“Fuck! Come on!” Merker shouted, gunning the accelerator while he held his other foot on the brake. The moment he let his foot off it, we’d shoot ahead like a rocket.

“Just take it ea-”

I didn’t have a chance to finish. Merker let his foot off the brake, trounced harder on the gas, and rammed the rear right corner of the Civic, shoving it out of our way.

“Christ!” I shouted, throwing my hands forward and bracing myself against the dashboard.

“Stupid bitch!” Merker shouted, even though he couldn’t see into the Civic any better than I could.

The car lurched forward into the street, forcing an oncoming SUV to slam on its brakes. Merker steered the truck around the Civic and headed north, the pickup’s shattered exhaust system sounding like a round of gunfire.

“Honest to God,” Merker said. “Some fucking drivers. How many chances did she have to pull out but she just sat there?”

I craned my neck around, saw a man get out of the Civic, a woman stepping out of the SUV, both of them pointing as we vanished into the distance. What if Merker got us both killed before we even got to the prison? Who’d tell Leo to let Katie go then?

I dropped my hands from the dash and gripped the door handle with my right one. The fingers of my left hand dug into the vinyl upholstery, unable to get a secure grip.

“So how far up here?” Merker asked, his nose twitching.

“Uh, three lights up, turn left. The prison’s up on the right.”

Merker scratched his nose, glanced over, grinned. “You sure are a nervous passenger.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me.”

I glanced back again, expecting to see a police car in pursuit, but no one was coming after us. At least not yet.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“Shoot,” Merker said.

“Martin Benson.”

“Who?”

“Benson. The man in the basement of Trixie’s house.”

“Oh yeah, yeah, I remember him.” Like he was an old acquaintance, someone from his school days. Not someone whose throat he’d slit.

“What happened there?”

“Well, after I got word from one of my old buddies that our friend Trixie had been spotted, Leo and I tracked down her house and we find this guy there, snooping around, peeking in the windows. We thought maybe he was her boyfriend or new husband or something, didn’t know at first that he was the guy what wrote about her in the paper. So we zapped him, got into the house. That little basement business Trixie has going, it had all the equipment we needed to conduct an interrogation, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” I said.

“So we tried to find out from him where Trixie was, when she was coming back, where she had my money. That kind of thing.”

“But he didn’t know, did he? All Benson knew was that she was running a little S &M parlor.”

“Yeah, so it seems. He was actually pretty useless.”

“So why’d you kill him?”

Merker shrugged. “I dunno.” He pointed. “This where I turn?”

I was so dumbfounded by his response that it took me a moment to register where we were. “Yeah,” I said. “Turn here.” There were no other motorists blocking our way, so Merker didn’t have to bulldoze any cars out of the way. He even signaled.

“Benson’s death was a warning, wasn’t it?” I asked. “A way to let Trixie know you were serious about getting your money back.”

“Well, yeah. Now that I think about it, that is why I did it. Do you ever find, as you get older, you start forgetting little things?”

“But killing Benson, that backfired, didn’t it? Because you killed him in Trixie’s house, left him there in her mock dungeon, that made Trixie an instant suspect with the police, and she took off. She disappeared. Made it a bit difficult to get the money from her.”

Merker shrugged again. “Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a perfect plan. I generally know what I’m doing, you know, but even Einstein made the odd slip-up.” He brightened. “Shit, there it is. This is it, right?”

The Clayton Correctional Facility. It looked like a community college behind high barbed-wire fencing.

“Yeah,” I said. “This is it.”

OF COURSE, some of this I’ve already told you. We’re back to where we started.

My first time walking into a prison. Putting my phone and change and car keys into a locker. Walking through the metal detector. Being brought to the place where you talked to inmates through the glass using a couple of phone handsets.

And now I was sitting in the chair, waiting for Trixie to be brought in. The door on the other side of the glass opened, and Trixie, in jeans and a pullover shirt, was ushered in. The female guard retreated to the other side of the door to give Trixie some privacy.

She sat down opposite me, picked up the phone.

“Zack, Jesus, what are you doing here?”

“Hi, Trixie.”

“I get this message, my lawyer’s setting up a meeting with you, very urgent. What’s going on?”

I took a breath. “I have some things to tell you, but I need you to remain cool when I do.”

“What?”

“Are you listening? You have to stay calm and listen to what I have to say.”

Her eyes danced momentarily. “Okay. What is it?”

“It’s bad,” I said, lowering my voice as I spoke into the receiver. “They’ve got her.”

Trixie’s mouth opened slowly in a silent scream. I didn’t have to say anything else, at least not yet. She had to know who “they” were. And I had no doubt she knew whom I was referring to when I said “her.”

She looked as though she’d lost the ability to breathe. She closed her eyes a moment, closed her mouth, breathed in through her nose. When her eyes opened, she asked, “Is she okay? Have they hurt her?”

“She’s not hurt,” I said. “Right now, she’s with Leo. Gary’s parked outside the prison, in his truck, waiting for me to come back.”

Trixie looked at me with eyes that were losing hope. “Claire? And Don?”

The Bennets.

I shook my head from side to side, no more than a sixteenth of an inch each way. Just enough to convey the message.

“Oh my God,” Trixie whispered. “Oh my God.”

I couldn’t help myself-it’s the way my mind works-but I thought of that scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the remake with Donald Sutherland, when the real Brooke Adams, after she’s been taken over by her pod replacement, collapses like a withered corn husk.

She was crying, but trying not to attract attention to herself. Even in her grief, she knew that she didn’t want to draw the guard over. That might lead to questions. She found a tissue tucked up in her sleeve, dabbed her eyes.

“Trixie,” I said, “I need you to focus for me. I’m here-”

“I know why you’re here,” she said. A tear ran down her cheek. She sniffed, wiped her nose with the tissue. “He wants his money.”

“Yes.”

“And he’ll kill Katie if he doesn’t get it.”

“Yes.”

“How much does he think there is?”

“Half a million.”

“There’s not that much. There’s just under three hundred thousand.”

“I’m sure he’d be happy with that,” I said. “He might be angry at first, but if he can really get his hands on that kind of money, he’ll take it.”

Trixie swallowed, tried to pull herself together. “I can tell you where it is, but I don’t know how you’re going to get it. They’ll have to let me out, I can’t imagine any other way…”

“Trixie, they’re not going to let you out. There’s no way. Why would they have to?”

“It’s in a safety-deposit box. They’ll have to let me out, just for an hour.”

“Trixie, the only way they might let you out is if you tell them what’s going on, that your daughter’s life is at stake. The moment Gary finds out you’ve been released, he’ll know you’ve told them what’s going on. And then I don’t know what he’ll do.”

More tears now. But even though Trixie was in a panic, she was also thinking. For Katie’s sake. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to have to tell you what to do. You’ll need to write this down.”