Stone Rain (37 page)

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?”

“Hang on, Sarah,” I said, again, and covered the phone again. “Shut up. It’s not happening. I’m not dragging her into this.”

He snatched the phone from me. “Hey!” I shouted.

Just as suddenly, Gary had the gun back in his hand—the real one—and was pointing it at me while he put the phone to his ear with his left hand.

I could hear Sarah say, “Zack? Zack?”

Merker said, “Hey, Mrs. Walker?”

“Zack? Who’s this?”

“This is Gary, Mrs. Walker. I’m a friend of your husband’s.”

“What happened to Zack? The phone went all funny.”

“Listen, we kind of need your help with something. Can I ask you a kind of personal question?”

“What?”

“How would you describe your breasts? I saw your picture, that one on the fridge where you’re wearing that gown? At your place? I know you can’t tell everything from a snapshot, but I’d say they’re pretty nice.”

“Put my husband on the phone.”

“Well, I’d like to, but I’ve got a gun pointed at his head right now, and if you don’t help us out, I’m gonna give his brains some fresh air.”

Annette came back in with the baby on her hip. “Even if I can’t do this thing, I should still get something for my time.”

WE WERE PARKED
across the street from SunCap Federal. Merker behind the wheel of the Ford pickup, me on the passenger side, Sarah between us. She had the red wig on and was practicing her Marilyn Winter signature a few more times. I’d dug a tattered old owner’s manual out of the glove box, and Sarah was writing out her new name in the margins of pages that described how to check oil levels and properly install a hitch. She scribbled into page after page, glancing up at the fake ID resting on the dashboard for guidance.

“That’s pretty good,” Merker said. “I think the
W
is off just a tiny bit, I think it should slant a bit more to the right, but really, you’re good.”

Sarah, normally fairly polite, did not respond to Merker’s praise. I looked at her last two forgeries, and they were pretty much dead on. The situation seemed too unbelievable. Here was my wife, pretending to be Marilyn Winter, the phony name of Trixie Snelling, who was actually Miranda Chicoine, also known as Candace.

“Even if I get the signature right, what if someone notices that I’m not her?” Sarah asked.

“You got the hair, you got the key, you can sign the name, the boobs are close,” Merker said, full of confidence. “You can do it. Although you could of dressed a little sexier.” Sarah was wearing a black blouse, tan skirt, sensible, flat shoes. “Can you at least hike the skirt up a bit?” His eyes narrowed. “You have to get this right. You fuck it up, bad things are gonna happen.”

Sarah glanced at me.

“So we’ll be sitting out here,” he reminded her. “I see anything funny going down, first thing I do is shoot your husband here. Then I call Leo and get him to kill the kid. A cop car comes screaming up, people come running out of the bank, anything like that, and the shit hits the fan.”

“I’ll do it,” Sarah said. “You don’t have to worry.” I believed her, but I didn’t know whether Merker was convinced.

He patted her bare knee encouragingly. Sarah tried to pull it away, but there was no room to move. “That’s a good girl,” he said.

I so wanted to kill him.

“Let me out,” Sarah said. I opened my door and stood on the sidewalk. I held out a hand for Sarah, but she made a point of navigating her descent from the raised truck without my assistance.

“Don’t forget this!” Merker shouted, tossing out a small blue zippered gym bag. He’d asked Annette if she had something he could carry a bit of cash in, and she’d offered him that. If Merker ever did get Trixie’s money, it was going to smell like old socks and sour towels. Sarah grabbed the bag by the strap and stood next to me.

“It’s a bit crooked,” I said.

“What?” said Sarah.

“The wig. It’s just a bit off to one side.”

She used the oversized mirror bolted to the passenger door to take one last look at herself, made a minor adjustment.

“That’s perfect,” I said.

She wouldn’t look at me. Maybe there was no point worrying anymore about whether I might get out of this alive. Even if I did, I was still a dead man. But all that really mattered to me now was that Sarah survive this.

I had no idea how things would play out. Would she get into the safety-deposit box? Would the money Trixie said was there actually be there? Would something tip off the bank officials that she was not who she claimed to be? Would they call the police? Would Merker kill me when they showed up, and call Leo to tell him to do the same to Trixie’s daughter?

After Sarah walked into SunCap Federal, would I ever see her again?

As if reading my mind, Sarah reached out and touched my arm and looked at me.

“I can do this,” she said. “I don’t want anything to happen to Katie.” She’d never met the girl, but she didn’t need to set eyes on a five-year-old girl to be concerned for her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for everything.”

She looked as though she wanted to say something, but I knew she wasn’t ready to forgive me for the mess I’d gotten us both into, nor did she feel this was the time to tell me what a complete and total asshole I was.

I could only hope there’d be a chance later.

“Wish me luck,” she said.

And I watched her, in her red wig, gym bag in hand, stride across the street, open the door of SunCap Federal, and disappear inside.

I
t had taken less time to lay it all out for Sarah than I might have expected. At Annette’s place, after Merker had asked Sarah about her breasts, he handed the phone back to me.

“Zack, what’s going on?” Sarah said.

I had to concentrate a moment and employ what journalistic skills I had to boil everything down to point form. “The guys who’ve been after Trixie found her sister and brother-in-law up in Kelton. They killed them. They took Trixie’s daughter Katie. They want the money Trixie took from them, or they’re going to kill Katie. I went to see Trixie in prison. She has a plan for how we can get into her safety-deposit box, get the money, give it to these guys. One of them is holding Katie at our house. If anything goes wrong, he gets the call and kills her.”