“Sweetheart,” I said.

“Hey, Daddy,” Angie said tiredly.

I ran over to her, went to my knees, and took her into my arms. Feebly, she wrapped hers around me.

“Are you okay?” I asked her, holding her by the shoulders and looking into her weary eyes. She nodded slowly. “I’m going to get you out of here as soon as possible, get you back home, okay?”

“Okay, Daddy.”

Bullock told Blondie to go back to the garage and start taking the car apart. I looked across the desk at him, but my eyes wandered. I couldn’t help but look at the Barbies.

“I see you’ve noticed my little girls,” Bullock said, making a horrific phlegmy noise in his throat. He finished off the juice in the bottle, tossed it into a trash can by the desk, and reached for the water bottle.

“Yeah.”

“Your daughter and I, we were having a wonderful discussion about Barbies earlier,” he said. “She said she sold most of hers at a garage sale.”

“A couple of years ago, I think.” I was about to say that she’d outgrown them, then thought better of it.

“Aww, that’s really a shame. Terrible mistake. You should never sell off your childhood toys. You grow up, years later, you really regret it.” He sounded quite sincere.

“That’s true,” I said, thinking, Would a guy engage you in conversation about his Barbie collection if he was planning to kill you?

“You agree?”

“I’m a bit of a collector myself. Not of Barbies, but science fiction memorabilia.”

“Oh!” said Barbie Bullock, all excited. “You’ll love this one.” He grabbed a pink box off one of the lower shelves. “This is the Star Trek version of Ken and Barbie.”

He handed me the box. The dolls, still behind acetate and held in an upright position with small plastic twist-ties, were dressed for service aboard the USS Enterprise.

Ken was in a tan shirt and black pants, Barbie in a red minidress. “From the original series,” I said. “I recognize the getups.”

“Yes, yes!” He took the box back from me, returned it to its spot on the shelf.

Angie shifted on the couch, rested her head on the arm. She was watching us like we were part of a dream she was having.

In addition to boxed dolls, there was the pink Barbie Volkswagen minibus, and a pink Beetle with an open roof for sliding Barbie and her friends in for a spin. Barbie houses filled with Barbie furniture, Barbie cases, Barbie everything.

“Here are a few I’m most proud of,” Bullock said. I glanced at Pockmark, trying to judge from his expression whether he saw anything strange in all this. If he did, he was keeping it to himself.

“Here’s Splashin’ Barbie, with her own personal watercraft. And Winter Fantasy Barbie, Malibu Barbie of course, you couldn’t not have a Malibu Barbie. And Cheerleader Flex Barbie, you can move her arms and legs better, so you can put her in all these cheering positions, which of course is never going to happen because I don’t like to take the dolls out of the box.”

“Sure,” I said. “Makes them more valuable that way.”

“Of course. It’s nice, though, when you get the odd one that has been taken out of the box, so you don’t feel restricted. You can handle it, play with it, that kind of thing. Here’s my Barbie Romance Novel Gift Set, where she looks like one of those heroines on the front of a romance novel, not that I read those fucking things. And this here,” he held up a Barbie dressed in a skintight-or plastic-tight-black latex, wielding a whip, “is Catwoman Barbie.”

Something for Trixie for Christmas, I thought.

“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 The Addams Family.”

“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.”