“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 ca
r 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.
“Bingo. So we take a few runs by your place, till we see the car, follow it, and you know the rest. But you want to know an even bigger coinky-dink?”
I said nothing.
“When we were looking for that car, around where this detective lives, we saw a car out back that looked awfully familiar to us. An old Buick. The night before, we were out conducting a bit of business, and this Buick starts tailing us, even started shooting at us. We got a pretty good idea it was this Jones fellow, although he had someone else in the car with him.”
I felt a bit weak in the knees. “What kind of business?” I asked, playing dumb.
“We’re also in the retail business. We sell suits. Nothing but the best. Like this,” he said, stepping out from behind the desk, raising his hands and turning around. “Pretty nice merchandise, wouldn’t you say? Armani.”
“The suits,” I said. “I saw them in the garage. So you guys not only deal cocaine, you steal high-end designer clothing.”
Bullock smiled. “We’re diversified. That’s the kind of economy we’re dealing with these days. Can’t put all your eggs in one basket.” He paused, said to Pockmark, “I wonder how things are going in the garage?”
I wondered, too. Maybe Trimble was out there. Maybe he’d subdued Blondie, was on his way to take out his buddy and the Barbie collector.
Bullock pressed the intercom unit on his desk. “Hey!” he shouted. “How’s it going out there? Hello?”
There was a bit of static and shouting as Bullock and Blondie tried to speak to each other at the same time. Bullock looked at me sadly, shook his head. “I’m trying to run this place more professionally, and look at the problems I have.”
Finally, he and Blondie coordinated their button pushing, and Blondie’s voice came through clearly. But he sounded very concerned.
“I think we may have a problem, Mr. Bullock.”
Bullock frowned, glowered at the intercom. “I don’t want to hear that kind of shit! What do you mean, a problem?”
“There’s nothing in this car. Not a fucking thing.”
31
“Nothing?” Bullock said.
“Everything I found, I tossed in a box, but it’s definitely not what you were hoping for,” Blondie said over the speaker.
“Bring it here,” he said, and took his finger off the intercom. He looked first at Pockmark, then at me. “What kind of shit you trying to pull here?” He was breathing pretty heavily now, which triggered a short coughing fit and prompted another sip of water.
“Believe me,” I said, “if there’s anyone here who wanted you to find what you wanted in that car, it’s me.”
This was not a good development. Bullock not finding what he’d hoped to, his face flushed red with anger. Not a good development at all.
Unless, of course, it was a good development.
Maybe this would buy me and Angie some time. Maybe this would give Trimble time to do what he had to do. And speaking of Trimble, where the hell was he? Anytime he wanted to make an appearance and bring an end to these proceedings was okay by me.
Blondie strode through the door, holding a small cardboard box that had once held a dozen bottles of Ernest amp; Julio Gallo wine, set it on Bullock’s desk, and took a step back, like he didn’t want to be too close when his boss peered inside. The box definitely wasn’t large enough to hold a shipment of coke, although I really had no idea how big a box you’d need for a shipment of coke.
Bullock peered over the edge of the box, looked at Blondie. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“That’s it,” Blondie said, a hint of nervousness in his voice. I think he was worried he might be coming down with a case of “shot messenger syndrome.” It couldn’t be fun giving bad news to a guy like Bullock, who was still looking into the box, incredulous in his ill-fitting suit, still holding Barbie’s pregnant friend Midge in his left hand.
“The fuck is this? An owner’s manual, an apple juice, a box of Kleenex, is this some kind of joke? And whose cell phone is this?” He tossed Midge aside, picked up the phone, threw it back into the box.
Blondie nodded in my direction. “It’s his. I took it off him earlier, put it in the box with the other stuff.”
“You looked in the doors?”
“I looked in the doors, just where Mr. Indigo said the stuff would be. There’s nothing in the doors.”
“I gotta see this for myself.” He left the box on his desk, headed for the door. He told Pockmark to stay with Angie, and ordered me to come with him to the garage.
The tape around my ankle felt as though it was coming loose.
We entered the brilliantly lit garage, where my Virtue took center stage, hood, trunk, and all four doors open. As I came around the car, I saw what a mess it was in. The panels on the insides of all four doors had been removed, exposing the skeletal sheet-metal work and side-impact beams.
“See for yourself,” Blondie said, which was the wrong thing to say, judging by the look Bullock gave him. Bullock looked inside all four doors, ran his hand inside where you couldn’t see, but carefully, so as not to cut himself on the edge of the exposed metal.
“When I couldn’t find it in the doors,” Blondie said, “I took the mats and everything out of the trunk, and there was nothing there. I pulled out the backseat, see if there was anything under there, which there wasn’t, so I put it back. I looked under the front seats, reached up into the springs. I’m tellin’ ya, there’s nothing in this goddamn car.”
Bullock began to pace, five steps one way, spinning around, five steps back. “This is not good,” he said. “This is not good.”
Blondie said, “Maybe you should call Mr. Indigo. We got that guard, he can get a message to him, ask whether the stuff might be someplace else and-”
“We are not calling Mr. Indigo!” Bullock bellowed. “That is the last fucking thing we are going to do, you understand?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m not calling him, you’re not calling him, no one is fucking calling him!”
“Okay, gotcha.”
“The last thing I need is him thinking I’ve fucked this up somehow! He’s trusting me to run things, and if I can’t do it, he can just as easily call someone in from the West Coast to do it instead, you understand?”
“I said yeah. Chill out, man.”
“Chill out? Is that what you said? You want me to chill out?” Bullock was in Blondie’s face now, as best he could, being about six inches shorter. “Getting this car back, recovering this shipment, this is a very important test not just for me, but for the three of us. That’s why we’re going to figure this out, find the coke, and Mr. Indigo will know nothing more than that we did our fucking jobs. Is that clear?”
“Yeah, boss.”
I spoke up. “What about in the rocker panels? Like in The French Connection. That’s where they hid the stuff in the movie.”
“Shut up,” Bullock said.
He reach
ed into his back pocket, pulled out a slender item, black in color, about six, seven inches long, pressed a button on it I couldn’t see, and suddenly this item was twice as long, and half of it was very shiny. And then he began, slowly, to walk toward me.
“I think,” he said, waving the switchblade very slowly, “that you’re holding out on me.”
I took a step back toward the garage door. “No,” I said. “I’m not. If I knew where those drugs were, I’d go get them for you now. I have no idea why they aren’t in that car.”
Bullock kept approaching, the knife kept waving. I thought, although I couldn’t be sure, that I could see small traces of blood near the blade’s base. I had a pretty good idea whose blood that might be.
I pressed myself up against the garage door, Bullock only inches from me now. He brought the knife close to my neck.
I thought I felt the gun sag just a bit against my ankle.
“That’s a very kind offer,” he said. “Makes me think you might already have an idea where those drugs might be.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t. I swear on every one of your Barbies, I don’t know.”
His eyes danced. Was my comment meant to convey sincerity, or was I mocking him, he wondered. And I wondered, Why is it, despite my best efforts, I keep saying and doing things that make me seem like an asshole?
Blondie said, “It doesn’t make much sense for him to have taken the drugs, boss. I mean, we were following the car for quite a while tonight, and would he be dumb enough to let his daughter drive it around if he knew there was drugs in it, or if he’d known there used to be drugs in it?”
Blondie was my new best friend.
“So what are you saying?” Bullock said.
“I’m saying that the drugs must never have been in the car. At least not since he bought it, or got it off that other guy who bought it at the auction.”
“You think that private detective knew, and he got the drugs out of the car?” Bullock asked.
“That’s crazy,” I offered. “Once we left the auction, I took the car. It’s been with me from the moment we drove it out of the compound.”
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