Linwood Barclay - Stone Rain

“Oh yeah,” he said, and pulled in behind Trixie’s GF300, blocking it. “Okay, kids, we’re home. Everybody out.”

He was out first, his truck keys looped onto a finger of his left hand, which was carrying the bag of cash, the gun in his right. He came swiftly around to the other side, watched me and Sarah warily as we stepped down out of the Ford.

He ushered us along in front of him, up the front porch steps. Before we’d reached the front door, he shouted, “Leo! Hey, Leo!”

The door opened, but instead of being greeted by Merker’s partner, it was Ludmilla letting us in. Her eyebrows went up a notch when she saw Sarah, evidently surprised that there was a new guest coming to the party.

Katie was lying down on the couch, but not sleeping. As soon as Sarah saw her, she went to her. “Hey, you must be Katie. I’m Sarah.”

Katie looked at her with tired eyes and said nothing. She’d met too many bad people in the last twenty-four hours to trust anyone new right off the bat.

“I’m Zack’s wife,” she said, her voice full of reassurance. “How are you holding up? Do you need something to eat? Have they been feeding you?”

There was no sign of Merker’s associate.

“Where the hell is Leo?” he asked Ludmilla.

“Upstairs,” she said. “In the bathroom. He is not feeling well.”

“What do you mean, not feeling well?”

Ludmilla shrugged. “He is throwing up, and he is having trouble at the other end too, I think. I think it is maybe something he ate. That burger in the fridge. I think maybe it was bad.” She looked at me accusingly. “You shouldn’t keep bad food in your fridge.”

I held back from telling where it had come from, that we’d been holding on to it in the hopes of turning it over to the health department.

Merker went to the bottom of the stairs, set down the gym bag, his keys resting on top. He shouted up the stairwell, “Leo!”

Edgars shouted back from behind the closed bathroom door. “Gary?”

“Leo, get down here!”

“I can’t! I’m sick! I think I’m gonna die!”

Merker rolled his eyes. “Honest to God,” he said, more for our benefit than Leo’s.

Ludmilla said, “Did you get the money?”

“Yeah,” said Merker, annoyed. “We got the money.”

“You give me our share, and I’ll go.”

“Already taken care of,” Merker said.

Ludmilla’s eyebrows went up again. “What do you mean, taken care of?”

“On the way back,” he said. “Didn’t you get the call?”

“What call?”

“From your mother. She didn’t call?”

“No, she has not called.”

“That’s funny. Well, she was pretty busy. Maybe she’s still counting it.”

“You gave her the money? You were supposed to bring our share here, then I call her and then we are done.”

“Fuck, sorry about that,” Merker said. “I got confused. But anyway, you can go. Take off. We’re all done. I dropped by, gave your mom the twenty-five grand. Oh yeah, actually, she told me to tell you to come on back. I don’t think she was going to call you anyway.”

Even if English had never been Ludmilla’s first language, she knew bullshit when she heard it.

“Leo!” Merker shouted again. “We gotta get out of here!”

Sarah had knelt down next to Katie. “Come on, honey, talk to me. Are you okay? Has anybody hurt you?” Katie shook her head no. “Would you like a snack or something? A drink of water?”

Leo shouted back, “I can’t get up yet! I feel terrible! Can you come up here for a second?”

Merker got a look on his face like he’d just bitten into a lemon. This was not his idea of a good time, having to go up and check on a friend suffering from a catastrophic intestinal disorder.

“Just finish up and get down here as quick as you can!” Merker said. “We got a few things to deal with.”

“I’m going to call my mother,” Ludmilla told Merker. “I will just check that she got the money.”

“Sure,” said Merker, his eyes dancing. “That’s what I’d do too, I was you. But your mom said she was having phone trouble, which is why she told me to tell you that everything was totally okay and-”

“Gary!” Leo sounded like he was going to die.

“Ah, fuck,” Merker said and bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time, to see what was wrong with his friend.

And suddenly, for the first time in hours, Gary Merker was not watching over us. He was out of the room. Sarah and I exchanged glances. Katie’s eyes went back and forth between us. Even she seemed to sense that there was an opportunity here, and we might be the ones to help her take advantage of it.

Ludmilla, however, was looking at the gym bag. She must have had a pretty good idea what it contained.

Upstairs, Merker shouted through the bathroom door, “Pull up your pants, we’re getting out of here!”

“Could you come in here?” Leo said. “I think I’m done, but I feel kind of weak.”

“Jesus, no,” said Merker. “Clean yourself up and come on.”

Ludmilla advanced on the gym bag, picked up the keys on top, and pulled back the zipper. Just a couple of inches, but enough to see the mountain of cash. She was turned away from me, so it wasn’t possible to see her expression, but I could imagine it.

But the sight of all that cash wasn’t enough of a shock that she forgot how to react. She kept the keys to Merker’s truck in one hand and grabbed hold of the bag’s straps with the other. She was out the front door without another word.

I made no move to stop her. This was my opportunity to escape not only Merker, but the Gorkins as well.

To Sarah, I said, quietly but with great urgency, “Go.”

She grabbed Katie by the hand. The girl seemed suddenly alive, swinging her legs off the couch and planting them on the floor.

“Just run,” I whispered. “Anywhere.”

Upstairs, Merker said through the bathroom door, “Smells like you died in there. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs.”

“Come,” Sarah said to me, her eyes full of pleading, already heading with Katie to the kitchen so she could sneak out the back door.

“Right behind you,” I said.

Out front, I heard the door slam on Merker’s truck, the engine turn over with a great roar. While Sarah and Katie slipped out the back way, I took a moment to peek through the glass in the front door to see Ludmilla backing out of the driveway.

It turned out to be a stupid thing to do. It was a moment I could not afford to take.

Merker came bounding back down the stairs. It took him a second to register that the bag was gone. “What the-”

Then he looked at me. He had the gun out, and while he was waving it around, it was pointed more or less in my direction.

“Where is it?” He’d become instantly maniacal. “The bag! Where is the bag?”

I made a motion with my thumb, like a hitchhiker, pointing out front. “Ludmilla,” I said. “I think she wanted to be sure Mom got her share.”

He ran straight into me, shoved me up against the wall, and opened the front door. He stepped out onto the porch, looked down the street in time to see his truck receding into the distance, and got off a shot.

I started running back through the house. I got as far as the kitchen, saw that the back door was still open from Sarah and Katie’s escape. Then there was another shot. Ahead of me, the kitchen window that looked out onto the backyard shattered.

“Hold it!” Merker shouted.

I froze. He ran, caught up to me, put the barrel of the gun to the back of my head.

“Where are they? The kid? Your wife?”

“They’re gone,” I said.

Merker pushed the barrel harder against my skull. “Jesus! Goddamn it!”

I could feel his hot breath on the back of my neck. This was it, I figured. He was finally going to blow my brains out. Part of me wished he’d just get it over with. I felt strangely at ease. The two people I most wanted to save were on their way to freedom.