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?”
37
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.
The whole way back downtown, I considered my options.
If I got a chance to get away, I could call the police. But between the time that I got hold of them and the time they arrived at my house, Merker’d be able to get in touch with Leo. They’d be able to make good on their threat against Katie before the police arrived.
So that wasn’t a good plan.
If I could somehow get the drop on Merker, put him out of commission before he could make a call to Leo, then I could call the police, fill them in on the situation, and they could surround my house, with Leo and Katie and Ludmilla still inside. Once Leo and Ludmilla knew they were trapped, there wouldn’t be any point in harming Katie.
So that was a plan.
The only problem with that was that it involved subduing, somehow, Gary Merker, who, in addition to being a psychopath who could beat the living shit out of me without breaking a sweat, was in possession of not only a knife and a stun gun, but a real, honest-to-God gun that shot bullets.
Could I get hold of my friend Lawrence Jones? I’d seen him deal with bad guys with a certain degree of efficiency. And they didn’t scare him the way they did me. But how, with Merker watching me all the time, was I supposed to reach him?
And so here I was, in a bar with Gary Merker, trying to locate a woman named Annette who Merker thought, with the help of a red wig, could pass herself off as Miranda Chicoine as Trixie Snelling as Marilyn Winter. The only signature she’d have to forge convincingly would be that last one.
Merker approached the bar, which was hosting a late-lunch crowd, more interested in chowing down on chicken wings than getting plastered, and called the bartender over.
“Annette around?” he asked.
“Not in till six,” the bartender said.
“Oh shit, that’s too bad,” Merker said. “I had some money I owed her.”
I thought, No, surely this old ruse won’t work.
“Oh yeah?” said the bartender, a tall, bearded man with a bent nose. “Whatcha owe money to her for?”
“She helped, on her day off, at a party I was giving. A work thing. She ran the bar for me, but I couldn’t pay her then, so I was dropping by to make it right.”
The bartender scowled. “We got party facilities here. You could have had it right here, you know?”
Merker laughed nervously. “Yeah, well, that woulda been good, but there was a bit of other entertainment, the kind you don’t offer here, you know what I mean?”
The bartender smiled and nodded. “Okay.” He tipped his head toward me. “Who’s your friend?”
“Hostage,” I said.
“Listen,” Merker said. “You got a number for her, or a home address, I could take care of this?”
“We don’t give out addresses or numbers for the staff,” the bartender said. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” said Merker. “’Cause I’m heading out of town today, won’t be back for three weeks, and I wanted to get this money to her before I left. But fuck it, I’m sure she can wait. Can you tell her I was by, that I’ll try to get back in a month or so to pay her what I owe her?”
Now the bartender was reconsidering. Maybe this was going to work. He didn’t want Annette blaming him when she didn’t get what she was owed. He didn’t want to listen to her whining for a month, or till whenever this guy came by again. “Shit,” he said. “She could probably use the dough, what with the kid and all.”
Merker shrugged, like it wasn’t up to him anymore. Don’t push too hard, he was thinking.
“Hang on,” said the bartender, and he disappeared to a back room. He was back two minutes later with a piece of paper. Written on it were an address and phone number. Merker glanced at it, folded it once, and shoved it into his pocket. “Thanks,” he said, and the bartender saluted.
Back in the truck, we headed for Galveston Street, a low-income neighborhood of semidetached homes with sagging porches. He ran the truck up onto the curb out front of 18 Galveston, a two-story house with a tattered stroller by the door. “I didn’t know she had a fucking kid,” Merker said. “Bring the wig and the ID and shit.”
We’d put everything into a plastic grocery bag that sat on the seat between us. I grabbed it and followed him to the front door. The bell didn’t work, so he knocked.
A moment later, a woman, who no matter her age was probably at least five years younger than she looked, came to the door. She was thin with short black hair and large breasts, and had a child of about two balanced on her bony, jean-clad hips.
“Jesus, Gary,” she said, not sounding entirely pleased to see him. “What are you doing here?”
“Hey, Annette,” Gary said. He forced his way inside and, despite how wrong it felt to me, I followed.
“Hey, Gary, like, you couldn’t have called first?” Annette said. “Do you mind?” She swung the child, a boy, over to the other hip. The inside of the house was a mess of children’s toys, dropped clothes, empty food containers.
“Nice place,” Merker said.
“How’d you find me?” Annette said, placing the child on the floor in the midst of some multicolored oversized Lego-type blocks.
“Listen, Annette, I got a chance for you to make some money,” Merker said. “How’d you like to make a grand for the afternoon?” That got her attention.
“What are you talking about?” she said. Baffled but interested.
Merker grabbed the bag from me and pulled out the red wig. “Try this on.”
Annette shook her head. “Oh no. I don’t do that no more. What’s this, for your friend here?” She looked at me scornfully. “This guy likes redheads? So what else you got in the bag? A little schoolgirl’s uniform?”
Merker shook his head. “It’s nothing like that. Jeez, that you would even think that of me.”
Annette’s eyes went wide. “Are you kidding me? The stuff you used to have me do at the Kickstart-”
“Forget that shit,” Merker said. “Just try this on.”
“What’s it for?”
“Would you just do it?”
Tentatively, she reached for the wig, inspected it as if it might be infested with head lice, and pulled it on. She didn’t have that much hair to tuck under it, and it fit pretty well. Didn’t look cheap, either. I figured Trixie was able to afford the best when it came to this sort of thing. Maybe that was why there was only three hundred thousand, instead of half a million, left over.
“Ooh, you look good,” Merker said. Annette went to check herself in a front hall mirror.
She cocked her head from side to side, watched the way the wisps of hair fell across her face.
“So like, what’s this about?” Annette said.
Merker invited her into her own kitchen to sit down and listen to what he needed her to do. First, Annette shoved a Finding Nemo tape into an old VCR, then joined the two of us at the table. Merker had the ID and the key out on the table for demonstration purposes.
“I need you to go into a safety-deposit box,” Merker said.
“Huh?” Annette said.
“You wear the wig, you use this ID, you sign this name, and you’re in. You take everything out of the box, put it in the bag, and you come back out. Simple as that.”
Annette looked at him openmouthed. “Huh?” she said again.
I was starting to have doubts about whether Annette was the best candidate for this operation.
“Listen,” she said, “I’d like to help, but I got no one to watch the kid.”
“Fuck, Annette, I’m going to give you a grand. Hire a fucking babysitter.”
“Who’m I gonna find in the middle of the day? You ever try to find a babysitter like that?” She snapped her fingers. “It’s not easy.”
Merker was thinking. “We could drop the baby off,” he said, and looked at me. “We could leave the baby at your place, with Leo and the fat Yugoslavian chick and the kid. They’re already looking after one kid, they could handle another one.”
“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?”
“This is the broad, on the fridge?” Merker asked.
“It’s my wife.”
“The one in the picture, with the nice rack?”
Was my wife’s honor worth protecting at a moment like this? Did I tell Merker to go fuck himself and run the risk of him pulling out his gun and shooting me through the head?
I thought about it, briefly, and told him, “Just give me a sec. I’m just about done.”
Sarah said, “Zack? Are you there?”
“No, no!” Merker said. “She can do it.”
“What?”
“We put the wig on her. She can do it.”
“You’re out of your mind,” I said, and unwrapped my hand from around the phone. “Sorry, honey. There was just someone going by.”
“Where are you?”
Merker was whispering. “How’s her handwriting?”
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