The old lady stopped shouting, but she did not get down. She turned and started walking over to where I was. “Were you in that car?” she asked me. “They ran right into me!”

But instead of talking to her, I was back on my feet, shouting at Leo. “Leo! Do what he says! Put the gun down!”

Leo, however, overcome with despair, was still waving the weapon around. Everyone was shouting. The cops were shouting at Leo to drop the gun, I was shouting at Leo to drop the gun, and Leo was shouting that his friend needed help.

From my vantage point on the lawn, it seemed that all the clichés were true. It’s like it was happening in slow motion. Like a dream.

The cop shouted again for him to put the gun down. The other cop was braced against the open door of his cruiser, his weapon bearing down on Leo.

“Can’t you see he needs help?” Leo pleaded to the first cop, and waved the gun in the officer’s direction. Not pointing. It was more like he was making gestures of hopelessness, and forgot that he had this thing in his right hand that could kill people.

If I’d been the cop, I probably would have done what he did.

He fired. Leo went down.

Just like that.

Even before the massacre at the Burger Crisp—Merker had walked directly behind the counter, fired two shots into Mrs. Gorkin and one each into Ludmilla and Gavrilla—the police were hunting for us. Sarah, Katie in tow, had gone to a house on the street behind ours and called 911. She’d directed them to our house on Crandall, and when she heard the sirens approaching, had left Katie with the neighbor and run back. But by then, we were all gone. Sarah gave them a description of Trixie’s car and the hunt was on.

I spent the rest of that day explaining things to the police. Detective Flint from Oakwood was brought in so he could hear it too.

I told them they’d find the Bennets, dead, in their barn in Kelton.

I told them about Merker’s plan, to use Katie to extort money from Trixie. About our trip to the prison. How Sarah had been coerced into going into the bank to empty the contents of the safety-deposit box.

I told them Merker had also told me, in the course of our conversations, that he’d killed Martin Benson. That he and Leo, while hunting for Trixie, had encountered Benson looking for more evidence of Trixie’s operation. That Merker had killed Benson in his bid to get information out of him.

And then I did something I suppose I didn’t have to do. I’m not even sure that I should have done it. But it seemed right.