“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 slowly 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
