“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
“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 car 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
