Linwood Barclay - Bad Guys

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.

“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.”