Gary Merker snatched the phone back. “Hey, lady, you don’t do it, he’s dead, the kid is dead. You in?”

“I’m in,” I heard her say.

Twenty minutes later we picked her up out front of the paper. And now Merker and I were sitting in the Ford pickup, waiting, wondering how it was going for Sarah inside the bank.

As I sat in the truck, I spotted something just barely sticking out from under Merker’s seat. It was a handle for something.

It was the stun gun. The one he’d used on me and one of the twins at our house.

He had his real gun sitting in his lap, his right hand resting on it, but without a finger looped around the trigger.

“She smart, your woman?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “A lot smarter than I am.”

“Yeah, well, that I can believe. How long she been in there now?”

“Only a couple of minutes,” I said. “It just seems like a long time.”

“How long should it take? You go in, you show them the key…”

“Just hang in. Maybe the bank is busy. Maybe it’s taking her a while to get someone to help her.”

Merker fidgeted nervously, scratched his nose, but, mercifully, stuck nothing in it for once. “She has to get the signature right. If she can do that, she’ll be fine.”

“She’s been forging mine for years,” I told him. “She can do this.”

But it was torture, sitting out there in the truck, having no idea of how it was going inside.

“Maybe I should go in,” I said. “Just watch from a distance, see that everything is going okay.”

Merker snorted. “Yeah, that’s a great plan. I sit out here all by myself, let the two of you just run off.” Merker turned on the radio, twisting the dial from station to station, then, deciding there was nothing interesting enough to take his mind off his current situation, turned it off.

“Shit,” he said, looking up the street. A police cruiser with two officers was approaching. “Shit shit shit,” he said. “She fucking told.”

I glanced down again at the handle of the stun gun. “Relax,” I said. “They’re just driving down the street. It’s not like they’re slowing down or anything. If they were—”

The police car slowed down.

“Shit!” Merker said through clenched teeth. He slammed his fist into the steering wheel. “She’s blabbed, I know it.”

“She won’t have done that,” I said. Unless, of course, she was unable to pass herself off as Marilyn Winter and had to confess to what she was up to, what was at stake.