quite a while,” Merker said when I got back into the truck. “I hope you didn’t do anything stupid.”

“You’re still here, aren’t you?” I said. “Don’t you think the cops would have surrounded you by now if I’d told them anything?”

“Maybe you’re up to something funny, but it hasn’t gone down yet.”

“Okay, why don’t we sit here and wait and see, forget about getting the money. Why don’t you call Leo, see if everything’s okay there.”

“I did. It is.” He paused. “So what’s the deal?”

“It’s in a safety-deposit box,” I told him. “Downtown. But we have to go to her house first. Get the key, some ID.”

“Yes!” He banged his fist on the wheel again, but not in anger this time. “She say how much is there?”

“Just under three hundred thousand.”

“Fuck! Are you shitting me? What happened to the rest?”

“I don’t know. She had to set up a new life. I guess that cost money.”

“That’s just totally fucking unacceptable.”

“Then why don’t you go in there”-I tipped my head toward the prison-“and discuss it with her.”

“Shit,” he said, more quietly, thinking about it. “I guess three hundred thou is better than nothing.” He turned the truck around, headed south, to the neighborhood where Trixie and I were once neighbors. I hardly needed to give him directions to her place. Surely, even if you can’t remember why you killed someone, you can remember how to return to where it happened.

“So hang on a sec,” Merker said, his nose twitching. “How the fuck we supposed to get into her safety-deposit box?”

“You’re going to have to find somebody. A woman with some passing resemblance to Trixie. Once you put a red wig on her, almost any woman will do.”

“Red wig?”

I told him about the ID with the color photo of Trixie in the wig. That whoever played Trixie, as Marilyn Winter, would have to sign in. Merker was thinking.

“There’s this one chick, I don’t know. Her boobs are about right, and she might pass if she’s got the wig on.”

“Where is she?”

“She works this bar, Leo and I popped in there a couple of times this week. Used to know her up in Canborough, she danced at the Kickstart. Now she waits tables, that kind of shit. Annette, her name is. She could do this.” He grinned. “She can’t say no to me.”

The old neighborhood was coming into view. Merker found his way to Trixie’s house, pulled into the empty driveway.

“Ah, the memories,” he said.

He tried the front door, wasn’t surprised to find it locked. “Let’s go around back,” he said. The sliding glass doors off the kitchen were locked as well, so Merker kicked one of them in. I waited for an alarm or something to go off, but nothing did. Merker reached through the opening, unlocked the door, and slid it open wide enough for us to get inside.

“Let’s find the key first,” he said.

We went upstairs, into the bathroom. I opened the medicine chest, started to carefully remove items from the two glass shelves-deodorant, toothpaste, bottles of aspirin and Tylenol. “Who are you, Mr. Tidy?” Merker said, and shoved me aside, grabbed hold of the two shelves, and ripped them out of the cupboard, tossing them to the floor, where they shattered amidst everything that had been on them. The few pill bottles and cosmetics that had fallen to the bottom of the chest Merker swept out with his hand.

The rear panel was now totally accessible. It was not immediately obvious that it was fake. A nail file had fallen into the sink, and I used it like a screwdriver to pry out the edges of the panel.

“It’s not coming out,” I said. I rapped on the panel with my knuckles. It sounded solid. “I don’t think this panel moves,” I said.

Merker’s face went red. He made a fist, pounded on the panel. It was drywall, and it dented only slightly from the force of the punch. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “What did she really tell you?”

He grabbed hold of my jacket lapels and shoved me. I lost my balance, went into the bathtub, grabbing the shower curtain as I toppled, snapping it off its rings. My head hit the tile wall. Merker had one foot in the tub, his fist ready to pummel me.

“Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop it! I’m telling you the truth! That’s what she told me! She said the medicine cabinet had a false back! It has to be there! She wouldn’t lie about this, not where her kid is concerned!”

Merker was breathing like a bull ready to charge.

“Unless,” I said, thinking of the floor plan of the house we used to have two doors down, “there’s another upstairs bathroom.”

Merker was gone, running down the hall. I’d nearly crawled out of the tub when he shouted, “Down here!”

He already had everything out of the medicine chest in the second upstairs bathroom by the time I got there. He rapped on the rear panel, and there was a satisfying hollow sound.

With the same nail file, we had the back off in seconds. And there was the key, and the phony ID.

Merker looked very pleased. “Okay,” he said, pocketing the key and the document. “All we need now is the wig.”

I tried not to look at the rack in the basement where Martin Benson’s life had come to an end. I found the set of folding doors next to a wall display of handcuffs, whips, gags, and other paraphernalia, and opened it.

There were half a dozen wigs there in a variety of shades. Merker grabbed the red one.

“We’re in business,” he said. “Now we just have to get hold of Annette and we go in and get my fucking money.”

I turned to head up the stairs, and Merker called to me. “Hey, look,” he said.

I looked back. He’d slipped the red wig onto his head and was holding one of the whips that had been hanging on the wall.

“Whaddya think?” He grinned. “Am I not fetching?”

The bar was called Hank’s, and it sat a couple of blocks north of the dockworks. It attracted local workers, but it also bordered a tourist district and was three blocks west of a community college, so there was an eclectic mix of clientele. Muscled stevedores, young kids with piercings, a middle-age out-of-town couple loaded down with shopping bags and a video camera.