Bad Guys zw-2

by Linwood Barclay

  The fact was, I didn’t want to tell her anything. First of all, the longer we spoke, the greater chance there was I’d miss the call from Bullock. And second, I might not be able to persuade Sarah not to call the police. She had every right to know what was going on, but right now, I felt the fewer people who knew what was happening, the better the odds we’d get Angie back alive.

  “I just got home. The drive coming back didn’t seem all that long. Both the cars are gone, the only one here is Paul, and he says he doesn’t know where anyone is.”

  “We’re out,” I said.

  “Thanks very much, Captain Obvious. I figured that part out. Where are you? Where’s Angie?”

  I looked at my watch. The call could be coming any moment now. There would probably be a call-waiting beep. But would I be able to get to it fast enough? Would I press the wrong button and lose both calls, the way I usually did when I attempted to switch from one caller to another?

  “I’m with Detective Trimble,” I said. Maybe I could include some elements of truth in my story. “The one who’s trying to find out who tried to kill Lawrence. He agreed to meet me, answer a few questions. Nancy wants me to do some follow-up, you know?”

  “He’s meeting you now? What is it, midnight?”

  “You want to meet these people when they can see you, right?”

  “And where’s Angie? I tried her cell but couldn’t raise her. You don’t suppose she’s gone out to see Trixie again, do you?”

  And I was thinking that I would be thrilled, right about now, for Angie to be visiting with Trixie and being taught how to be the best goddamn dominatrix in the entire world. “Uh, she called me earlier, said her battery was dying, but she was going to a late movie with some friends.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about why she might have gone to see Trixie. But I have a theory.”

  The line beeped.

  “Listen,” I said, hurriedly, “go to bed I won’t be home for a bit but if she’s not home by the time I get there I’ll wait up for her so don’t worry about it I really have to go.”

  The line beeped again.

  “Okay,” said Sarah, who evidently hadn’t detected the beep at her end. “But don’t you want to hear my theory about why-”

  “Gotta go!” I said, hit the button, and said, “Yeah?”

  Trimble intuited that I’d taken another call. He leaned in again, and I tipped the phone toward him.

  “Fuck, I was just about to hang up,” said Bullock on the other end. “What, are you playing with yourself? This call not important enough to you?”

  “I’m sorry. It was my wife. I practically had to hang up on her.”

  “You tell her-” a short cough “-what’s going on?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Because we don’t want her calling the cops, do we?”

  “No.” I swallowed. Trimble, in less than a whisper, said, “Tell them to put your daughter on.” I said, “Let me talk to Angie.”

  “She’s fine, don’t worry about her.”

  “If you want me to deliver this car,” I said, “you’ll put her on the line.”

  Bullock sighed. “Jesus, fine, whatever.” I could hear him say to someone else, “Bring the girl over here, her dad wants to talk to her.” Then some phone fumbling.

  Then: “Daad.” It didn’t sound like her. At least, it didn’t sound like any Angie I knew.

  “Angie, is that you?” I was trying, without much success, to keep the panic out of my voice.

  “Hi, Daddy… I’m so tired.”

  I could tell it was her now, but her words came out slowly, dreamily. “Honey, what’s wrong? Have they given you something?”

  “I’m just really… really tired.”

  “Have they hurt you?”

  “Hmmm? No… Can you come and take me home? I want to go to bed. And I’ve got an essay to do, that’s due tomorrow…”

  “Honey, I’m coming to get you, I’m-”

  “There,” said Bullock. “You satisfied? She’s fine.”

  “What have you done to her? What the fuck is wrong with her?”

  “Just relax. We just gave her a little something to calm her nerves, you know? Make her comfortable. Mellow her out. Sort of like Roofies.” The colloquial for the date rape drug. “But we’re honorable people. We wouldn’t do anything improper.” He coughed, cleared his throat. It sounded as though he was taking a sip of water. “So, you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re at 32 Wyndham Lane. You know where that is?”

  “No,” I said, but was writing down the address in my notebook.

  “We’re a few blocks south of the university, Mackenzie, down in there.” He gave me more detailed directions. It was, if I had my bearings right, a pretty nice part of town. Not quite the Heights, but filled with old, big homes.

  “I can find it,” I said.

  “Come up the drive, you’ll see a three-car garage. Pull up to the center door.”

  “All right.”

  “And don’t do anything dumb. No cops.”

  “No cops,” I repeated. And Bullock broke off the call. I looked at Trimble. “I guess this is it. You know how to find this?” I showed him the address I’d written down, and he nodded.

  Trimble said he would lead the way in his own car, but pull over a couple of blocks short of my destination, then hop into the Virtue with me. He moved pretty quickly in his souped-up unmarked car, and I struggled to keep up with him. He’d glance in his mirror, see that maybe he was losing me, and slow down a bit.

  We entered a heavily treed residential area where the homes cost a hell of a lot more than they did on Crandall. Trimble found a spot to pull over, and I slowed and pulled up alongside so he could get in.

  “We’ll get a bit closer, then I’ll get out before you pull in.”

  I saw him check his gun in the holster that was belted to his waist, and I considered telling him that I had a weapon taped to my ankle, and then thought better of it. I knew what Trimble would say, that carrying a gun was best left to the professionals, and then he’d relieve me of it.

  I didn’t want that, although the tape I’d used to hold the gun in place pulled at the hairs on my calf, and smarted nearly every time I moved my leg.

  We were on Wyndham now, and Trimble was reading house numbers. “Okay, slow down, we should be almost there. Okay, stop.” He had his hand on the door handle and said, “Try to stay cool. You may not think I’m around, but I’ll be watching. Just do what they say, don’t piss them off. We’re going to get your daughter out of this.” He was looking me right in the eye. “You believe me, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I believe you.”

  “And I’d like to get the motherfuckers who put Lawrence in the hospital,” he said. “Maybe we can all get what we want.”

  And then he opened the door and ran up through the trees that shrouded the front lawn of a beautiful old Victorian house. In a moment, he was gone. I let my foot off the brake, slowly moved down the street, still looking for numbers, and then came upon 32. The number was visible below the light over the front door. Slowly, I turned into the drive, a cobblestone affair that rose from the street and wound down along the side of the two-story home, opening up around the back in front of a three-car garage that was separate from the house. There were two lights, one over the center garage door, and a second around the side over a regular door.

  I brought the Virtue to a stop directly in front of the center garage, as asked, and found myself parked next to the black Annihilator, which was backed up to the garage on the right. The add-on bars that protected the front grill were scratched and bent out of shape, no doubt from being used to ram storefronts. Sitting there, engine and lights off, it was a fierce beast asleep.

  I sat in the car, with the engine running, wondering what I should do next. Get out, go knock on a door?

  But then, at the bottom of the door, a sliver of light appeared, and grew wider as the door slowl
y rose. Two sets of legs turned into full bodies as the door glided all the way up electrically. It was two men, neither of whom I recognized, dressed in black jeans and black leather jackets, dark sunglasses perched atop their noses like they were auditioning for bad-guy parts in a Chuck Norris movie.

  The one on the left looked at me and motioned me forward with his index finger, the way the car wash guys do when they lead you onto the track. The two men stepped apart to allow me to drive the Virtue into the garage, and once the car was fully inside, I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the garage door slowly slide back down.

  30

  One of the two guys in leather jackets-he was blond and lean and fit and kind of Swedish looking-approached my door. I put down the window and said, “Should I turn it off? Once it’s off, you never know whether it’s going to start again.”

  Blondie smiled. “You can turn it off.”

  I turned back the key, opened the door. It was a hell of a garage. You could have performed surgery in there. Banks of overhead lights, a spotless concrete floor. Across the back wall, cabinets and tools of the kind you might expect to see in an auto-repair shop. A machine that separated tires from rims, jacks you could push under cars, a broad counter where you could disassemble and fix things.

  The Virtue was the only car in there. The right bay, which the Annihilator might have backed into if it weren’t too tall for the door opening, was empty. And the left bay was filled, but not with any kind of vehicle. There had to be half a dozen long racks, the kind they push around the fashion district, of new suits, tags still attached. As you may have gathered, I am not particularly knowledgeable about matters related to fashion, but this looked like high-end stuff. Boss, Versace, Armani, apparently nothing from the Gap.

  The other one, whose face looked like a relief map of the moon, littered with small round scars as though he’d barely survived chicken pox, came around the back of the car and up to the door. “Keys inside?” Pockmark asked me.

  “Yeah. In the ignition. Look, I’d like to see my daughter now.”

  “I’ll just bet you would,” he said. “That’s the boss’s area. He’ll be here in a minute.” To his blond friend, he said, “You gonna pat him down?”

  Something in my stomach did a somersault.

  “Huh?” said Blondie. “He’s just some fucking doofus, not a cop or a detective or anything.”

  “Yeah, well, check him anyway.”

  I was sure, now, that the slight bulge at the bottom of my right pant leg was as obvious as a football. Maybe I could tell them it was a rare leg goiter. But when I glanced down, I realized it wasn’t all that noticeable. Blondie came up behind me, told me to lift up my arms, patted under there without a great deal of enthusiasm, then reached into the inside pockets of my coat.

  “Ooh,” he said to Pockmark. “He’s carrying a ballpoint. He could have stabbed us to death. There’s nothing else on him but a cell phone.”

  “You should probably take that,” Pockmark said.

  Blondie came around in front of me and held out his hand while I fished the cell out of my jacket and placed it in his palm. He took a few steps over to the counter and set it there. Pockmark had all the car doors open now, plus the trunk lid.

  There was a crackly, staticky noise, and then a voice over a speaker. “Hello?” It was Bullock. “Is this thing working? Hello?”

  Blondie walked over to a small intercom panel on the wall and pressed a button. “Yeah?”

  “Hello?”

  “Don’t press the button when I’m pressing the button, boss,” Blondie said.

  “Okay, you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t press the button when I’m pressing the button,” Bullock said. “This system is supposed to make things easier, asshole.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I need one of you here to watch the girl,” Bullock said.

  “I’ll be right there,” Blondie said, taking his finger off the button and disappearing out the side door. A couple of minutes later, the door reopened, and in walked the man from the auction. Short, not much hair on top, but solid looking, like if you tried to push him over you’d need half a dozen other guys, or else you’d have to attach a bunch of ropes to him and pull him down like he was a Saddam Hussein statue. He was in another expensive-looking suit that didn’t fit him all that well, bunched up around the tops of his shoes, the sleeves too long. I guessed he was one of those kinds of guys you couldn’t fit off the rack, at least not the racks that were in that garage. He’d be wise to kidnap someone sometime who could do alterations.

  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 hundr
eds 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.