It couldn’t be Sarah, I figured. There was no reason for her to come home late morning from work. Paul was at school, Angie at college. But whoever it was, it presented an opportunity. Maybe, if the Gorkins allowed me to answer it, I could mouth “Help!” Roll my eyes, nod my head back into the house, somehow indicate that I was in a great deal of trouble.

“I should see who it is,” I said, turning and looking at Mrs. Gorkin.

Another knock. Harder, more insistent. Maybe it was Detective Herlich. No, that made no sense. He’d only just called. Unless he’d called from his car. Maybe he was out front.

Yes. Let it be Detective Herlich.

“Really,” I said. “Just let me answer it. I’ll get rid of them.”

“You girls,” Mrs. Gorkin whispered. “You get on sides of door.” To me, she said, “I stay up here on stairs. Have gun. You be stupid, I shoot you.”

“Of course,” I said.

Gavrilla cleared the way for me to get down the rest of the stairs, then she and her sister hid on either side of the door.

There was another knock. Whoever wanted me to answer it was banging it with his fist now. Would a cop bang a door like that?

I approached the door, my heart pounding. I took hold of the knob, turned it, and opened the door wide.

It took me a moment to recognize him. Even though I’d heard so much about him, I’d only seen him once in person, at the stun gun demonstration.

Gary Merker. Arms down at his side, one hand, his right one, held slightly behind his back. Beyond him, in the driveway, I could see an old Ford pickup with one adult in it, on the passenger side, and possibly a child in the middle.

“You Zack Walker?” he said.

“Uh,” I said, wondering how much crazier things could get. “Yeah, that’s me.”

Then Gary Merker raised his right arm, and I saw that there was something gun-like in it, but not a gun exactly.

Okay, now I knew what it was. A stun gun.

Merker squeezed the trigger, and then I had, and I hope you’ll forgive me for this, the most shocking experience of my entire fucking life.

I DROPPED TO THE FLOOR.

I went down without any accompanying theatrics. This was no Broadway death scene where I clutched my chest and staggered across the stage in tiny steps whimpering that the end was near.

I simply dropped. Like a Thunderbirds puppet with the strings cut.

All the little messages my brain had been sending to my legs to keep me standing, to my hand to keep holding the doorknob, to my mouth to keep asking questions I hoped would buy me some time, all were abruptly interrupted.

Fifty thousand volts has a way of doing that to you, I guess. When the charge from Merker’s stun gun hit me, the effect was instantaneous, and I don’t believe there are words to adequately describe the sensation. It was like my entire body was a tooth with a filling, and it had just bitten into the world’s biggest piece of tinfoil.

So I hit the floor, and lay there a moment, and was only vaguely aware of the commotion going on around me. But there was plenty of it. As best as I can recall, Mrs. Gorkin was the first to start shouting.

“Drop it!” she screamed.

“Fuck are you?” Merker shouted back.

Then one of the twins-like it matters which one-appeared out of nowhere and slammed Merker up against a wall. He took another shot with the stun gun-it being one of those newfangled ones, he was able to fire it more than once-and caught the other twin, who screamed and dropped to the floor as quickly as I had, but, and I’m not just saying this to be nasty, with a much more resounding thud. Then Merker fired the gun a third time, but failed to connect with anyone.

There was another shot, but from a real gun. It had come from Mrs. Gorkin, who fired wild, sending a bullet into the wall next to Merker.

“Be frozen!” Mrs. Gorkin shouted.

And then everything went quiet, except for some whimpering from both me and, as it turned out, Ludmilla. We were the two stunned ones.

“Okay, let’s everyone just calm down here a moment,” Merker said, catching his breath. For all he knew, these three lovely ladies were members of my family, and the Walkers were just waiting for someone like Gary Merker to show up so we could toss him about and fire bullets at him.

But he must have also been able to sense that something was amiss here. That he’d actually walked in on something out of the ordinary.

“Who are you?” Mrs. Gorkin said, keeping her gun trained on Merker but moving across the room to check on Ludmilla, who was struggling to her knees. “You okay, sweedie?” she asked.

“Who the fuck are you?” Merker said.

“Listen,” I said, trying to sit up. “Give me a second here and I’ll try to introduce everyone, shall I?” Merker glanced at me, surprised, perhaps, that I would be able to introduce him. I wasn’t certain he recognized me from the stun gun demo he’d done for the cops, and it occurred to me after I’d offered to do introductions that maybe it was a mistake for me to let on that I knew who he was.

The fifty thousand volts might have interfered with my mental processes.

“Gary Merker, this is Mrs. Gorkin, and her daughters Ludmilla and Gavrilla, and they run the Burger Crisp across town, and it seems that if they haven’t come here to kill me, they certainly intend to cause me a great deal of harm. And ladies, this is Gary Merker, who’s trying to unload a bunch of stun guns to the police, and who also seems bent on doing me some sort of harm too.” I took a breath. “I guess you’ll have to fight over me.”

“What do you want with him?” Merker asked Mrs. Gorkin.

“He had file. We come to get it.”

“What fucking file?”

“About health inspection.”

“Health inspection?” Merker said. “What fucking health inspection?” He was twitching his nose about, like it itched. He stuck a pinky finger in one of his nostrils, dug around a bit.

Mrs. Gorkin looked taken aback by Merker’s blatant display of nasal inspection. It was nice to know that even she had standards. “You don’t know about dat?”

“Lady, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” He pulled out his finger, examined what was stuck to the end of it, and wiped it on his trousers.

“Den why are you here?”

“Because this son of a bitch”-he pointed down at me-“is going to help me get back some money that was stole from me.”

“Dat’s too bad, because we’re taking him with us,” Mrs. Gorkin said.

“Why do you need him?” Merker said.

“Because we have to make sure he make no more trouble for us,” Mrs. Gorkin said.

That didn’t sound good. I was wondering whether I should start rooting for Merker, who had his finger back in his nose to get what he missed the first time.

“You shouldn’t shoot my daughter like that,” she said. “What that thing?”

“It’s just a stun gun,” Merker said. “She’ll be fine. Be glad I didn’t use my real gun on her. And Jesus Christ, lady, you nearly shot me with that thing.” He was pointing at Mrs. Gorkin’s weapon. “That some sort of Soviet piece? Looks kinda different.”

Mrs. Gorkin didn’t answer him. She was helping Ludmilla get up.

Gavrilla said, “Maybe we can work something out. What’s this money you got stolen from you?”

Merker thought a moment. “This guy knows someone stole some money from me, and I think if he talks to her for me, I can get it back.”

“There’s nothing I can do for you,” I said.

“Really? According to the news, you know Candace, or Trixie or Miranda or whoever the fuck she is this week, very well. Went all the way up to farm country to try to get her to come back before the cops got her. Am I right?”

I nodded wearily.

“So I need you to talk to her, explain to her the situation, and I think once you’ve done that, she’ll tell you where you can find the money, and you and I can go and get it.”