Bad News

by Linwood Barclay

  ‘The man,’ said Gavrilla. ‘The man who was going to talk to you. He sent a file to you. That you could hear.’

  ‘Where is computer?’ Mrs Gorkin asked.

  ‘My computer?’ I said. ‘It’s up in my study. Upstairs. Help yourself to it.’ It wasn’t like I had a nearly finished novel sitting in it. Cart it away, I thought.

  ‘Upstairs,’ Mrs Gorkin said, ‘you take us.’

  I shook my head like I didn’t know what she was talking about but was happy to indulge her little whims. Once I was on my feet, I took another couple of breaths. I realized now it was Gavrilla who’d held me, and Ludmilla who’d thrown the punch. It felt as though her fist was still in my stomach.

  ‘This way,’ I said, leading them up the stairs to the study. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what it is you’re going on about.’

  ‘Shut the mouth,’ said Mrs Gorkin, giving me a shove from behind.

  ‘Who’s running Burger Crisp?’ I asked, just making conversation. It wouldn’t be long before the lunchtime crowd showed up. ‘Shouldn’t you be there? You want, I could bring the computer by.’

  ‘We have people,’ said Ludmilla. ‘Better than your stupid son.’

  I led them into the study and took a seat in front of my computer. Mrs Gorkin had her eyes on me, but the girls took a quick look around the room, taking in my various items of SF kitsch.

  ‘Look!’ said Ludmilla. ‘Wonder Woman!’

  ‘Neat!’ said Gavrilla, taking the busty superhero from the shelf. ‘Look, her arms move. She even has a little lasso.’

  Mrs Gorkin was not interested in Wonder Woman. ‘Show me where you have da files,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got all kinds of files,’ I said. ‘What kind of files did you have in mind?’

  Ludmilla came up behind me. ‘Open your e-mail. Momma wants to see the e-mail.’

  I did as I was asked, Ludmilla peering over my shoulder. She smelled of fries. ‘Go to Inbox,’ she said, and I did. ‘There it is,’ she said, pointing to the one labeled ‘Brian Sandler.’

  ‘I don’t hear anyting,’ said Mrs Gorkin.

  ‘Click on it,’ said Ludmilla. ‘Momma doesn’t understand computers very well.’ I clicked on the e-mail, and then, at Ludmilla’s instruction, the attached audio file.

  And a moment later, the conversation between Brian Sandler and Frank Ellinger was coming out of the speakers.

  ‘Dat is it!’ said Mrs Gorkin. ‘You say you not know what I’m talking about!’

  ‘I didn’t know you meant this file,’ I said. ‘Do you have any idea how many files I have?’

  ‘Okay, kill da file,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll do it, Momma,’ Gavrilla said, dragging me out of the chair and taking my place at the keyboard. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the tiny arrow attached to Sandler’s message, indicating that it had been forwarded to Lawrence Jones.

  Gavrilla highlighted the e-mail, hit Delete, and it disappeared.

  ‘Is gone?’ Mrs Gorkin said.

  ‘I have to empty all the items in the Trash file,’ Gavrilla said, switching to the Trash box. She highlighted all the items, hit Delete again, and they vanished from the screen. But she’d neglected to go to Sent Items, where the message to Lawrence sat.

  ‘There we go, Momma,’ Gavrilla said.

  ‘Okay, now we smash it,’ Mrs Gorkin said. ‘So no one ever sees it.’

  ‘Uh, we don’t have to do that, Momma,’ said Ludmilla.

  ‘I smash it!’ Mrs Gorkin said, and grabbed a stapler off the desk and used it to shatter the computer monitor. Shards of glass littered the top of my desk.

  To me, Ludmilla said, almost apologetically, ‘Momma doesn’t understand that it could still be there in the computer. She thinks, you smash the screen, it’s gone.’

  I smiled. ‘That’s sweet,’ I said. ‘So, you’ve done what you came to do, the file is gone, so don’t even worry about the monitor, I can get another one of those. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘You come,’ said Mrs Gorkin. ‘Come to restaurant.’ She smiled, showing off a brown, crooked tooth. ‘We make you lunch.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘that would be great, but I have this thing I have to go to. Maybe, later, I could drop by. Love to get an order of fries. Honestly, terrific fries.’

  Gavrilla had hold of my arm. ‘Momma wants you to come with us.’

  I had a mental image of Brian Sandler, the twins dipping his hands in first, then pushing his face into the fryer. If I could just break free of Gavrilla’s arm, get out the study door and down the stairs, I could be out the front door in a shot. The girls were strong, but they didn’t look as though they were built for speed. I was sure I could outrun them.

  Then Mrs Gorkin pulled some sort of short-barreled pistol from the bag hanging over her shoulder. ‘You come back with us,’ she said, pointing the weapon at me. I could outrun the twins, but a bullet was something else altogether.

  The phone rang.

  I looked at Mrs Gorkin. ‘I should answer that,’ I said.

  ‘No, it can ring,’ she said.

  ‘But there are people who are expecting me to be here, who might wonder why I’m not coming to the phone.’

  ‘The bullsheet,’ said Mrs Gorkin. ‘You could be in bathroom, having crap. Let it ring.’

  And it rang. Once, twice, three times. And then it went to the machine.

  ‘Hi, Mr Walker? This is Detective Herlich returning your call about the Brian Sandler investigation. Feel free to try me again, or I may try you again, too.’

  The message ended. Mrs Gorkin looked very displeased with me. ‘So you don’t know anyting. But you call police to tell dem what you don’t know?’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Especially with the pistol pointed at me.

  ‘We go back,’ Mrs Gorkin said. ‘Ludmilla, go down street and bring up car.’

  We were going down the stairs, Gavrilla in front, then me, followed by Ludmilla and Mrs Gorkin, when there was a knock at the front door. Everyone froze.

  ‘Sheet,’ whispered Mrs Gorkin.

  It couldn’t be Sarah, I figured. There was no reason for her to come home late morning from work. Paul was at school, Angie at college. But whoever it was, it presented an opportunity. Maybe, if the Gorkins allowed me to answer it, I could mouth ‘Help!’ Roll my eyes, nod my head back into the house, somehow indicate that I was in a great deal of trouble.

  ‘I should see who it is,’ I said, turning and looking at Mrs Gorkin.

  Another knock. Harder, more insistent. Maybe it was Detective Herlich. No, that made no sense. He’d only just called. Unless he’d called from his car. Maybe he was out front.

  Yes. Let it be Detective Herlich.

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Just let me answer it. I’ll get rid of them.’

  ‘You girls,’ Mrs Gorkin whispered. ‘You get on sides of door.’ To me, she said, ‘I stay up here on stairs. Have gun. You be stupid, I shoot you.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Gavrilla cleared the way for me to get down the rest of the stairs, then she and her sister hid on either side of the door.

  There was another knock. Whoever wanted me to answer it was banging it with his fist now. Would a cop bang a door like that?

  I approached the door, my heart pounding. I took hold of the knob, turned it, and opened the door wide.

  It took me a moment to recognize him. Even though I’d heard so much about him, I’d only seen him once in person, at the stun gun demonstration.

  Gary Merker. Arms down at his side, one hand, his right one, held slightly behind his back. Beyond him, in the driveway, I could see an old Ford pickup with one adult in it, on the passenger side, and possibly a child in the middle.

  ‘You Zack Walker?’ he said.

  ‘Uh,’ I said, wondering how much crazier things could get. ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

  Then Gary Merker raised his right arm, and I saw that there was something gun-like in it, but not a gun exactly.

&nbs
p; Okay, now I knew what it was. A stun gun.

  Merker squeezed the trigger, and then I had, and I hope you’ll forgive me for this, the most shocking experience of my entire fucking life.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I dropped to the floor.

  I went down without any accompanying theatrics. This was no Broadway death scene where I clutched my chest and staggered across the stage in tiny steps whimpering that the end was near.

  I simply dropped. Like a Thunderbirds puppet with the strings cut.

  All the little messages my brain had been sending to my legs to keep me standing, to my hand to keep holding the doorknob, to my mouth to keep asking questions I hoped would buy me some time, all were abruptly interrupted.

  Fifty thousand volts has a way of doing that to you, I guess. When the charge from Merker’s stun gun hit me, the effect was instantaneous, and I don’t believe there are words to adequately describe the sensation. It was like my entire body was a tooth with a filling, and it had just bitten into the world’s biggest piece of tinfoil.

  So I hit the floor, and lay there a moment, and was only vaguely aware of the commotion going on around me. But there was plenty of it. As best as I can recall, Mrs Gorkin was the first to start shouting.

  ‘Drop it!’ she screamed.

  ‘Fuck are you?’ Merker shouted back.

  Then one of the twins – like it matters which one – appeared out of nowhere and slammed Merker up against a wall. He took another shot with the stun gun – it being one of those newfangled ones, he was able to fire it more than once – and caught the other twin, who screamed and dropped to the floor as quickly as I had, but, and I’m not just saying this to be nasty, with a much more resounding thud. Then Merker fired the gun a third time, but failed to connect with anyone.

  There was another shot, but from a real gun. It had come from Mrs Gorkin, who fired wild, sending a bullet into the wall next to Merker.

  ‘Be frozen!’ Mrs Gorkin shouted.

  And then everything went quiet, except for some whimpering from both me and, as it turned out, Ludmilla. We were the two stunned ones.

  ‘Okay, let’s everyone just calm down here a moment,’ Merker said, catching his breath. For all he knew, these three lovely ladies were members of my family, and the Walkers were just waiting for someone like Gary Merker to show up so we could toss him about and fire bullets at him.

  But he must have also been able to sense that something was amiss here. That he’d actually walked in on something out of the ordinary.

  ‘Who are you?’ Mrs Gorkin said, keeping her gun trained on Merker but moving across the room to check on Ludmilla, who was struggling to her knees. ‘You okay, sweedie?’ she asked.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Merker said.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, trying to sit up. ‘Give me a second here and I’ll try to introduce everyone, shall I?’ Merker glanced at me, surprised, perhaps, that I would be able to introduce him. I wasn’t certain he recognized me from the stun gun demo he’d done for the cops, and it occurred to me after I’d offered to do introductions that maybe it was a mistake for me to let on that I knew who he was.

  The fifty thousand volts might have interfered with my mental processes.

  ‘Gary Merker, this is Mrs Gorkin, and her daughters Ludmilla and Gavrilla, and they run the Burger Crisp across town, and it seems that if they haven’t come here to kill me, they certainly intend to cause me a great deal of harm. And ladies, this is Gary Merker, who’s trying to unload a bunch of stun guns to the police, and who also seems bent on doing me some sort of harm too.’ I took a breath. ‘I guess you’ll have to fight over me.’

  ‘What do you want with him?’ Merker asked Mrs Gorkin.

  ‘He had file. We come to get it.’

  ‘What fucking file?’

  ‘About health inspection.’

  ‘Health inspection?’ Merker said. ‘What fucking health inspection?’ He was twitching his nose about, like it itched. He stuck a pinky finger in one of his nostrils, dug around a bit.

  Mrs Gorkin looked taken aback by Merker’s blatant display of nasal inspection. It was nice to know that even she had standards. ‘You don’t know about dat?’

  ‘Lady, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’ He pulled out his finger, examined what was stuck to the end of it, and wiped it on his trousers.

  ‘Den why are you here?’

  ‘Because this son of a bitch’ – he pointed down at me – ‘is going to help me get back some money that was stole from me.’

  ‘Dat’s too bad, because we’re taking him with us,’ Mrs Gorkin said.

  ‘Why do you need him?’ Merker said.

  ‘Because we have to make sure he make no more trouble for us,’ Mrs Gorkin said.

  That didn’t sound good. I was wondering whether I should start rooting for Merker, who had his finger back in his nose to get what he missed the first time.

  ‘You shouldn’t shoot my daughter like that,’ she said. ‘What that thing?’

  ‘It’s just a stun gun,’ Merker said. ‘She’ll be fine. Be glad I didn’t use my real gun on her. And Jesus Christ, lady, you nearly shot me with that thing.’ He was pointing at Mrs Gorkin’s weapon. ‘That some sort of Soviet piece? Looks kinda different.’

  Mrs Gorkin didn’t answer him. She was helping Ludmilla get up.

  Gavrilla said, ‘Maybe we can work something out. What’s this money you got stolen from you?’

  Merker thought a moment. ‘This guy knows someone stole some money from me, and I think if he talks to her for me, I can get it back.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do for you,’ I said.

  ‘Really? According to the news, you know Candace, or Trixie or Miranda or whoever the fuck she is this week, very well. Went all the way up to farm country to try to get her to come back before the cops got her. Am I right?’

  I nodded wearily.

  ‘So I need you to talk to her, explain to her the situation, and I think once you’ve done that, she’ll tell you where you can find the money, and you and I can go and get it.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘She’s in jail. If you listened to the news, you know that.’

  Merker nodded his understanding. ‘You’ll have to go visit her. I can’t do it. People might be looking for me. Last place I want to walk into is a prison. They might not let me out. But I bet you can get in to see her.’

  ‘So I’m supposed to just walk in, into the jail, and say hey, where’s that money, and she tells me, we go find it, and you walk off with it.’

  Merker smiled, delighted that I had grasped the concept. ‘Yup.’

  Gavrilla interrupted. ‘How much money did she steal from you?’

  ‘A lot,’ Merker said. I knew it to be about half a million, but clearly he didn’t want to tip his hand.

  ‘Then here is a deal,’ Gavrilla said, glancing out the front door. ‘We let you take him to get the money, but we get a, what do you call it, a cut.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Merker said. ‘That’s a plan.’

  Mrs Gorkin turned her gun on me. ‘We kill him now then.’

  ‘Whoa, hang on, wait a minute,’ Merker said. ‘Let’s not get crazy.’

  ‘Who’s that man in the truck?’ Gavrilla asked.

  ‘That’s Leo,’ Merker said.

  ‘Okay, so you leave Leo with us,’ Gavrilla said, her mom watching her curiously, ‘and we let you take this guy to get your money, then you come back with the money, you give us our cut, Leo can go and you give us back this guy.’

  ‘What, Leo’s, like, a hostage?’

  ‘No, no. He just stays with us.’ Gavrilla shrugged. ‘We’ll hang out.’

  Ludmilla, on her feet now, said, ‘I could stay here.’

  ‘There’s somebody else,’ Merker said. ‘In the truck, with Leo. She’d have to stay too.’

  ‘How much money?’ Mrs Gorkin asked.

  ‘Like I said, a lot,’ Merker said.

  ‘Don’t give me thi
s sheet, a lot,’ she said. ‘We not letting you walk off with him we don’t know what’s in it for us.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Merker said, ‘I don’t know exactly how much she’s got. I know what she took, but she probably spent that, but she’s probably made some back. I’m betting she’s got it stashed away someplace and I want it back. With fucking interest too.’

  ‘How much she take?’

  Merker didn’t even hesitate. ‘A hundred thousand.’ I couldn’t see any advantage, at the moment, in pointing out that he was underreporting potential income. I was not the tax man.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Mrs Gorkin. ‘Okay then, we want thirty per cent.’

  ‘Thirty per cent?’ said Merker. ‘You fucking joking? What’s fucking thirty per cent of a hundred thousand?’

  Trixie hadn’t been kidding when she said Merker wasn’t very good at numbers. I said, ‘I think that would work out to about thirty thousand dollars.’

  Merker shook his head disapprovingly. ‘That’s just ridiculous. I’ll give you five. Five thousand bucks.’

  Mrs Gorkin pointed her weapon at me again. ‘You must not need him very much.’

  ‘Okay, okay, ten. Ten thousand. That’s as high as I’m willing to go.’ Mrs Gorkin’s gun was still trained at my head. ‘Fuck, all right, what about twenty-five thousand? That would work out to, that would be …’

  ‘Twenty-five per cent,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, how about that?’

  Mrs Gorkin lowered the gun. ‘Dat okay.’

  Gavrilla was smiling proudly. This had been her strategy, after all. ‘That’s good. That’s great. So, you should call Leo in.’

  Merker went to the open door, made a waving motion. I heard a pickup door slam, and then Leo Edgar was walking up the porch steps.

  He was leading, by the hand, a child. A little girl, probably no more than five years old. Curly haired. Quiet, walking as if in a daze. Dried tears visible on her cheeks.

  Katie Bennet. Trixie’s daughter.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I was back up on my feet now, the residual effects of a punch to the gut and fifty thousand volts to my entire body momentarily forgotten as Katie Bennet stepped into the house. She looked at me with a glimmer of recognition, but no joy.