I held on to Angie. This had a very bad feel to it.

“I think you’re closer,” Trimble told him. “Why don’t you do it.”

Blondie was looking very ill at ease, and wanted to try to defuse the situation. “I’ll get it,” he said.

“No!” Bullock shouted, and Blondie jumped back. “Did I ask you?”

“I was just trying to help.”

Pockmark strolled back into the room, quipped, “All quiet,” and, spotting the Malibu Barbie on the floor, quickly scooped it up and put it back on the shelf before Bullock could scream at him not to.

“Fuck,” said Bullock, and Pockmark looked at him, baffled, wondering why his action hadn’t rated a thank-you.

“What do you want from me?” Trimble said. “I help you out, I tip you off to things, I run your fucking errands. And you’ve done right by me, I’ll grant you that. And I’ve even stood by and done nothing when I find out you put my old partner in the hospital.”

“Who told you that?” Bullock demanded. “I’ve been over this with you.”

Trimble didn’t think that was worthy of a response. He continued, “Who was it talked Eddie into helping you out? It wasn’t me. I didn’t pick him, and I wouldn’t have, either. That was your decision. I’ve known him long enough to know he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. So he double-crossed you. That’s too bad, but I don’t see how that’s my fault.”

I felt the weight of the gun in my jacket pocket. I didn’t know where this was going, this set of hostilities between Trimble and Bullock. And I didn’t know whether it was going to afford me any sort of advantage.

“I’ll tell you what,” Trimble said. “Let Walker here, and his daughter, take a walk.” Bullock eyed the cop suspiciously, wondering what kind of game he was up to. Trimble continued. “They don’t have anything to do with this. He made the mistake of buying the wrong car, his daughter made the mistake of driving it. They’ve never done you any harm, they didn’t rip you off.”

Bullock stared at Trimble as though he’d never seen him before. “Have you lost your fucking mind? You’re suggesting we let them walk out of here. After they know what we’ve been up to, about that smartass photographer, about Eddie, where I live and conduct my business. You think, we let them walk out of here, they’ll just forget any of that stuff ever happened? You think that maybe all we have to do is ask them real nice?”

Even I was thinking Trimble had lost his mind. If I were Bullock, I’d kill us, too. Angie clutched me more tightly.

“I’m just saying,” Trimble said, “that maybe it’s time to lay low for a bit. You start piling up corpses, it has a way of attracting attention.”

Bullock suddenly looked contemplative, as though he might actually be considering what Trimble had to say. “You make some interesting points, Steve. I’d like to think on them a moment, perhaps discuss a couple of things with Mr. Walker here. Would you mind waiting out in the garage while I did that?”

Trimble eyed Bullock warily. None of this felt right.

“Sure,” Trimble said, then turned and walked out of the room, but not before looking over at me. He did something funny with the corner of his mouth that seemed to say “Hey, I gave it a shot. Good luck.”

Once Trimble was out of the room, Bullock walked over to Blondie and said, in a loud enough whisper that I could hear it, “Do him.”

Blondie turned, but I was taking a step in his direction, and shouting, “Trim-”

Pockmark was behind me, grabbing me at the top of my jacket and tossing me onto the couch. Angie screamed as I tumbled onto the cushions. Pockmark had his gun out and pointed at me as Blondie went out the door and pulled it shut behind him.

“You’re not going to kill him,” I said.

Bullock said, “He’s been a pain in the ass for a while. You start seeing the signs, that he’s starting to get some crisis of conscience or something. There’s nothing worse than a cop with a conscience.”

“He wasn’t bullshitting you,” I said. “You let us walk out of here, we’ll forget everything.”

“Sure,” Bullock said. “Sure. That’s exactly what I’d do, if I was you.”

Outside, there was a popping noise. One lone shot in the night, followed by silence. Not enough to make anyone go to their phone and put in a call to the cops. You hear one shot, you listen for another, to confirm your suspicions that something’s amiss. When you don’t hear it, you go back to sleep. Just like car alarms.

Angie heard it, and she looked at me. There wasn’t much hope in her eyes.

“I mean it,” I said. “We walk out of here, you never hear from us again.” Desperate for any way to sweeten the offer, I said, “You can even keep the car.”

I guess that struck Bullock as pretty funny, because he started to laugh.

“I’m serious. You can probably sell it for what I paid for it. I’ll sign it over to you.”

“Oh, that’s too much,” Bullock said, and laughed again.

As I’d seen so often before, the laughter sent him into a coughing fit. There was one loud, hoarse cough, and when he inhaled to catch his breath, it set off another. He began to make some awful hacking noises in his throat, like maybe he was going to cough up a hairball or something.

Bullock went to grab for the water bottle, then remembered that he’d finished it and tossed the empty into the trash. He glanced around, then peered into the cardboard box still sitting on his desk, the one Blondie had brought in from the garage, containing everything he’d found in my car.

I remembered that my cell phone was in there, but something else had caught Bullock’s eye.

He reached in and came out with a full bottle of Snapple apple juice. And I wondered, just for a moment, where that had come from. I hadn’t bought any bottle of apple juice.

And then I realized it was the bottle I’d picked out of my own recycling basket, the one I’d taken with me when I went out for my first surveillance job to track Angie’s stalker, Trevor.

What a trivial problem he seemed now.

And I remembered how, once I’d filled that bottle myself, I’d tucked it into the pouch behind the passenger seat to keep it from rolling around.

And I remembered that it was, of course, not apple juice.

Bullock uncapped the bottle and moved it toward his mouth.

I thought back to that discussion Lawrence had had with me, about the robbery he’d interrupted, the guy with the ragweed allergy. How Lawrence had said you had to wait for your moment when you were in a tense situation, and that when it had arrived, you’d know it.

I had a feeling, that if there was ever going to be a moment, this was going to be it.

36

I SLIPPED MY HAND into my jacket pocket, wrapped it around the cold metal of the gun’s grip, got my body ready to launch off the couch in a hurry.

Bullock didn’t just sip from the bottle. He took a long swig, which meant my day-old urine was already hitting the back of his throat before he had a chance to realize that it was not, in fact, apple juice. Already I was thinking that being over on the couch, away from the desk and off to one side, was a good place to be, because I was expecting, any second, something of an eruption from Bullock.

I was not disappointed.

It all took less than a second or two, but if you could have slowed down time, broken it down into milliseconds, you’d have seen his eyes bug out first. Then the cheeks puffed out, the body lunged forward, and then he spewed. The contents of his mouth sprayed out across his desk and onto the carpeting beyond. There was a lot of noise that went along with this. It was as if you went into a recording studio to combine screams of anguish, retching, and intense vulgarity. Somewhere, in the midst of perhaps the most disgusting sound I’d ever heard, Bullock managed to let loose with a loud, gargly “Shit!”