“I was just trying to help.”
Pockmark strolled back into the room, quipped, “All quiet,” and, spotting the Malibu Barbie on the floor, quickly scooped it up and put it back on the shelf before Bullock could scream at him not to.
“Fuck,” said Bullock, and Pockmark looked at him, baffled, wondering why his action hadn’t rated a thank-you.
“What do you want from me?” Trimble said. “I help you out, I tip you off to things, I run your fucking errands. And you’ve done right by me, I’ll grant you that. And I’ve even stood by and done nothing when I find out you put my old partner in the hospital.”
“Who told you that?” Bullock demanded. “I’ve been over this with you.”
Trimble didn’t think that was worthy of a response. He continued, “Who was it talked Eddie into helping you out? It wasn’t me. I didn’t pick him, and I wouldn’t have, either. That was your decision. I’ve known him long enough to know he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. So he double-crossed you. That’s too bad, but I don’t see how that’s my fault.”
I felt the weight of the gun in my jacket pocket. I didn’t know where this was going, this set of hostilities between Trimble and Bullock. And I didn’t know whether it was going to afford me any sort of advantage.
“I’ll tell you what,” Trimble said. “Let Walker here, and his daughter, take a walk.” Bullock eyed the cop suspiciously, wondering what kind of game he was up to. Trimble continued. “They don’t have anything to do with this. He made the mistake of buying the wrong car, his daughter made the mistake of driving it. They’ve never done you any harm, they didn’t rip you off.”
Bullock stared at Trimble as though he’d never seen him before. “Have you lost your fucking mind? You’re suggesting we let them walk out of here. After they know what we’ve been up to, about that smartass photographer, about Eddie, where I live and conduct my business. You think, we let them walk out of here, they’ll just forget any of that stuff ever happened? You think that maybe all we have to do is ask them real nice?”
Even I was thinking Trimble had lost his mind. If I were Bullock, I’d kill us, too. Angie clutched me more tightly.
“I’m just saying,” Trimble said, “that maybe it’s time to lay low for a bit. You start piling up corpses, it has a way of attracting attention.”
Bullock suddenly looked contemplative, as though he might actually be considering what Trimble had to say. “You make some interesting points, Steve. I’d like to think on them a moment, perhaps discuss a couple of things with Mr. Walker here. Would you mind waiting out in the garage while I did that?”
Trimble eyed Bullock warily. None of this felt right.
“Sure,” Trimble said, then turned and walked out of the room, but not before looking over at me. He did something funny with the corner of his mouth that seemed to say “Hey, I gave it a shot. Good luck.”
Once Trimble was out of the room, Bullock walked over to Blondie and said, in a loud enough whisper that I could hear it, “Do him.”
Blondie turned, but I was taking a step in his direction, and shouting, “Trim-”
Pockmark was behind me, grabbing me at the top of my jacket and tossing me onto the couch. Angie screamed as I tumbled onto the cushions. Pockmark had his gun out and pointed at me as Blondie went out the door and pulled it shut behind him.
“You’re not going to kill him,” I said.
Bullock said, “He’s been a pain in the ass for a while. You start seeing the signs, that he’s starting to get some crisis of conscience or something. There’s nothing worse than a cop with a conscience.”
“He wasn’t bullshitting you,” I said. “You let us walk out of here, we’ll forget everything.”
“Sure,” Bullock said. “Sure. That’s exactly what I’d do, if I was you.”
Outside, there was a popping noise. One lone shot in the night, followed by silence. Not enough to make anyone go to their phone and put in a call to the cops. You hear one shot, you listen for another, to confirm your suspicions that something’s amiss. When you don’t hear it, you go back to sleep. Just like car alarms.
Angie heard it, and she looked at me. There wasn’t much hope in her eyes.
“I mean it,” I said. “We walk out of here, you never hear from us again.” Desperate for any way to sweeten the offer, I said, “You can even keep the car.”
I guess that struck Bullock as pretty funny, because he started to laugh.
“I’m serious. You can probably sell it for what I paid for it. I’ll sign it over to you.”
“Oh, that’s too much,” Bullock said, and laughed again.
As I’d seen so often before, the laughter sent him into a coughing fit. There was one loud, hoarse cough, and when he inhaled to catch his breath, it set off another. He began to make some awful hacking noises in his throat, like maybe he was going to cough up a hairball or something.
Bullock went to grab for the water bottle, then remembered that he’d finished it and tossed the empty into the trash. He glanced around, then peered into the cardboard box still sitting on his desk, the one Blondie had brought in from the garage, containing everything he’d found in my car.
I remembered that my cell phone was in there, but something else had caught Bullock’s eye.
He reached in and came out with a full bottle of Snapple apple juice. And I wondered, just for a moment, where that had come from. I hadn’t bought any bottle of apple juice.
And then I realized it was the bottle I’d picked out of my own recycling basket, the one I’d taken with me when I went out for my first surveillance job to track Angie’s stalker, Trevor.
What a trivial problem he seemed now.
And I remembered how, once I’d filled that bottle myself, I’d tucked it into the pouch behind the passenger seat to keep it from rolling around.
And I remembered that it was, of course, not apple juice.
Bullock uncapped the bottle and moved it toward his mouth.
I thought back to that discussion Lawrence had had with me, about the robbery he’d interrupted, the guy with the ragweed allergy. How Lawrence had said you had to wait for your moment when you were in a tense situation, and that when it had arrived, you’d know it.
I had a feeling, that if there was ever going to be a moment, this was going to be it.
36
I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket, wrapped it around the cold metal of the gun’s grip, got my body ready to launch off the couch in a hurry.
Bullock didn’t just sip from the bottle. He took a long swig, which meant my day-old urine was already hitting the back of his throat before he had a chance to realize that it was not, in fact, apple juice. Already I was thinking that being over on the couch, away from the desk and off to one side, was a good place to be, because I was expecting, any second, something of an eruption from Bullock.
I was not disappointed.
It all took less than a second or two, but if you could have slowed down time, broken it down into milliseconds, you’d have seen his eyes bug out first. Then the cheeks puffed out, the body lunged forward, and then he spewed. The contents of his mouth sprayed out across his desk and onto the carpeting beyond. There was a lot of noise that went along with this. It was as if you went into a recording studio to combine screams of anguish, retching, and intense vulgarity. Somewhere, in the midst of perhaps the most disgusting sound I’d ever heard, Bullock managed to let loose with a loud, gargly “Shit!”
I felt no compunction to point out to Bullock that while he had that wrong, he was closer than he knew.
Pockmark thought, and had every reason to believe, that his boss must be dying. He rushed across the room at the first signs of Bullock’s distress, then dodged as Bullock spewed across his desk, hitting the box and phone and intercom and the envelopes of cash Trimble had taken off Eddie Mayhew.
“What?” Pockmark said. “Is the juice bad?”
He’d totally forgotten about me, and his gun hung down at his side as he w
ent to save his boss, who was now spitting repeatedly, and not particularly fussy about where any of it landed.
Angie’s mouth was hanging open in shock. And I was on my feet, taking the gun out of my pocket and, gripping it with both hands, pointing it at Pockmark, then Bullock, then back at Pockmark, not having to waver too much, because the two of them were now pretty much shoulder to shoulder.
“Ewww,” said Pockmark.
“Fuck!” Bullock said, spitting onto the top of his desk. “What the fuck is this?” He glanced at the bottle, put it up to his nose, and turned his head away, disgusted.
I didn’t have a lot of time to think about what I was going to say, so I said the first thing that came to mind, and that was “Freeze!” I was close to saying “Freeze, motherfuckers!” but it struck me as even more of a cliche, and besides, my daughter was standing right there.
Bullock and Pockmark looked at me, stupidly at first, a kind of “Huh?” expression on both their faces. Bullock wiped the back of his left sleeve across his mouth. When Pockmark saw the gun in my hand, he went to raise his and I shouted at him, “Freeze, motherfucker!”
I couldn’t help myself. I could always apologize to Angie later. And the thing was, it worked this time.
Pockmark froze.
Angie, who two seconds earlier had been reeling from Bullock’s explosive performance, now looked at me with further astonishment, wondering, perhaps, what I had done with her real father.
“I want you to put that gun on the floor,” I said, pointing my gun now directly at Pockmark.
“I thought you dumbfucks searched him,” Bullock said.
“We did! He had nothing on him!”
“You call that nothing?”
“I asked you to put that gun down,” I said, stepping around in front of Angie to shield her in case Pockmark decided to try something stupid.
But he still wouldn’t drop it. It hung there at the end of his arm, still pointing down. He glared at me, as if we were engaged in a staring contest, that he would no more drop his gun than look away.
I didn’t see this situation getting any better if something wasn’t done about it right away. Blondie was still out there somewhere, probably coming back soon. At the moment, I only had two of them to deal with, and it wasn’t going to get any easier with three.
So I shot Pockmark.
For a second, I couldn’t believe I’d done it. No one was more surprised than I. Well, maybe Pockmark. And Angie seemed a bit taken aback as well, because she screamed. From where she stood, slightly behind and to the side of me, she didn’t know for a moment who’d actually pulled the trigger. And in that room, the shot sounded like a cannon going off.
I’d aimed a bit low when I squeezed the trigger, not wanting to actually shoot Pockmark in the head or chest, even though I realized that if you want to bring someone down, you aim for the biggest part of his body, the torso. Aiming for someone’s leg and actually hitting it was not something you could count on, so I guess you could say I got lucky. Certainly luckier than Pockmark.
“Jesus!” he yelped, and the gun hit the floor. He stumbled over to a chair, both hands pressed over a growing shiny patch on his black jeans. “Jesus Christ.”
There was a time when I might have apologized for something like this, but not tonight.
Bullock said nothing. He kept glaring at me.
“Angie, sweetheart,” I said.
From behind me, she said, “Yes, Daddy?”
“Do you think you could go over and pick up that gun? Very carefully, by the handle?”
“Okay.”
She came around me, and I noticed that she was still a bit unsteady on her feet. When she bent over to pick up the gun, I thought she might fall over, but she steadied herself, grabbed it gingerly, found it a bit heavier than she’d anticipated, I think, and handed it to me. I slipped it into my other pocket.
Now all we had to do was get out of there. Get to the Virtue, hope it would start, get Angie to a hospital to make sure she was okay. But Blondie was still out there someplace. In the house, maybe out in the garage. And, as thick as the walls seemed to be in this old house, he might still have heard the shot, or Angie’s scream, and be on his way back to investigate.
To Bullock, I said, “Take out your knife.”
“I don’t have a knife.” Didn’t even blink.
“The one in your back pocket, the one you put to my neck when we were in the garage.”
“I don’t have it now,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “You can either toss out your knife, or Barbie and Ken get it.”
Bullock suddenly looked alarmed. “What? What did you say?”
“Toss it, or the dolls die,” I said.
Bullock almost smiled. “You’re absolutely out of your mind. Whaddya gonna do, take one of them hostage?”
That was a plan I could keep in reserve. For now, I was happy to play executioner. I turned the gun toward the shelves of pink packages. I didn’t really have to aim. I could fire anywhere and hit something.
So I did.
I caught the Munsters version of Ken and Barbie. The box spun on the shelf, hit the back wall, and bounced back onto the floor. The bullet had torn through the packaging and caught Ken in the neck, knocking his Frankenstein-like head clean off.
“My God!” Bullock said. “What have you done? You some kind of fucking animal?”
“Toss out the knife,” I said.
“That’s Munster Barbie! It took me five years to find that!”
I fired again, putting a hole through the door of Barbie’s pink Volkswagen minibus.
It then occurred to me that I’d fired three bullets. I had no idea how many I had left, and there was no sense using them all on defenseless pieces of plastic.
“Stop it!” Bullock screamed. “Stop it!”
He reached into his back pocket and threw the switchblade, closed, across the room.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Are you insane?”
Pockmark, leaning into his chair and still holding his wounded leg, looked at Bullock and said, “So now he’s insane. He shoots me in the fucking leg, you got nothing to say. “
I was ready to move out. Bullock and Pockmark, to the best of my knowledge, were disarmed. But I had to get myself and Angie down the hall, out the door, to the garage, get the door open, get us into the Virtue, get it started (fingers crossed), and drive away. Once I was out of this room and no longer able to keep a gun on Bullock, he’d probably come after us.
And Blondie was still out there.
A phone rang.
I looked at Bullock, who looked at me. The ringing was coming from inside the cardboard box where he’d found the Snapple bottle.
It was my cell phone.
Tentatively, I moved closer to the desk, still holding the gun on Bullock, and reached in with my left hand for the phone. The phone was damp, but there wasn’t time to be squeamish about picking it up. I pressed the button after the third ring and put the phone up to my left ear, half expecting it to be Bertrand Magnuson, checking in with me to make sure I wasn’t using a weapon in the performance of my duties as a Metropolitan staff member. No, I could say honestly, I was only shooting people in my off-time.
“Hello,” I said evenly.
“Mr. Walker? It’s Trevor.”
Jesus. Just what I needed.
“This isn’t really a good time, Trevor. I’ve kind of got my hands full.”
“Okay, listen, I’m sorry, but I wanted to know how it was going, because if you haven’t found Angie, I think I can tell you where she is.”
“I know where she is, Trevor. She’s here with me.”
“So you’re at the house on Wyndham Lane?”
I felt blood pounding in my temples. “That’s right, Trevor. We’re in a house on Wyndham Lane.”
“Excellent.”
“Trevor, where are you?”
“Well, I’m sort of in the bushes, by the house. I didn’t think you wer
e here, because I didn’t see your car or anything. But that big black SUV? The one they used to take away Angie? It’s here. But if you’re with Angie, I’m assuming everything’s okay, right?”
“Not entirely, Trevor. There are still a few things to work out. How, exactly, did you know where to find us?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you, but you’re gonna be pissed.”
37
“Go ahead,” I said to Trevor, trying to keep my voice even. “I won’t get mad. I promise.”
Angie was feeling a bit unsteady on her feet and plopped back onto the couch while I continued to hold a gun on Bullock. Pockmark had lost a fair bit of blood, and his head hung down onto his chest as he gripped his thigh. The guy needed to get to a hospital.
“This was the thing I was going to tell you a while ago,” Trevor said, “but I couldn’t think of a way to do it, but I’ve been thinking about it and decided the best thing to do is help Angie, no matter what.”
“Okay, Trevor. I’d be real grateful if you can move this story along and just tell me.”
“I know what I’ve done, some people might call inappropriate. But I wasn’t doing it for my own purposes alone. I think there’s a larger issue at stake here, a point to be made about how we’re all being monitored in one way or another, that Big Brother is watching our every move, and that we need to take a stand against this kind of dehumanization that threatens to rob us of our-”
“Trevor!”
“Okay. You know that day you found me at your place, and I had my computer with me, and I was looking for my dog?”
“The tracking thing,” I said. “Let me guess.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
“You’ve been tracking Angie’s whereabouts, with the same kind of gizmo you clipped onto your dog’s collar.”
“You don’t have to thank me now,” Trevor said. “When I ran into Angie the other day at Starbucks, I was helping her with her coat and I sort of slipped it into one of the inside pockets where I figured she’d never look.”
I glanced over at Angie, and at her coat, draped over the end of the couch.
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