Bad Guys (28 page)

He put his fist to his mouth, coughed and cleared his throat. In his other hand he carried a small glass bottle of juice, and took a sip.

“So, you must be Mr. Walker,” he said, stepping closer to me but not extending his hand.

“And you must be Mr. Bullock,” I said.

He looked surprised, and pleased. “Hey, you know who I am. I guess the word’s getting around, huh? You hear that?” He was talking to Pockmark now. “He knows who I am.”

“That’s great, boss.”

“I’ve been trying to enhance my reputation of late,” Bullock said to me. “So you having heard about me, that’s good.”

I was less sure. It might have been stupid, addressing him by his name. It was one more reason not to let us out of here alive. I knew who he was. Of course, I already knew where he lived, didn’t I? Wasn’t that enough knowledge to get me killed?

“I was at the auction, when you went ballistic on the photographer. Someone picked you out of those pictures later.”

Bullock shook his head, then waved his finger at me accusingly. “That photographer was a very rude person. He disrespected me. And I can’t afford that kind of thing right now, not from anybody.” He coughed, took another sip from the bottle.

“His name was Stan. I didn’t know him real well, but he was a friend. He was a good guy.”

Bullock shrugged. “It’s not very nice to go around taking someone’s picture without their permission. And the other thing is, he didn’t turn out to be, in the end, a very good friend to you. Because if he hadn’t been rude to me at that auction, and interfered with my business, chances are you wouldn’t be here right now.”

I puzzled over that one a moment.

“It’s simple,” Bullock said, noting my confusion. “If we hadn’t had that little scene and attracted so much attention, I could have hung around and bid on your car here myself, and believe me, I’d have outbid you no matter what. And then I’d have got the car, and had what I wanted from it by now. But when all that shit went down, I had to get out of there. You see, there tend to be a lot of feds around at a government auction.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

Bullock shook his head. “Anyhoo, despite the odd setback, everything’s coming together just as it should. We now have the car, that photographer’s been taught a lesson, and soon we can all get on with our lives.”

Taught a lesson.

“So you’ve got the car,” I said, gesturing behind me. “You’ve got what you wanted. Now let me and my daughter leave here.”

“Come along to the house,” Bullock said. To Pockmark, he said, “With me.”

We walked out in single file, Bullock ahead of me, Pockmark behind. We went outside, walked about thirty feet to the house, entering through a back door that took us through an old but elegant kitchen and down a hall until we reached a heavy wood door. Bullock admitted us to what I guessed was his study or office.

I was not expecting to be nearly blinded by pink.

Three of the four walls were lined with shelves stocked with hundreds and hundreds of pink packages. Not stacked as they might be in a storage room, but on display, on parade. Tiny spotlights hanging from tracks bolted to the ceiling were strategically aimed at the boxes, and light shone off the clear plastic windows on the front of them. It was as though I had wandered into the Barbie aisle at Toys “R” Us. There were hundreds of differently costumed Barbies, and Kens, and friends and associates of the Barbies and Kens, plus pink plastic houses and furniture and cars.

In the middle of the room, things were a bit more traditional. There was an oversize desk with a leather chair behind it, a couple more leather chairs and a leather couch up against one wall, just in front of one of the display shelves, and it was there that Angie sat, looking dazed. Bullock took a position behind his desk, nearly bare save for a phone, a small box that appeared to be the other end of the intercom system in the garage, and a bottle of water. Pockmark had taken a position next to Blondie, both of them by the open door, keeping an eye on me. I hadn’t noticed this before, but he had a gun in his right hand, pointed, for the moment, at the blood-red carpeting.

“Sweetheart,” I said.

“Hey, Daddy,” Angie said tiredly.

I ran over to her, went to my knees, and took her into my arms. Feebly, she wrapped hers around me.

“Are you okay?” I asked her, holding her by the shoulders and looking into her weary eyes. She nodded slowly. “I’m going to get you out of here as soon as possible, get you back home, okay?”

“Okay, Daddy.”

Bullock told Blondie to go back to the garage and start taking the car apart. I looked across the desk at him, but my eyes wandered. I couldn’t help but look at the Barbies.

“I see you’ve noticed my little girls,” Bullock said, making a horrific phlegmy noise in his throat. He finished off the juice in the bottle, tossed it into a trash can by the desk, and reached for the water bottle.

“Yeah.”

“Your daughter and I, we were having a wonderful discussion about Barbies earlier,” he said. “She said she sold most of hers at a garage sale.”

“A couple of years ago, I think.” I was about to say that she’d outgrown them, then thought better of it.

“Aww, that’s really a shame. Terrible mistake. You should never sell off your childhood toys. You grow up, years later, you really regret it.” He sounded quite sincere.

“That’s true,” I said, thinking, Would a guy engage you in conversation about his Barbie collection if he was planning to kill you?

“You agree?”

“I’m a bit of a collector myself. Not of Barbies, but science fiction memorabilia.”

“Oh!” said Barbie Bullock, all excited. “You’ll love this one.” He grabbed a pink box off one of the lower shelves. “This is the
Star Trek
version of Ken and Barbie.”

He handed me the box. The dolls, still behind acetate and held in an upright position with small plastic twist-ties, were dressed for service aboard the USS
Enterprise
.

Ken was in a tan shirt and black pants, Barbie in a red minidress. “From the original series,” I said. “I recognize the getups.”

“Yes, yes!” He took the box back from me, returned it to its spot on the shelf.

Angie shifted on the couch, rested her head on the arm. She was watching us like we were part of a dream she was having.

In addition to boxed dolls, there was the pink Barbie Volkswagen minibus, and a pink Beetle with an open roof for sliding Barbie and her friends in for a spin. Barbie houses filled with Barbie furniture, Barbie cases, Barbie everything.

“Here are a few I’m most proud of,” Bullock said. I glanced at Pockmark, trying to judge from his expression whether he saw anything strange in all this. If he did, he was keeping it to himself.

“Here’s Splashin’ Barbie, with her own personal watercraft. And Winter Fantasy Barbie, Malibu Barbie of course, you couldn’t not have a Malibu Barbie. And Cheerleader Flex Barbie, you can move her arms and legs better, so you can put her in all these cheering positions, which of course is never going to happen because I don’t like to take the dolls out of the box.”

“Sure,” I said. “Makes them more valuable that way.”

“Of course. It’s nice, though, when you get the odd one that has been taken out of the box, so you don’t feel restricted. You can handle it, play with it, that kind of thing. Here’s my Barbie Romance Novel Gift Set, where she looks like one of those heroines on the front of a romance novel, not that I read those fucking things. And this here,” he held up a Barbie dressed in a skintight—or plastic-tight—black latex, wielding a whip, “is Catwoman Barbie.”

Something for Trixie for Christmas, I thought.

“And check this out.” He handed me another box. Inside, Ken was dressed in a tuxedo, and Barbie’s hair looked especially puffy and windswept. “That’s the James Bond 007 Ken and Barbie Gift Set.”

“I never knew,” I said. “I simply had no idea.”

Bullock looked at me seriously. “Can I ask you something?”

I wasn’t in any position to say anything but “Sure.”

“You think this makes me some kind of fag?”

“I really hadn’t thought about it one way or another. As I said, I’m a collector myself, and so I try not to judge.” Fact was, I was not thinking “fag.” I was thinking “nut.”

“Well, I’m not a fag. I like pussy, ask anyone. Ain’t that right?” he asked Pockmark.

“You bet,” said Pockmark. “You love pussy.”

“That’s right. You got time for a story?”

Slowly, I nodded.

“I had a sister growing up, she was two years older than me, my mom showered her with Barbies, you know? Kind of a shared interest. And when I was around six, and my sister, her name was Leanne, this would be when she was eight, she got hit by a car, you know. She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, so, this kind of cracked up my mom, she just kept on buying dolls and outfits and givin’ them to me. And so I took them, built up a collection, to keep my mom happy. Like it was keeping my sister alive somehow, you know?”

“Where was your father?” I asked, genuinely wondering. It was hard to picture a dad standing by and watching this happen.

“Oh, him, he fucked off when I was like one. My mom raised me without that asshole. So my mom, she died a few years ago, too, she had cancer, but this collection, it’s my way of keeping the memory of her and my sister alive.”

Pockmark said, “Our boss here, he’s sort of a tragic figure.”

Barbie Bullock nodded. “Yeah, that’s kind of what I am.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“The thing is, I’ve really kind of gotten into it over the years. It’s good to have a hobby, right? Once, couple years back, we busted into a warehouse, thinking it was going to be full of stereos, and whaddya know, the place is jammed to the rafters with Barbie stuff. Must have been a shipment from Mattel to a toy store or something, it was like busting into Fort Knox by accident.”

He cleared his throat, like he was getting hoarse. He coughed twice, took a drink of water.

“Well,” I said, feeling the tape pull at the hairs on my leg. I was sure I’d put on enough to hold the gun in place. The last thing I wanted was for it to fall out of my pants. I didn’t think there was a chance I could go for it, get it into my hand, before Pockmark had emptied his own gun into me.

My hope was that I wouldn’t even need it. That Trimble would make an appearance at just the right moment.

“And there’s my Wonder Woman Barbie. Check out her little magic lasso. And probably the neatest thing in my collection, Barbie and Ken dressed as Lily and Herman Munster, from that show in the sixties. You ever watch that?”

“Sure. And
The Addams Family
.”

“Oh, they have a set for that, too, but I’m still hunting for that one. I spotted one on eBay one time, but they wanted too much for it. And this here is Barbie’s friend, Midge. See how her tummy’s all big? She’s pregnant, but the baby’s just there with a magnet, you can take it off or put it back on again. Some nuts, they thought this doll was immoral, but I think it’s perfectly natural, don’t you?”

“Sure.” I paused. “Do you think,” I said, gently, “you might be good enough to let me and Angie walk out of here? I don’t care anything about what you’re up to here. Keep the car, I’ll report it stolen, I don’t care. I’m already pretty unpopular with my insurance company, so this shouldn’t make things all that much worse.”

“As soon as we’ve had a look at the car,” Bullock said. “As soon as we have what we’re looking for. I’m guessing, when you bought that car, you had no idea what you were getting.”

“I still don’t.”

“There’s some fucking outstanding optional equipment on that car. A couple million in coke, to be exact. Tucked inside the door panels. When the feds arrested my boss, Mr. Indigo, he’d recently brought that car across the border, hadn’t had a chance to get his precious cargo out of it yet. And the feds, dumb fucks that they are, never even thought the car was used for smuggling. We’d have known had they found it, they would have entered the stuff into evidence, but they never did, so Mr. Indigo, he gets a message to me, says get that car back, sell the stuff, because he’s got a lot of lawyers to pay, you know? He’s launching an appeal.”

He sipped his water.

“Tell you another story. Couple years ago, in California, guy goes to one of those government auctions, picks himself up a nice little car, real cheap, he’s driving it for like six months, and he goes down to Mexico for the day, and he’s crossing the border, coming home, they pull him over in some random search, and these drug dogs start sniffing, get a whiff of something. The fucking bumpers are loaded with coke, so they arrest the poor son of a bitch.” He laughed, which set off another short coughing fit. He took another sip. “He tells ’em, ‘Hey, those aren’t my drugs in the car, I bought it from the government, they left the drugs in the car.’ And the customs guys, they’re laughing their balls off, you know? Like they hadn’t heard that one before. So the guy, he goes to jail, he’s suing the government now, fuck of a lot of good that’s going to do him.”

“So you figured you’d buy the car at the auction, get the drugs, everything would be fine.”

Bullock nodded. “The thing is, it’s the greatest car for smuggling dope, you know? Little hybrid, environmentally responsible, you drive it, they think it’s fucking Ralph Nader coming through customs. We sailed that car through, half a dozen times. When we weren’t using it for that, Mrs. Indigo liked to drive it around.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, what with all that trouble with that cocksucking photographer, I bailed out. But we have a friend working at the auction place, and we checked with him later, found out who bought the car.”

Lawrence Jones.

“So we track down where the guy lives, and he’s some kind of private detective. And we didn’t find the car at his place, but guess what we did come across?”

Bullock reached into his pocket and pulled out a rumpled check. “We look through his things, and we find a check, written to him, for the very same amount that he paid for the car. That’s quite a coinky-dink, isn’t it? And guess whose name was on that check?”

He tossed the check onto his desk, but I didn’t have to look at it. “And my address was on it, too,” I said.