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 bunch of ropes to him and pull him down like he was a Saddam Hussein statue. He was in another expensive-looking suit that didn’t fit him all that well, bunched up around the tops of his shoes, the sleeves too long. I guessed he was one of those kinds of guys you couldn’t fit off the rack, at least not the racks that were in that garage. He’d be wise to kidnap someone sometime who could do alterations.

He put his fist to his mouth, coughed and cleared his throat. In his other hand he carried a small glass bottle of juice, and took a sip.

“So, you must be Mr. Walker,” he said, stepping closer to me but not extending his hand.

“And you must be Mr. Bullock,” I said.

He looked surprised, and pleased. “Hey, you know who I am. I guess the word’s getting around, huh? You hear that?” He was talking to Pockmark now. “He knows who I am.”

“That’s great, boss.”

“I’ve been trying to enhance my reputation of late,” Bullock said to me. “So you having heard about me, that’s good.”

I was less sure. It might have been stupid, addressing him by his name. It was one more reason not to let us out of here alive. I knew who he was. Of course, I already knew where he lived, didn’t I? Wasn’t that enough knowledge to get me killed?

“I was at the auction, when you went ballistic on the photographer. Someone picked you out of those pictures later.”

Bullock shook his head, then waved his finger at me accusingly. “That photographer was a very rude person. He disrespected me. And I can’t afford that kind of thing right now, not from anybody.” He coughed, took another sip from the bottle.

“His name was Stan. I didn’t know him real well, but he was a friend. He was a good guy.”

Bullock shrugged. “It’s not very nice to go around taking someone’s picture without their permission. And the other thing is, he didn’t turn out to be, in the end, a very good friend to you. Because if he hadn’t been rude to me at that auction, and interfered with my business, chances are you wouldn’t be here right now.”

I puzzled over that one a moment.

“It’s simple,” Bullock said, noting my confusion. “If we hadn’t had that little scene and attracted so much attention, I could have hung around and bid on your car here myself, and believe me, I’d have outbid you no matter what. And then I’d have got the car, and had what I wanted from it by now. But when all that shit went down, I had to get out of there. You see, there tend to be a lot of feds around at a government auction.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

Bullock shook his head. “Anyhoo, despite the odd setback, everything’s coming together just as it should. We now have the car, that photographer’s been taught a lesson, and soon we can all get on with our lives.”

Taught a lesson.

“So you’ve got the car,” I said, gesturing behind me. “You’ve got what you wanted. Now let me and my daughter leave here.”

“Come along to the house,” Bullock said. To Pockmark, he said, “With me.”

We walked out in single file, Bullock ahead of me, Pockmark behind. We went outside, walked about thirty feet to the house, entering through a back door that took us through an old but elegant kitchen and down a hall until we reached a heavy wood door. Bullock admitted us to what I guessed was his study or office.

I was not expecting to be nearly blinded by pink.

Three of the four walls were lined with shelves stocked with hundreds and hundreds of pink packages. Not stacked as they might be in a storage room, but on display, on parade. Tiny spotlights hanging from tracks bolted to the ceiling were strategically aimed at the boxes, and light shone off the clear plastic windows on the front of them. It was as though I had wandered into the Barbie aisle at Toys “R” Us. There were hundreds of differently costumed Barbies, and Kens, and friends and associates of the Barbies and Kens, plus pink plastic houses and furniture and cars.

In the middle of the room, things were a bit more traditional. There was an oversize desk with a leather chair behind it, a couple more leather chairs and a leather couch up against one wall, just in front of one of the display shelves, and it was there that Angie sat, looking dazed. Bullock took a position behind his desk, nearly bare save for a phone, a small box that appeared to be the other end of the intercom system in the garage, and a bottle of water. Pockmark had taken a position next to Blondie, both of them by the open door, keeping an eye on me. I hadn’t noticed this before, but he had a gun in his right hand, pointed, for the moment, at the blood-red carpeting.