Linwood Barclay - Stone Rain

“I don’t think she’s Yugoslavian,” I said. I suddenly felt very tired.

“But we could do that. So getting a sitter is no big deal, Ann-”

“Jesus!” she said. “Are you still doing that?” She pointed at Merker, who had slipped his index finger into his nose. “That is the most disgusting habit! You were doing that in Canborough. You haven’t fucking cleared things out in there yet?”

Merker’s nose-picking hand dropped to his side. “Leave me alone,” he said, suddenly an eight-year-old. “So, you’ve got a sitter. You’ll do this thing?”

“Is it illegal?” she asked.

Merker, who had not been one to share his feelings with me up to now, gave me a look, as if to say, You see what I have to deal with ?

“What do you think, Annette? You’re going into a fucking bank, pretending to be someone else, and walking out with a bag full of cash, you want to know whether it’s illegal?”

“I was just asking is all. How much cash?”

“Enough. Anyway, it’s sort of partly legal, because the person who has the box says it’s okay for us to do it. She’s given us permission.”

“Written permission?”

“Fuck no, Annette, I don’t have written permission. You think this is the sort of thing people put in writing?”

“Well, why can’t she just do it herself? Why does she need someone else? Did she break a leg or something?”

“Because she can’t, okay?”

Annette shrugged.

“When did you have a baby anyway?” Merker asked.

“Two years ago.”

“You married? This baby got a father?”

“That any business of yours?”

“Sounds like a no,” Merker said, tsk-tsking. “That’s not good, bringing up a baby without a father. I know a little something about that.”

“Yeah, well, he was a son of a bitch and I’m better off without him.”

Merker slid the fake Marilyn Winter ID, which happened to be a driver’s license, toward her. “You see the signature there? When you get into the bank, you have to be able to sign it like that. They’ve already got a signature on file, and they’re going to compare. That’s how they do things.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know if I can do that,” she said.

“Just practice a few times, you’ll be fine. You got some paper and a pen?”

Annette reached over to a table by the phone, found a scratch pad and a pen. Merker was twitching his nose, wanted to touch it, but kept his hands on the table. “Okay,” Annette said, looking at the ID and taking the pen in her left hand.

“Jesus, you’re left-handed?” Merker said.

“Yeah. That some sort of crime?”

Merker looked at me. “What’s Trixie?”

I tried to picture her with a pen in her hand, doing anything. “I’d guess right-handed,” I said.

Merker shook it off. “Doesn’t matter. Long as the signature matches, doesn’t matter which hand it’s written with. Go ahead, try it.”

Annette had already written “Marilyn Winter” three times on the notepad. Even looking at it from where I sat, across the table, the signatures bore no resemblance to the Trixie version.

“Is this a joke?” Merker said, yanking the pad away from her. “This looks like it was written with a fucking stump.”

“It’s hard,” Annette whined.

“Look at your M . It’s all roundy. It’s supposed to be pointy at the tops. Jesus.”

“Let me try again.” She really concentrated this time, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, and carefully mimicked the original signature, as if she were tracing it.

“Oh, that’s good,” Merker said. “That won’t arouse any suspicion. Taking fifteen minutes to sign your goddamn name.”

“You’re making me nervous,” Annette said. “Maybe if you was paying me two grand instead of one, I’d be motivated to do it better.”

“I could be giving you Donald fucking Trump’s platinum card and you still wouldn’t be able to do it,” Merker said. “Okay, just calm down and try again.”

“It’s just that my fingers are delicate,” Annette said. “It’s hard for me to make them go another way.” In the living room, with the Finding Nemo soundtrack playing in the background, the baby started crying. “Hold on!” Annette snapped.

It was hopeless. We all knew it. Annette kept trying, and Merker kept badgering her, but if anything, her attempts to copy the Marilyn Winter signature were only getting worse. Once, she wrote “White” instead of “Winter.”

“I forgot,” she said.

Merker was sweating. To me, he said, “What are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should get Ludmilla to do it.”

Merker squinted. “Very funny. We might as well go down to the zoo and see if we can fit that wig onto a fucking hippo.” Fed up, he reached across the table and yanked the wig off Annette’s head. He’d caught one of her own hairs, and she yelped. She pushed her chair back angrily and went to get the baby, and Merker’s finger went to his nose. He grabbed Annette’s pen to try to get at something that was buried pretty deep. I couldn’t look.

“This is just fucking fantastic,” Merker said. “She’d of been perfect, too. She’s got the same kind of tits and everything.”

I didn’t feel it was worth pointing out to Merker that the bank officials, unlike him, might not reduce a person’s legitimacy to a bra size, that there might be other criteria.

My cell phone rang. Merker wiped the end of the pen on his sleeve, dropped it onto the table, and eyed me warily as I took the phone out of my jacket. “Who is it?” he asked.

I glanced at the number. “It’s my wife, calling from work.” Sarah did seem to be developing a habit of calling at the most amazing times. Tied up in a barn, held hostage by a homicidal maniac. But it was always nice to hear from her.

“Don’t answer it,” Merker said.

“She’ll just call again,” I said. “I can handle this.”

He shook his head in frustration. He was having a very bad day. “All right, take it.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Hey,” said Sarah. “Where are you? Are you home?”

“Not at the moment,” I said.

“I tried to call home, and I think there’s something wrong with our number. I called and I got this other person. I asked for you and he said there was no one there by that name.”

“Really,” I said. Leo, maybe. Or Ludmilla, who didn’t sound particularly feminine.

“So then I called back, and there was no answer. But since you’re not home, I guess that makes sense. Maybe the lines got crossed the first time.”

“Maybe.”

“Listen, that was nice, last night, and breakfast.”

“It was,” I said.

“It hasn’t been nice, being angry with you,” Sarah said. “I don’t like it. But I think, with this stuff with Trixie behind us, I think we can start over, you know what I mean?”

“Sure.”

“What are you doing today, anyway? I thought maybe you’d be home. Although, I guess, with this suspension thing still going on, it’s hard to know what to do with yourself. I was thinking, maybe you should get started on another book. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe you have to see this as an opportunity, to get back to your novels. I mean, maybe the other ones didn’t take off, but lots of successful authors, their first few books, they don’t do that well, and then all of a sudden, they have a bestseller.”

“Sure,” I said. “I just thought I’d go out, get a coffee or something.”

Merker was giving me a hurry-up sign, but then, suddenly, he stopped, as though something had occurred to him. He was waving his hand at me, like he wanted to say something.

“Listen, honey, can you hang on a sec?” I said. I smothered the bottom half of the phone with a fist. “What?”