Bad Guys

by Linwood Barclay

  “Eddie,” Trimble said.

  “I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “I’m really sorry. So so sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am. Tell Mr. Bullock I’m sorry about this, I’ll make it all up to him.”

  “Eddie, who’d you sell to?”

  Eddie just looked at him, his eyes moistening.

  “Eddie?”

  “The Jamaicans.”

  “It’s a wonder you’re still alive. What did you get?”

  “One-fifty.”

  “What?”

  “One-fifty. A hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “Tell me you’re kidding,” Trimble said, slapping Eddie across the face. “Tell me you’re fucking kidding.”

  “A hundred and fifty could last me a long time. Long time. I watch my pennies.”

  “You should have got half a mill, easy, maybe more. Mr. Bullock was going to make a couple million out of that.”

  Eddie, his cheek red, looked up as a tear ran down his cheek. “I didn’t want to get greedy,” he said.

  “So you got the stuff out of the car before it went to auction, cut a deal behind Bullock’s back, figured you’d pocket the cash yourself. So we’ve got about six, seven thousand in the room here. Where’s the rest of it?”

  “I mailed it.”

  Now Trimble’s face was red, without being slapped. He went very quiet. “Eddie, you what?”

  “I mailed it, to Rio. Some of it I mailed, some of it I FedExed, to different hotels, to be held in care of. You know, in care of me. When I get there, I ask at the front desk, they got any mail for me, I pick it up.”

  “You put more than $140,000 in the mail?”

  “I didn’t want them to find all that on me if they did a search when I was getting on the plane.”

  I had a sinking feeling. We were going to be returning to Bullock’s place with very bad news.

  “Can’t you tell Mr. Bullock I’m sorry? I’ll make this right. I’ll go to Rio, go to all the hotels where I sent the money, and I’ll send it all back. I can put all the cash in a bank, then send him a certified check.”

  Trimble looked at me, shook his head, then tossed a pair of pants at Eddie’s face. “You’re going to have to explain this to Mr. Bullock yourself. Get dressed.”

  Eddie eased himself off the bed, winced when he put his foot on the carpet. “I really do think all my toes are broken,” he said. “Could we stop at the hospital on the way, get somebody to look at this? Or, I know, I know. Listen, couldn’t you tell him you couldn’t find me? You do that, and I’ll send you the money. You can have it all. Mr. Bullock doesn’t ever have to know. You could come to Rio with me, I’ll take you to the hotels. They’re all five-star, we could hang out awhile, at each one. Get ourselves some girls, have a party. But it’s all yours, you don’t want to pay for my room, that’s cool, that’s okay, I understand. I mean, if you could spare me a couple thou, that’d be great, but the rest, it would be yours.” To me, he said, “You can have some, too, I mean, if that’s okay with Detective Trimble.”

  And back to Trimble: “You know what Bullock is going to do to me. You can’t just let that happen. You can’t take me back there. You know what he’ll do to me. He won’t be at all understanding. You know he’ll kill me.”

  Trimble closed his eyes a moment in frustration. “Get dressed, Eddie. We’re going for a ride.”

  He turned away from Eddie, pulled me aside. “This is gonna be ugly. We’ve got no drugs, we’ve got no money, and he—”

  Eddie was running for the sliding glass door to the balcony. He hobbled a bit, trying to keep the weight off his bad foot, flung the door open, and in a second his hands were on the railing, and he was over it like it was a vaulting horse.

  And I thought, for a moment, how odd it was, that a guy, knowing his life was going to be over in a few seconds, would still favor his bad foot so it wouldn’t hurt him too much.

  34

  We both ran to the balcony, but Trimble edged in front of me to get out there first. I noticed he was careful not to touch the railing as he peered over, so I followed his lead. Ten floors down, the lower half of Eddie Mayhew was sprawled across the short hood of a minivan, and the rest of him had gone through the windshield. The van’s alarm system had kicked in and was whooping.

  “Terrific,” said Trimble, going back into the room. He took the case off a pillow and wiped down the back of the chair he’d grabbed, the handles of the over-the-shoulder bag. “Did you touch anything?” he asked me.

  “We didn’t kill him,” I said. “You didn’t kill him. He jumped.”

  “Yeah, well, I had every reason to have tossed him off the balcony, so I might as well have. Did you touch anything?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” I honestly wasn’t certain, shaken as I was by what I’d just seen.

  To be sure, Trimble used the pillowcase to wipe down the doorknobs, and the last thing he did was open the door with it, then tossed the case back into the room. “Put it back on the pillow,” he told me, and I did.

  And then we were in the hall, heading for the elevator. But Trimble shouldered open a door under an Exit sign and we were in the stairwell. “I don’t want anyone downstairs seeing an elevator come up to ten,” he said. He was running down the steps, taking two at a time. We did about a flight every five seconds, and about a minute later, we were back on the first floor, going down a hallway and out a side entrance that wasn’t locked from the inside.

  I had thought we’d be hearing sirens by the time we went outside, but there was only the distant wailing of the van’s alarm from around the other side of the building. As if reading my mind, Trimble said, “No one pays any attention to those things.”

  It was true. Anytime I hear an alarm go off, I figure someone’s hit the wrong button on their remote key by mistake.

  We got into Trimble’s car, me behind the wheel again. I could still see the gun down by the pedal. “Drive out slow,” he said. “We don’t want anyone thinking this is a getaway vehicle.”

  I glanced at the dashboard clock. It was time for another call to home base.

  Trimble got out his cell, entered the number. “Can’t get a signal,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t get a signal. It’s says No Service. Let me try again.” He entered Bullock’s number again, put the phone to his ear. “Cut out. Fucking cells.”

  I went to reach for mine, then realized it was in a cardboard box on Bullock’s desk. “Try again!” I said.

  “Okay, hang on, it’s ringing.” A pause. “Hey, it’s me. Checking in . . . Yeah, I was having trouble getting a signal. Everything okay there?” Another pause. “We’re on our way back, actually. . . . We had a visit with Eddie. . . . No, listen, let me tell you about it when we get back. . . . Yeah, bye.”

  Trimble cleared his throat. “I think Bullock could sense that things didn’t go as well as they might have.”

  I had us on the highway to downtown. Trimble seemed contemplative.

  “Imagine what that must have been like, huh?” he said. “Ten floors down. Then splat.”

  “Imagine,” I said, “thinking that was preferable to being taken back to see Bullock.”

  As we got closer to downtown I asked Trimble what was on his mind.

  “I was thinking about when you have a scarf, or a shirt maybe, and you get a tear at one end, say, and the threads start coming apart. And you try to tidy up the edges, you snip off the loose strings, but then, after another day or so, there are more loose threads. And you realize that the thing is just going to keep unraveling and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it.”

  I slowed for a red light.

  “You know how many people have to die tonight for things to not unravel?” Trimble asked. I thought it was more a rhetorical question, so I didn’t say anything. “You, of course. And your daughter. And Eddie would have had to, if he hadn’t taken care of that himself. And his wife, of course. That one’s going to haunt me forever. There’s enough w
itnesses to fill a streetcar.”

  “Some have died already,” I said. “There’s a photographer at my paper. His name was Stan Wannaker, and your friend Bullock smashed his head in a car door earlier this evening. Not to get anything from him. Just to settle a score. And Lawrence is still probably iffy. It’s only luck that’s kept him alive. When Bullock left him, he had to believe he was leaving him for dead.”

  Trimble said nothing. I guess he didn’t have the energy this time to defend Bullock on that one. He was staring out the window. It was odd. He seemed at peace somehow, like maybe he’d arrived at some kind of a decision.

  “One time,” he said, letting out a small chuckle, “Lawrence and I, back when we were in uniform, we got partnered up one time, years before we’d end up together as detectives, and we get a call, a jumper, a hotel like the Ramada, must have been thirty floors or so. And there’s a guy hanging off the other side of the balcony, the railing behind him, you know, leaning forward, holding on from behind?”

  “I think I see it,” I said.

  “So Lawrence and I—never Larry, right?—go into the room where the balcony is, and the guy says to stand back, or he’ll let go if we come out there. So I stand back in the room and Lawrence gets into the room next door and goes out onto that balcony so he can talk to the guy without getting too close. And Lawrence looks down, and he tells the guy that his balcony, the one Lawrence is standing on, is way better to jump from than the one the guy is on.”

  “Why?”

  “Lawrence is looking down, and he says to the guy, ‘If you jump from your balcony, you might catch the edge of the pool, maybe hit the water, and you’ll probably just bust your spine or something, and you’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of your life sucking your meals through a straw. But if you come around to the next room, and jump off this balcony, you’ll catch the parking lot, and you’ll be dead in a second.’

  “So the guy starts thinking about it, thinks maybe Lawrence is onto something, so he comes in off the balcony, and he’s walking through the room and he says to me, ‘Your partner says I have to jump off the other balcony,’ and I say okay, and escort him next door, and then together, Lawrence and I subdue this guy till the psycho ward arrives.” Trimble smiled to himself. “Saved that dumbass’s life. We pissed ourselves laughing all night over that.”

  “That’s kind of amazing. Smart, too.”

  “Oh, he was good, Lawrence was. He always had a good feel for people, good judge of character.”

  Neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

  “Maybe he made a mistake in my case,” Trimble said.

  “You can still make this right,” I said. “Maybe you can’t undo all the mistakes you’ve made, but maybe you can keep any more big ones from happening.”

  Trimble shook his head, bemused. He looked over at me. “Sometimes you just have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by that.

  We were heading down Wyndham, Bullock’s house half a block away. “What about it, Trimble?” I asked. “How’s this going to play out? I’d kind of like to have some idea before we go in there.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he said. His gun appeared in his lap, gripped tightly in his right hand. “Park the car and get out.”

  We opened the doors at the same time, and I was half out of the front seat as Trimble was coming around the back of the car.

  “Shit,” I said. “I dropped my wallet.”

  And I leaned back into the car, reached up by the accelerator, and slipped my hand around the cold metal of the gun grip. Quickly, before Trimble was around my side of the car, I slipped the gun into the pocket of my jacket. I’d already been patted down once. The odds were that I wouldn’t be again.

  Together, we walked into the house.

  35

  Angie was still on the couch, but, I was relieved to see, more alert this time. As I entered the Hall of Barbies she jumped up and ran to me and I took her into my arms and hugged her, burying my face in her hair.

  “Hey,” I said softly, patting her back. “You okay?”

  She looked up at me, her eyes red, and nodded. “They haven’t hurt you?” I asked. She shook her head.

  “What about you?” she asked, reaching up to touch the left side of my face, which I’d forgotten had a good-size lump on it from much earlier that evening. “Did they hit you?”

  “No,” I said, not able to keep myself from smiling. “That was from someone else.”

  Angie blinked, like maybe she had an inkling for an instant, then dismissed the idea.

  “She’s been a perfect guest,” Bullock said, standing behind his desk as Blondie and Pockmark took up positions just inside the door. “Your Angie was telling me that one Christmas when she was a little girl you assembled her a Barbie house. With a little swing attached to one side, and a spiral staircase on the other?”

  “I remember,” I said. “It took me hours.”

  “I have that one,” Bullock said. “But not here. It’s a little too big for the shelves.”

  I squeezed Angie into me. “We’re going to be okay,” I whispered to her. “I promise you.”

  Bullock snorted, smiled. Trimble stepped around me and Angie so he could face Bullock head-on.

  “Where’s Eddie?” Bullock asked. “You said on the phone that you didn’t have him with you. I specifically told you to bring him back here. I’m running this show now, so when I say jump, you’re supposed to jump. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right, boss,” said Pockmark. “You’re the man.”

  Bullock looked at his underling with the bad complexion and said, “Why don’t you go outside, do a walk of the place, make sure there’s no one around.”

  Pockmark, almost cheerful, said, “Yeah, sure, I could do that.”

  “Eddie was unable to join us,” Trimble said. “He figured he’d get treated better taking a leap down ten stories, rather than come here and face you.”

  Bullock was stone-faced. “What are you telling me?”

  “He jumped. He’s dead.”

  Bullock leaned forward. “Jesus Christ on a saltine, are you shitting me?”

  “No.”

  “But you got the stuff, right? Before he jumped? You got the stuff?”

  “There is no stuff. He sold it.”

  Bullock was starting to hyperventilate, which sent him into a coughing fit. He drank a few sips from the nearly empty water bottle.

  “Then you got the money. Tell me you got the fucking money.”

  Trimble said, “Not exactly. He sold the shipment for a handful of magic beans to the Jamaicans. A hundred and fifty thou.”

  “A hundred fifty?” Bullock was stone-faced no more. He was stunned. “He sold that for a hundred fifty? That would have kept half the junkies in this city happy for a year. A hundred fifty?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bullock made a fist and slammed it so hard onto the table that we all jumped, even Blondie. A pink display box featuring Malibu Barbie slipped off the shelf and hit the floor.

  “Fuck!” Bullock screamed. And that set off yet another coughing fit. When he was done, he finished off the water bottle and tossed it into the garbage. Another guy who didn’t know how to recycle.

  Somewhat calmed now, he said to Trimble, “So, you came back with the hundred fifty?”

  Trimble paused. “No. I came back with around seven thousand, maybe not even that. I haven’t had a chance to count it yet.” He dug the envelope out of his pocket and tossed it onto Bullock’s desk.

  Bullock stared at Trimble, apparently unable to believe what he was hearing. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “He put it in envelopes and mailed it to Rio. Some in the regular mail, some by courier.”

  “He put the cash in the mail,” Bullock said. Even Blondie looked surprised.

  Trimble nodded. “I guess he had a lot of faith in the postal system. Sent it to a bunch of five-star hotels in Rio, planned to go down there and pick
it up. At least it could have been worse.”

  Bullock cocked his head. “How do you think it could be worse?”

  “Could have been you who paid nearly nine grand for that car at auction. At least it was Walker’s money that did that.” He glanced over at me, like maybe he thought he was scoring me a brownie point.

  It didn’t appear as though Bullock saw this as any sort of silver lining. He didn’t look at me or Angie, but settled himself into his chair behind the desk, then glanced down and saw the Barbie box on the floor. He eyed it curiously, as if seeing it for the first time.

  “I’m guessing Mr. Indigo’s not going to be very pleased about this,” Trimble said.

  “Not pleased,” Bullock repeated. “Not pleased, you say? That’s very astute of you. Not pleased. Mr. Indigo will be disappointed, perhaps even miffed. But you know what he’ll be mostly?”

  Trimble’s eyebrows went up a notch.

  “He’ll be fucking apoplectic, that’s what he’ll be! And he’ll have someone else running this organization before daylight, that’s what he’ll do.”

  Bullock shook his head with rage, and then his eyes landed on the Barbie box that had dropped to the floor. “Steve,” he said to Detective Trimble, his voice dripping with politeness, “would you please put that Barbie back up where it belongs?”

  “Excuse me?” Trimble said.

  “My Barbie box. Would you please put it back up on the shelf? I guess it fell when I lost my temper a moment ago.”

  “You want me to put your Barbie back on the shelf.”

  “That’s correct. I want to see if you’re good for anything this evening.”

  I held on to Angie. This had a very bad feel to it.

  “I think you’re closer,” Trimble told him. “Why don’t you do it.”

  Blondie was looking very ill at ease, and wanted to try to defuse the situation. “I’ll get it,” he said.

  “No!” Bullock shouted, and Blondie jumped back. “Did I ask you?”

  “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.