Bad News: A Zack Walker Mystery #4

by Linwood Barclay

He let his foot off the brake, backed the truck onto the street, leaving Trixie’s car in the driveway. ‘So where are we going?’

  I gave him directions to the highway that would take us west out of the city. Once we took the Oakwood exit, I’d be able to get us to the Clayton Correctional Facility. I’d never been in it, but had driven by it enough times when we lived out that way to know where it was.

  Once we were on the highway, and I didn’t have to navigate for Merker, I was quiet. I glanced over occasionally, but Merker was usually preoccupied with wiggling his nose or conducting digital explorations of it. He almost never had both hands on the wheel. I could see, sticking out of his front jeans pocket, what looked like the handle of a knife. A switchblade, most likely.

  I was surprised when, after ten minutes or so, he actually spoke. ‘You ain’t got much to say,’ he said.

  ‘Just thinking,’ I said.

  ‘Oh. About what?’

  ‘I guess I’m wondering what kind of person would kill a little girl’s parents.’

  ‘They weren’t her parents,’ Merker corrected me. ‘That was her aunt and her aunt’s husband.’ So there.

  ‘But they were raising Katie like she was their own child.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that wasn’t my decision, now was it,’ Merker said. ‘That was your friend Trixie’s decision.’ He shook his head derisively. ‘She has an awful lot to answer for, you know.’

  He looked up the highway. ‘Fuck.’ Traffic was bunching up. Brake lights were flashing on ahead of us. ‘What time is it?’

  I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s only ten thirty-five. We have lots of time.’

  But Merker wasn’t a patient man. He made a fist out of his nose-picking hand and bounced it angrily off the steering wheel. ‘Do you see an accident? I don’t even see an accident. Everyone’s just fucking slowing down.’

  ‘The Oakwood exit is just up ahead,’ I said. ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘Take it easy? Does somebody owe you half a mill? Maybe if they did you’d be a bit tense too.’

  ‘Half a mill?’ I said, innocently. ‘You just told Mrs Gorkin it was a hundred thousand.’

  Merker blinked. ‘Yeah, well, I forgot a bit of it,’ he said. He steered the truck over to the right lane without signaling, cut some motorists off. Someone laid on the horn and Merker held up a finger to the window, then reached into his jacket, where I knew he was touching the grip of his handgun, wondering whether to pull it out and use it as a traffic calmer.

  Never again would I honk at anyone.

  The exit was a couple of hundred yards up, so Merker rode the shoulder until we reached the ramp. ‘When you get to the light at the end,’ I said, ‘hang a right.’

  Merker’s face was full of fury. He wanted his money, and he didn’t appreciate anything, like other drivers and traffic lights, that delayed our arrival at the prison and moving forwards with his plan. At the light, we waited behind a white Civic, its right blinker going. I couldn’t make out the driver, sitting up high as I was in the pickup. But it was a timid one. Several times, there was enough of a gap in the traffic for the Civic to go, but the car held back.

  ‘Fuck! Come on!’ Merker shouted, gunning the accelerator while he held his other foot on the brake. The moment he let his foot off it, we’d shoot ahead like a rocket.

  ‘Just take it ea—’

  I didn’t have a chance to finish. Merker let his foot off the brake, trounced harder on the gas, and rammed the rear right corner of the Civic, shoving it out of our way.

  ‘Christ!’ I shouted, throwing my hands forwards and bracing myself against the dashboard.

  ‘Stupid bitch!’ Merker shouted, even though he couldn’t see into the Civic any better than I could.

  The car lurched forward into the street, forcing an oncoming SUV to slam on its brakes. Merker steered the truck around the Civic and headed north, the pickup’s shattered exhaust system sounding like a round of gunfire.

  ‘Honest to God,’ Merker said. ‘Some fucking drivers. How many chances did she have to pull out but she just sat there?’

  I craned my neck around, saw a man get out of the Civic, a woman stepping out of the SUV, both of them pointing as we vanished into the distance. What if Merker got us both killed before we even got to the prison? Who’d tell Leo to let Katie go then?

  I dropped my hands from the dash and gripped the door handle with my right one. The fingers of my left hand dug into the vinyl upholstery, unable to get a secure grip.

  ‘So how far up here?’ Merker asked, his nose twitching.

  ‘Uh, three lights up, turn left. The prison’s up on the right.’

  Merker scratched his nose, glanced over, grinned. ‘You sure are a nervous passenger.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s me.’

  I glanced back again, expecting to see a police car in pursuit, but no one was coming after us. At least not yet.

  ‘Let me ask you something,’ I said.

  ‘Shoot,’ Merker said.

  ‘Martin Benson.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Benson. The man in the basement of Trixie’s house.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah, I remember him.’ Like he was an old acquaintance, someone from his school days. Not someone whose throat he’d slit.

  ‘What happened there?’

  ‘Well, after I got word from one of my old buddies that our friend Trixie had been spotted, Leo and I tracked down her house and we find this guy there, snooping around, peeking in the windows. We thought maybe he was her boyfriend or new husband or something, didn’t know at first that he was the guy what wrote about her in the paper. So we zapped him, got into the house. That little basement business Trixie has going, it had all the equipment we needed to conduct an interrogation, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘So we tried to find out from him where Trixie was, when she was coming back, where she had my money. That kind of thing.’

  ‘But he didn’t know, did he? All Benson knew was that she was running a little S&M parlor.’

  ‘Yeah, so it seems. He was actually pretty useless.’

  ‘So why’d you kill him?’

  Merker shrugged. ‘I dunno.’ He pointed. ‘This where I turn?’

  I was so dumbfounded by his response that it took me a moment to register where we were. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Turn here.’ There were no other motorists blocking our way, so Merker didn’t have to bulldoze any cars out of the way. He even signaled.

  ‘Benson’s death was a warning, wasn’t it?’ I asked. ‘A way to let Trixie know you were serious about getting your money back.’

  ‘Well, yeah. Now that I think about it, that is why I did it. Do you ever find, as you get older, you start forgetting little things?’

  ‘But killing Benson, that backfired, didn’t it? Because you killed him in Trixie’s house, left him there in her mock dungeon, that made Trixie an instant suspect with the police, and she took off. She disappeared. Made it a bit difficult to get the money from her.’

  Merker shrugged again. ‘Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a perfect plan. I generally know what I’m doing, you know, but even Einstein made the odd slip-up.’ He brightened. ‘Shit, there it is. This is it, right?’

  The Clayton Correctional Facility. It looked like a community college behind high barbed-wire fencing.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘This is it.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  Of course, some of this I’ve already told you. We’re back to where we started.

  My first time walking into a prison. Putting my phone and change and car keys into a locker. Walking through the metal detector. Being brought to the place where you talked to inmates through the glass using a couple of phone handsets.

  And now I was sitting in the chair, waiting for Trixie to be brought in. The door on the other side of the glass opened, and Trixie, in jeans and a pullover shirt, was ushered in. The female guard retreated to the other side of the door to give Trixie some privacy.
/>   She sat down opposite me, picked up the phone.

  ‘Zack, Jesus, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Hi, Trixie.’

  ‘I get this message, my lawyer’s setting up a meeting with you, very urgent. What’s going on?’

  I took a breath. ‘I have some things to tell you, but I need you to remain cool when I do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you listening? You have to stay calm and listen to what I have to say.’

  Her eyes danced momentarily. ‘Okay. What is it?’

  ‘It’s bad,’ I said, lowering my voice as I spoke into the receiver. ‘They’ve got her.’

  Trixie’s mouth opened slowly in a silent scream. I didn’t have to say anything else, at least not yet. She had to know who ‘they’ were. And I had no doubt she knew whom I was referring to when I said ‘her.’

  She looked as though she’d lost the ability to breathe. She closed her eyes a moment, closed her mouth, breathed in through her nose. When her eyes opened, she asked, ‘Is she okay? Have they hurt her?’

  ‘She’s not hurt,’ I said. ‘Right now, she’s with Leo. Gary’s parked outside the prison, in his truck, waiting for me to come back.’

  Trixie looked at me with eyes that were losing hope. ‘Claire? And Don?’

  The Bennets.

  I shook my head from side to side, no more than a sixteenth of an inch each way. Just enough to convey the message.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Trixie whispered. ‘Oh my God.’

  I couldn’t help myself – it’s the way my mind works – but I thought of that scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the remake with Donald Sutherland, when the real Brooke Adams, after she’s been taken over by her pod replacement, collapses like a withered corn husk.

  She was crying, but trying not to attract attention to herself. Even in her grief, she knew that she didn’t want to draw the guard over. That might lead to questions. She found a tissue tucked up in her sleeve, dabbed her eyes.

  ‘Trixie,’ I said, ‘I need you to focus for me. I’m here—’

  ‘I know why you’re here,’ she said. A tear ran down her cheek. She sniffed, wiped her nose with the tissue. ‘He wants his money.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he’ll kill Katie if he doesn’t get it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much does he think there is?’

  ‘Half a million.’

  ‘There’s not that much. There’s just under three hundred thousand.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d be happy with that,’ I said. ‘He might be angry at first, but if he can really get his hands on that kind of money, he’ll take it.’

  Trixie swallowed, tried to pull herself together. ‘I can tell you where it is, but I don’t know how you’re going to get it. They’ll have to let me out, I can’t imagine any other way …’

  ‘Trixie, they’re not going to let you out. There’s no way. Why would they have to?’

  ‘It’s in a safety-deposit box. They’ll have to let me out, just for an hour.’

  ‘Trixie, the only way they might let you out is if you tell them what’s going on, that your daughter’s life is at stake. The moment Gary finds out you’ve been released, he’ll know you’ve told them what’s going on. And then I don’t know what he’ll do.’

  More tears now. But even though Trixie was in a panic, she was also thinking. For Katie’s sake. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to tell you what to do. You’ll need to write this down.’

  ‘They took my pen,’ I said. ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘You have to go to my house. Break in, whatever you have to do. Go to the upstairs bathroom, the medicine chest, take out the shelves, then you take out the back.’

  ‘The back comes out?’

  ‘It’s a false back. There’s a small storage area behind that. You’ll find a safety-deposit key and a set of ID. For Marilyn Winter.’

  Christ. Yet another name.

  ‘The box is registered under Marilyn Winter. There’s a color photo with the ID. It’s not the clearest picture in the world of me, but I’m wearing a red wig in it. You’re going to have to get somebody to go into the bank, with that ID, with a red wig.’

  ‘Where do I find a red wig?’ I whispered into the handset.

  ‘In the basement closet. Along the wall with the straps and ropes and things, there’s a set of folding doors. In there, there’s a bunch of Styrofoam heads, each one has a wig on it. You’ll find a red one there.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘The wig, the key, the ID. I got it.’

  ‘The box is downtown. I didn’t want it in the same town where I lived and did business. Might run into people who know me as someone else. It’s SunCap Federal. On Kingston, near Bellview. You know where that is.’

  ‘I think so. I mean, yes. I can find it.’

  ‘Okay, it’s box number 2149. You go in – well, it can’t be you. But whoever it is, you show your ID if they ask for it, but they might not if you’ve got a key, you tell them the box number, you sign in, they take you into the safety-deposit box room, you use the key to open the box, you take it into a little booth. The money’s in there.’

  ‘Trixie, I don’t know where—’

  ‘I know. You’ll have to find someone. Zack, you have to find someone who can pass as me.’

  I was feeling overwhelmed. I couldn’t begin to imagine how we could pull this off, how we could give Merker what he wanted, how we could keep Katie alive.

  ‘Maybe Gary knows someone,’ Trixie said. ‘He knows hookers and dancers all over the place. He can find someone to be me for fifteen minutes. Someone who can wear the wig, do my signature. She has to sign in. They usually check my signature against the one they have on file.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe I’m even considering this.’

  ‘And I can’t believe they’re gone,’ Trixie said, wiping her nose again. ‘I did it all. I’m responsible for all of this. Gary didn’t really … they’re not really gone, are they? Claire and Don?’

  I nodded.

  ‘How … Did Katie see?’

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t ask her that.’

  ‘You’ve seen her?’ Trixie brightened. ‘You’ve seen Katie?’

  ‘Yes. She’s okay. But she’s pretty shook up.’ The truth was, I didn’t want to know whether Katie had seen Don and Claire murdered. ‘She asked me to tell you,’ I paused, having a hard time getting it out, ‘that she needed you to be her mother all the time now.’

  Trixie dropped the phone, put both hands to her face. Her body shook. The guard took note but didn’t move. Inmates getting bad news, of one kind or another, had to be a pretty regular occurrence.

  ‘Trixie, listen to me,’ I said, the handset still resting on the counter. I rapped the glass. She pulled her hands away, her eyes red and raw, and picked up the handset. ‘Trixie, you can tear yourself up about this later, but right now, we have to get this money to Merker.’

  She nodded, pulled herself together. ‘It’s in the box. He can have it all.’ She paused. ‘I need you to let me know when it’s done. When they let go of Katie. I need to know that she’s okay.’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ I said. If I was alive to, I thought.

  The guard opened the door, the signal that Trixie’s time was up. She touched her fingers to the glass. I put my hand up, mirroring hers.

  ‘I gotta go,’ I said, looking into Trixie’s eyes. ‘I gotta do this thing. It’s going to be okay.’

  She looked away. She had to know I had next to no faith in my own words.

  ‘You were quite a while,’ Merker said when I got back into the truck. ‘I hope you didn’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘You’re still here, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Don’t you think the cops would have surrounded you by now if I’d told them anything?’

  ‘Maybe you’re up to something funny, but it hasn’t gone down yet.’

  ‘Okay, why don’t we sit here and wait and see, forget about gett
ing the money. Why don’t you call Leo, see if everything’s okay there.’

  ‘I did. It is.’ He paused. ‘So what’s the deal?’

  ‘It’s in a safety-deposit box,’ I told him. ‘Downtown. But we have to go to her house first. Get the key, some ID.’

  ‘Yes!’ He banged his fist on the wheel again, but not in anger this time. ‘She say how much is there?’

  ‘Just under three hundred thousand.’

  ‘Fuck! Are you shitting me? What happened to the rest?’

  ‘I don’t know. She had to set up a new life. I guess that cost money.’

  ‘That’s just totally fucking unacceptable.’

  ‘Then why don’t you go in there’ – I tipped my head towards the prison – ‘and discuss it with her.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said, more quietly, thinking about it. ‘I guess three hundred thou is better than nothing.’ He turned the truck around, headed south, to the neighborhood where Trixie and I were once neighbors. I hardly needed to give him directions to her place. Surely, even if you can’t remember why you killed someone, you can remember how to return to where it happened.

  ‘So hang on a sec,’ Merker said, his nose twitching. ‘How the fuck we supposed to get into her safety-deposit box?’

  ‘You’re going to have to find somebody. A woman with some passing resemblance to Trixie. Once you put a red wig on her, almost any woman will do.’

  ‘Red wig?’

  I told him about the ID with the color photo of Trixie in the wig. That whoever played Trixie, as Marilyn Winter, would have to sign in. Merker was thinking.

  ‘There’s this one chick, I don’t know. Her boobs are about right, and she might pass if she’s got the wig on.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She works this bar, Leo and I popped in there a couple of times this week. Used to know her up in Canborough, she danced at the Kickstart. Now she waits tables, that kind of shit. Annette, her name is. She could do this.’ He grinned. ‘She can’t say no to me.’

  The old neighborhood was coming into view. Merker found his way to Trixie’s house, pulled into the empty driveway.

  ‘Ah, the memories,’ he said.

  He tried the front door, wasn’t surprised to find it locked. ‘Let’s go around back,’ he said. The sliding glass doors off the kitchen were locked as well, so Merker kicked one of them in. I waited for an alarm or something to go off, but nothing did. Merker reached through the opening, unlocked the door, and slid it open wide enough for us to get inside.