Bad News

by Linwood Barclay

  ‘You see? That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. It’s your attitude. Leo, what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m just trying to get my belt off, okay?’ I glanced back, saw him slip it out of the last loop of his jeans. ‘How am I supposed to keep my pants from falling down, Gary?’

  ‘I’ll buy you a new belt this afternoon,’ Merker said. ‘I’ll buy you a hundred belts.’

  The belt went over my head and down to my neck. Leo looped it around the two aluminum posts that supported the headrest.

  ‘It’s kind of loose,’ Leo said. ‘I got it on the last hole.’

  That, thankfully, was true. While the belt prevented much mobility on my part, it didn’t keep me from breathing. As long as I didn’t lean forwards suddenly, it wasn’t touching the front of my neck. I sat rigidly in the seat, pressing my head back against the cushioned headrest.

  ‘All comfy?’ Merker said. When I did not reply, he put the car into reverse and backed out of the drive. ‘Which way?’ he asked me.

  I pointed. Merker headed north. ‘Second stop sign, hang a right,’ I said.

  Merker put his foot to the floor, listened to the engine’s powerful surge. ‘Nice wheels. This is yours?’

  ‘Trixie’s,’ I said.

  ‘No shit. Hey, Leo?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Like this car?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s really nice. Nice upholstery.’

  ‘We’re gonna keep this car. Make up for the fact that we got short-changed on the safety-deposit box.’

  ‘Okay,’ Leo said without much enthusiasm.

  ‘You don’t mind, right?’ Merker asked me with mock consideration. ‘It’s not like it’s your car.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ I said, pushing my head back against the headrest.

  Leo called to me. ‘Hey, mister, that burger? I think there was something bad about it.’

  ‘You were warned,’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It was written right on the box.’

  Leo didn’t have anything to say about that.

  ‘Here?’ Merker asked. We had come to the stop sign. I nodded and he turned right. The car surged forwards again.

  ‘At the light, a left on Welk,’ I said. ‘It’s up five or six blocks on the right. Burger Crisp.’

  ‘Gotcha.’

  ‘You going to let them keep twenty-five thousand dollars?’ I asked.

  Merker smiled. ‘Oh, I’m going to give them something. I’m definitely going to give them something.’

  ‘Maybe when we get there I could use the washroom,’ Leo said.

  ‘You’ll be staying in the car, watching this asshole,’ Merker said. ‘We can stop somewhere else, after.’

  ‘Okay,’ Leo said, but he sounded pretty uncertain.

  And that was pretty much how I felt too. A few minutes earlier, I’d felt good that Sarah and Katie had managed to get away. But now, I was, literally and figuratively, feeling my neck. I was, once again, looking for an opportunity, a way out. It was something that I had shown myself, so far, to not be very good at.

  My cell went off. This, I knew, would be Sarah. She’d have gotten Katie and herself someplace safe, and would want to know where I was.

  ‘Give me that,’ Merker said, and I reached into my pocket and handed him my still-ringing phone. Merker punched his power window button, tossed the phone out the window.

  Merker pointed ahead and to the right. ‘That it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’

  Merker pulled into the Burger Crisp lot. There were three other cars there, and, best as I could tell, business was light. It was midafternoon, the lunch crowd had thinned.

  ‘Check it out,’ Merker said.

  Parked down around the side of the restaurant was his Ford pickup. ‘We gonna get the truck back?’ Leo asked.

  ‘Fuck the truck,’ Merker said. ‘We’re keeping this.’ He had his left hand on the door handle, the gun in his right. To Leo, he said, ‘Keep an eye on him. Hang on to the belt. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.’

  Leo grabbed the belt and pulled it taut as Merker got out of the car, leaving it running, and strode towards sthe Burger Crisp, the gun down at his side and slightly to the back.

  ‘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?’

  FORTY-ONE

  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 th
e 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.

  Riding with Merker, the belt around my neck, whizzing past other cars at high speed, pedestrians jumping out of our way, I thought I’d break my ankle, I was pressing so hard. A van backed out of a drive into our path, and I slipped my hands up between my neck and the belt, seeking to mitigate its strangling effect when we collided.

  I closed my eyes.

  When another two seconds went by without an impact, I opened them.

  ‘Close, eh?’ Merker said, twirling the pencil in the air.

  Trixie had mentioned something else about her car. Another problem, something she’d been notified about in the mail.

  Air bags. That was it. Something about the air bags. That they were extra sensitive, that the slightest bump on the front bumper could set them off.

  If Merker hit something, even nudged it, and if that set off the air bags, maybe that would provide enough of a distraction that I could turn the belt around, bring the buckle to the front, loosen it enough to get my head out, and bail out of the car. Merker didn’t have the gun, Leo did, and I wasn’t convinced he’d be as quick to use it. And it would take a few seconds to hand it to Merker in the front seat.

  Merker made another turn, slammed on the brakes. He’d taken us into a dead end. He threw the car into reverse, backed up so quickly he couldn’t control the steering, and the front end of the car whipped around so that we were facing the other way immediately. Back into drive, and we were off again.

  ‘Just like Jim Rockford,’ Merker cackled.

  ‘Hey, Gary, this isn’t very good for my stomach,’ Leo said. ‘I was just starting to feel better, like I could eat something.’

  ‘Jesus, Leo, enough.’

  Up ahead, at the next cross street, a police car went screaming past from left to right.

  ‘Yikes!’ Merker shouted, and slammed on the brakes. I didn’t have time to get my fingers in between my neck and the belt and I lost my breath, gagged, as the belt cut into my windpipe. I closed my eyes a moment, wondering whether I’d pass out.

  Maybe, I thought, keeping them closed was a smart idea. If we did have an accident, there might be flying glass.

  But curiosity prevailed, and I opened them. We were approaching a stop sign. A small car – it looked like another Civic, not unlike the one Merker had rammed with the truck on our way to the prison – was waiting to make a right turn.

  Merker might ordinarily have driven around the car, to the left, but there was a brown UPS truck there. Not enough room to get through. On the right, our path was blocked by a metal pole supporting a stop sign.

  Our car screeched to a halt behind the Civic. ‘Jesus Christ, lady, let’s go!’

  This time, his prejudice against lady drivers was at least accurate. The person behind the wheel of the Civic was an elderly woman, her hair tinted a light shade of blue.

  Behind us, we could all hear the approaching sirens.

  The lady’s right turn signal continued to blink while she waited for a break in traffic.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, wanting to sound as helpful as I could, ‘you need to give her a bit of a nudge.’

  ‘Fucking right,’ Merker said.

  And again, I closed my eyes and waited for the impact.

  The car bolted forwards, but we only had to go a foot or two before the bumper of the GF300 would connect with the rear bumper of the Civic. Merker wouldn’t be able to get the car up to much speed.

  But it was enough.

  I scrunched my eyes shut as hard as I could, threw my hands up to my neck to get them around the belt, and then we hit.

  Th
ere was a soft explosion as I was jerked forwards. Not that I could go that far, with Leo’s belt and all. The explosion was loud, but muffled at the same time. I felt the fabric of the passenger-side air bag brush, only momentarily, against my face.

  For the few milliseconds my eyes were closed, I plotted out my moves. Move the belt back to front. Hunt for the buckle. Slip out. Open the door.

  Run like hell before Merker could grasp what had happened and tried to grab me, or worse, shoot me.

  I opened my eyes. My air bag, and the one that had exploded out of the steering wheel, had already deflated. I started twisting around the belt, my heart pounding, but fingers fumbling for the buckle.

  But the sense of urgency seemed to have passed.

  Merker was not moving.

  His head was tilted forward, and there was blood dripping from his face onto his shirt and pants.

  His eyes were still open, but they seemed lifeless.

  Then I noticed something silver and pink and rubbery under his nose.

  It was the yellow wooden pencil. The force of the airbag had driven it clear up Gary Merker’s right nostril.

  The only thing left sticking out was the eraser. He had six inches of pencil in his brain.

  FORTY-TWO

  ‘Gary?’ said Leo, who’d been tossed to the floor of the back seat and was getting himself reoriented.

  I had my hands on the buckle, was pulling the belt through it. Once I had enough slack, I pulled it over my head.

  ‘Gary, you okay?’ Leo leaned forwards between the seats and tapped Merker on the shoulder. Leo saw the blood, then saw the end of the pencil sticking out of his nose.

  ‘Gary!’ he shouted. He burst into tears. ‘Gary?’

  I opened the door and stumbled out of the car. I could hear sirens coming from different directions. The elderly woman in the Honda had gotten out too, and was standing next to her car, shouting back at us, ‘Where’d you get your license, asshole?’

  I took three steps over to the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and collapsed onto the perfectly cut yard of a two-story brick house.

  Leo, gun in hand, got out of the back seat and opened the front driver’s door. His beltless pants were slipping down and he tugged them up with his free hand. ‘Come on, Gary! Wake up! Come on! Wake up.’