“You forgot to mention giving them their share,” I reminded him.

“Well, sure,” Merker said slowly, like a kid who’d been asked whether he had his homework done. “Just sort of slipped my mind for a second.”

“Listen,” I said. “You’ve got what you want, right? This all worked out, I helped you out, I got my wife to help us, we’re good, right?”

Merker glanced over. “You mean, not counting when you tried to fucking zap me?”

“Aside from that, yeah.”

Merker thought a moment. “I suppose. So what’s your point?”

“First of all, we pull over and you let my wife go. She went in, she got you the money. The Gorkins don’t know or care about her. Just let her go.” Sarah listened intently as I argued for her release, and momentarily reached over and squeezed my knee.

“Well, shit, I don’t know about that,” Merker said. “Maybe once Leo and I are on our way and this is all over.”

The thing was, how could he let us go? Look at what we knew. Particularly me. Merker knew that I knew he’d killed Benson, the Bennets, the biker who’d fathered Trixie’s child. And for all he knew, I’d passed all this information on to Sarah.

If I were him, right about now, I’d be thinking about how I was going to get rid of two more bodies.

And that didn’t even count Katie.

Jesus. What would he decide to do about Katie?

My mind started working again, looking for another way out of this. I wasn’t confident of my ability to leap from a moving pickup truck, and even if I could, I wasn’t about to leave Sarah with Merker.

I knew Sarah was doing the same thing, calculating the odds, looking for an opening. If she’d come up with anything, she certainly hadn’t found a way to communicate it to me. Merker was using one hand to steer so that he could keep his other hand on the gun. The only bonus for us from this arrangement was that it meant he was leaving his nose alone for a while.

There was no need to tell Merker how to get back to our house from the bank. He seemed to know where he was going, and he was driving with great purpose. I noticed he had not bothered to ask me where Mrs. Gorkin’s Burger Crisp establishment was. We could drop by there on the way and give her the twenty-five thousand dollars he’d promised her for not taking me away before I could get his message to Trixie in prison.