Then he looked at me. He had the gun out, and while he was waving it around, it was pointed more or less in my direction.

“Where is it?” He’d become instantly maniacal. “The bag! Where is the bag?”

I made a motion with my thumb, like a hitchhiker, pointing out front. “Ludmilla,” I said. “I think she wanted to be sure Mom got her share.”

He ran straight into me, shoved me up against the wall, and opened the front door. He stepped out onto the porch, looked down the street in time to see his truck receding into the distance, and got off a shot.

I started running back through the house. I got as far as the kitchen, saw that the back door was still open from Sarah and Katie’s escape. Then there was another shot. Ahead of me, the kitchen window that looked out onto the backyard shattered.

“Hold it!” Merker shouted.

I froze. He ran, caught up to me, put the barrel of the gun to the back of my head.

“Where are they? The kid? Your wife?”

“They’re gone,” I said.

Merker pushed the barrel harder against my skull. “Jesus! Goddamn it!”

I could feel his hot breath on the back of my neck. This was it, I figured. He was finally going to blow my brains out. Part of me wished he’d just get it over with. I felt strangely at ease. The two people I most wanted to save were on their way to freedom.

They were safe.

“Fuck them,” Merker said. “I want the money. We’ve got to go after the money.” He took a couple more breaths. He was trying to pull himself together. “You know where they hang out? Where the twins and the mother are?”

“It’s a burger place.”

“Show me. Take me there.”

The cold steel against my head made the decision a bit easier. “Sure,” I said.

Leo, coming into the kitchen, was doing up the belt on his pants and walking like he’d just ridden in on a horse. He was white as a sheet. If he was surprised to see Merker and me alone in the kitchen, Ludmilla and Katie gone, and a gun to my head, he didn’t show it.

He asked me, “You got any, like, Alka-Seltzer or anything?”

I pointed to the pantry. “Bottom shelf,” I said.

Leo opened the pantry door, found the tablets, ran some water into a glass and dropped two of them in.

He squinted at the bubbles as they rose off the water’s surface, then drank it down in one gulp. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and said to Merker, who was still holding the gun to my head, “Did you count the money yet?”

CHAPTER 40

40

“LUDMILLA LEFT WITH THE MONEY?” Leo said. He seemed genuinely shocked. “Are you sure, Gary?”