“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.”
He sipped his water.
“Tell you another story. Couple years ago, in California, guy goes to one of those government auctions, picks himself up a nice little car, real cheap, he’s driving it for like six months, and he goes down to Mexico for the day, and he’s crossing the border, coming home, they pull him over in some random search, and these drug dogs start sniffing, get a whiff of something. The fucking bumpers are loaded with coke, so they arrest the poor son of a bitch.” He laughed, which set off another short coughing fit. He took another sip. “He tells ’em, ‘Hey, those aren’t my drugs in the car, I bought it from the government, they left the drugs in the car.’ And the customs guys, they’re laughing their balls off, you know? Like they hadn’t heard that one before. So the guy, he goes to jail, he’s suing the government now, fuck of a lot of good that’s going to do him.”
“So you figured you’d buy the car at the auction, get the drugs, everything would be fine.”
Bullock nodded. “The thing is, it’s the greatest car for smuggling dope, you know? Little hybrid, environmentally responsible, you drive it, they think it’s fucking Ralph Nader coming through customs. We sailed that car through, half a dozen times. When we weren’t using it for that, Mrs. Indigo liked to drive it around.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, what with all that trouble with that cocksucking photographer, I bailed out. But we have a friend working at the auction place, and we checked with him later, found out who bought the car.”
Lawrence Jones.
“So we track down where the guy lives, and he’s some kind of private detective. And we didn’t find the car at his place, but guess what we did come across?”
Bullock reached into his pocket and pulled out a rumpled check. “We look through his things, and we find a check, written to him, for the very same amount that he paid for the car. That’s quite a coinky-dink, isn’t it? And guess whose name was on that check?”
He tossed the check onto his desk, but I didn’t have to look at it. “And my address was on it, too,” I said.
“Bingo. So we take a few runs by your place, till we see the car, follow it, and you know the rest. But you want to know an even bigger coinky-dink?”
I said nothing.
“When we were looking for that car, around where this detective lives, we saw a car out back that looked awfully familiar to us. An old Buick. The night before, we were out conducting a bit of business, and this Buick starts tailing us, even started shooting at us. We got a pretty good idea it was this Jones fellow, although he had someone else in the car with him.”
I felt a bit weak in the knees. “What kind of business?” I asked, playing dumb.
“We’re also in the retail business. We sell suits. Nothing but the best. Like this,” he said, stepping out from behind the desk, raising his hands and turning around. “Pretty nice merchandise, wouldn’t you say? Armani.”
“The suits,” I said. “I saw them in the garage. So you guys not only deal cocaine, you steal high-end designer clothing.”
Bullock smiled. “We’re diversified. That’s the kind of economy we’re dealing with these days. Can’t put all your eggs in one basket.” He paused, said to Pockmark, “I wonder how things are going in the garage?”
I wondered, too. Maybe Trimble was out there. Maybe he’d subdued Blondie, was on his way to take out his buddy and the Barbie collector.
Bullock pressed the intercom unit on his desk. “Hey!” he shouted. “How’s it going out there? Hello?”
There was a bit of static and shouting as Bullock and Blondie tried to speak to each other at the same time. Bullock looked at me sadly, shook his head. “I’m trying to run this place more professionally, and look at the problems I have.”
Finally, he and Blondie coordinated their button pushing, and Blondie’s voice came through clearly. But he sounded very concerned.
“I think we may have a problem, Mr. Bullock.”