Linwood Barclay - Bad Guys

“Not that much,” I said.

Sarah was starting to glower. “How much?”

“Just a little over eight thousand.”

She swallowed. “How much over eight thousand?”

“Nine hundred.”

“Nine hundred? So the car was nine thousand? Dollars?”

“No, just $8,900.”

Sarah shook her head. “There goes the budget for the next six months.”

“It’ll be okay. We’ll be saving hundreds on gas. Just wait and see. It’s a good deal.”

Sarah shook her head. “I think life was simpler when I only had to put up with you at home,” she said, and turned to make the trek back across the newsroom to her office.

I turned back to my computer screen and started typing. A moment later, I felt a pair of hands on my shoulder, then noticed the familiar scent of Sarah as she leaned down and put her mouth close to my ear.

“You were right about one thing,” she whispered.

“About what?” I said, eyes on my screen.

“Black, front clasp.” And she strode off. I would have spun around in my seat to say something, but I had responded, involuntarily, to her comment, and felt that keeping a good part of me under the desk was prudent for the next couple of minutes.

Stan poked his head from behind the partition. “That was a good guess on the clasp thing,” he said, startling me. “I wasn’t even sure she was wearing one at all.”

“You probably know, Stan, that Sarah’s my wife,” I said.

He nodded. “I had a feeling you’d met her before.” He came around the partition, dropped a contact sheet on my desk. “There’s the auction stuff. There’s another copy with the desk, whenever they want it.”

I glanced at the negative-size shots. Stan could take something as mundane as a lot full of cars and, with the right angles and lighting, turn it into something special.

“Great,” I said. Stan didn’t acknowledge the compliment. He’d been praised by people a lot more important than I. One of the frames caught my eye. “That the guy?”

Stan squinted. “What?”

“The one who wanted your film? That him there?”

The angry short man was off to the left side of the frame, not doing anything in particular. Stan’s focus had been a pair of guys looking under the hood of a Pontiac. “I think so. I wasn’t even shooting him. Asshole.”

“Hey, Walker,” someone on the other side of me said.

I looked around. It was Cheese Dick Colby, the paper’s star police reporter, a heavyset man in his mid-fifties. A police search of his medicine cabinet would be unlikely to turn up any deodorant.

“Hey, Dick,” I said.

“Thanks for the call the other night, about the hit-run outside the men’s shop. Just so you understand, I do the breaking stuff, you can do the puff pieces.”

“Sure, Dick. I just hope someday I’m trusted to handle the big stories like you.”

Colby, evidently oblivious to sarcasm, said, “What you working on?”

“A feature.”

“This still the same thing you were working on the other night, hanging out with the detective?” He was leaning over my desk, forcing me to hold my breath, and looking at the contact sheet Stan had presented to me.

“Whoa, the fuck is this?” Colby asked. “That’s Barbie Bullock there.”

“Who?” I said, leaning in close to the pictures, not only to see them better but to put as much distance as possible between my nose and Colby’s armpit.

Colby pointed to the guy who’d roughed up Stan and demanded his film.

“Him. His actual name is Willy Bullock, but everyone refers to him as Barbie Bullock. He’s been attempting to run Lenny Indigo’s organization ever since Lenny got sent away for everything from dealing to robbery.”

“That name’s popping up everywhere,” I said.

“Lenny’s number two guy, Donny Leppard, he got sent up, too, but he’s going to be out in less than a year. Barbie here’s under a lot of pressure to do well while Donny’s gone a few months. He does a good job, Indigo’s likely to make him his number two guy instead of Donny.”

“So why do they call this clown Barbie?” Stan asked.

“He collects them. Barbies. Got hundreds of them, they say. All sorts of rare ones, plus accessories.”

“His key chain,” I said. “It was a like a mini-Barbie. I figured it was his wife’s or something. Doesn’t a guy who collects Barbies run the risk of being made fun of?”

Colby paused. “Last guy who made fun of Barbie Bullock had his face shoved into the running propeller of an Evinrude. You doing something on Bullock?” Colby eyed me warily, like I was trying to work his side of the street.

Stan spoke up. “He just happened to be in the picture. We were there doing something else, Dick, so chill out.”

Colby snorted, and I shifted in case any of it landed on me. After he walked away, I said to Stan, “So, don’t you feel special? Pissing off an important underworld character?”

Stan shrugged. “Listen, when you’ve pissed off the Taliban, everything else kind of pales in comparison.”

I banged off the auction story in under an hour, let the desk know it had been handed in, and popped into Sarah’s office. She was at her desk, reading stories on her screen.

“I’m outa here,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

“Cheese Dick came by to see me.”

Sarah closed her eyes. “And?”

“He strutted about, then left. Could you put him on some sort of beat that requires bathing? Maybe send him to fashion, writing about skin care.”

“See ya at home. And don’t forget to see the managing editor before you leave.”

I hadn’t forgotten, but I had been considering pretending to have forgotten. I wandered over to his office, where his secretary was posted outside the door.

“Mr. Magnuson wanted to see me?” I said.

His secretary said, “And you are?”

This is always encouraging, when the secretary to the guy who runs the newsroom where you are employed has no idea who you are.

“Zack Walker?” I said. “I work here?”

She buzzed him, spoke so quietly into her phone that I could not make out what she was saying, and when she was done, said to me, “He’ll be with you in a moment.”

I cooled my heels for about five minutes, standing around Magnuson’s closed door like a kid waiting to see the principal. Finally, it opened, and Magnuson himself gestured for me to come in.

He was a slight man, a bit round-shouldered, thinning gray hair atop his head, immaculately dressed, even with his suit jacket off and hanging over the back of the leather chair behind his broad oak desk.

“Mr. Walker, what a pleasure,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve actually spoken since you joined us.”

“No, Mr. Magnuson, I don’t think we have.”

“Have a seat.”

I took a chair in front of his desk as he got back into his behind it. He tossed a red binder across the desk at me. There was a sticker on the front that read “Editorial Policy Manual.”

“Did you get one of these when you were hired?” Magnuson asked.

“Uh, I believe I did.”

“I’m going to have to rewrite it,” he said.

“Really? Why is that, Mr. Magnuson?”

“I left something out. I should have thought of this before I had it drafted. I can’t believe how neglectful I was.”

I didn’t want to ask, but felt it was expected of me. “What, uh, did you leave out?”

“The part that says Metropolitan staffers are not supposed to be involved in shootouts.”

“Mr. Magnuson, that’s not exactly correct. I was in a car with someone who was doing the shooting, but the only thing I was doing was holding the steering wheel so he could get off a few shots.”