Bad Guys (34 page)

“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 were 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.”

“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.

“Hold on a second, Trevor,” I said. To Angie, I said, “Honey?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Take a look in the inside pockets of your coat, see if you find anything in there.”

“Like what?”

“Sort of like a button or something.”

She pulled the coat over onto her lap, started rifling through the pockets, and came out with a small silver disc. “This?” she said.

I went back onto the phone. “We found it, Trevor.”

“What is this?” Angie asked.

“It’s a tracking thing,” I told her. “Trevor put it in your pocket, that’s how he’s been following you all over town, showing up where you least expected him.”

Even slightly out of it, Angie went red with anger. “Is that him on the phone? Give it to me. I want to talk to him.”

“Later, hon,” I said.

At the other end of the line, Trevor said, “She sounds a bit pissed.”

“Trevor, what can you see from where you are?”

“Huh? Uh, like I say, I’m just in the bushes, looking at the house. I’ve got Morpheus with me.”

“Where’s your car?”

“It’s about six blocks back. I didn’t want anyone to see it, so I walked down, but I’ve got my laptop with me.”

“Jeez, I think I’m dying,” Pockmark said. I had a look at him. He didn’t look to me like he was dying, but there was no question he needed some medical attention.

“Shut up,” Bullock said. “If you’d frisked him better, we wouldn’t be in this mess now. Wait’ll I tell Mr. Indigo.”

“I can’t wait to hear that myself,” Pockmark said. “How you gonna explain all this?”

“What’s going on?” Trevor said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just some other people in the room here havin’ a chat. We need a ride out of here, Trevor, but we don’t have time for you to run back to your Chevy. Also, there’s another man outside or around the garage somewhere, and he isn’t going to want us to leave.”

“I saw a guy a minute ago. I think he’d just dumped something into the back of the SUV.”

Trimble’s body, I figured.

“And then he went back into the garage.”

I thought for a moment. If we could get Blondie back out of the garage, then Trevor could go in, open the door, get the Virtue running and out into the driveway, and all Angie and I had to do was run out, hop in, and go.

“Hang on, Trevor, okay?”

“Yeah.”

To Bullock, I said, “You can talk to the garage with that thing there, right?” I pointed to the intercom. He nodded. “Tell your guy to come on back here.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I take a shot at Wonder Woman Barbie.”

He didn’t have to think long about that. He pressed the button, shouted, “Hey!” He waited a second for a response, tried again. “Hey, are you—”

“Hello?”

“Take your finger off the button!”

“Hello? Go ahead!”

“Fuck,” Bullock said under his breath, waited a beat, then pressed the button again. “Are you there?”

“Yup.”

“You get that job done?”

“Yeah. Stevie’s loaded up and ready to go. We can take a drive, unload him somewhere. I know where there’s a wood chipper. You want to do the others at the same time?”

I had a chill, knowing now what was in store for us.

“First thing I need you to do is come back here. It’s these others we have to deal with.”

“Yeah, sure, just be a sec.”

“You,” I said to Pockmark. I wanted him out of the chair. If he stayed there, he’d be visible the moment Blondie opened the door. He forced himself out of the chair, dragged his leg to the other side of the room, and sat down on the floor. I motioned for Angie to get off the couch, and handed her the gun I’d taken from Pockmark.

“Think you can manage this?” I said to her. “I want you to keep it on Mr. Barbie here.”

She nodded. Tiredly, but she was more awake every minute.

I spoke into the cell. “Trevor, you there?”

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“Has that guy left the garage yet?”

“No.”

“The moment he walks out and heads for the house, you let me know.”

“Okay. Nothing yet. Maybe he’s— Hang on, the side door’s opening up. He’s coming out! He’s going into the house.”

“Is he holding a gun?”

“Uh, I don’t, I don’t think so!”

I figured it wouldn’t take him any more than ten or fifteen seconds to get from the house door to the room we were in now. I positioned myself against the wall, by the doorframe. I could hear Blondie’s steps coming down the hall, stop, then the knob turned and the door began to open.

“I was—” he started to say, but then he felt the cold ring of metal against his temple.

“Don’t move,” I said.

“No problem,” he said.

“Come in very slowly.”

He quickly took in the scene, assessed it. His partner on the floor, bleeding. Bullock not moving, standing behind a very damp desk. Angie standing on the other side of the door, her gun trained on Bullock.

“Nice frisking job,” Bullock said to him.

“Where’s your gun?” I asked.

“Tucked into the back of my pants,” he said. I looked around, saw it, couldn’t help but think that he had a butt sticking out of his butt. Funny how the mind works.

I moved slightly behind him, keeping the gun close to his head, then took the gun from the back of his pants with my left hand. Now that I’d given Pockmark’s weapon to Angie, I could slip this new one into my now empty left pocket.

“Now step into the room and lie facedown on the floor,” I said.

Blondie did as he was asked.

I got back on the phone. “Trevor, go into the garage.”

“Gotcha.”

I could hear him running across the property, then the sound of a door opening and closing.

“See my car?”

“Yeah. Shit, it’s all in pieces.”

“It’s mostly the inside door panels. Don’t worry about that. See if the keys are in it.”

“Hang on, yeah, they’re here.”

“See if it’ll start.”

I listened. The Virtue was so quiet, I wasn’t sure I’d hear it come on even if it did. “No, it won’t.”