“Okay,” I said. “You can either toss out your knife, or Barbie and Ken get it.”
Bullock suddenly looked alarmed. “What? What did you say?”
“Toss it, or the dolls die,” I said.
Bullock almost smiled. “You’re absolutely out of your mind. Whaddya gonna do, take one of them hostage?”
That was a plan I could keep in reserve. For now, I was happy to play executioner. I turned the gun toward the shelves of pink packages. I didn’t really have to aim. I could fire anywhere and hit something.
So I did.
I caught the Munsters version of Ken and Barbie. The box spun on the shelf, hit the back wall, and bounced back onto the floor. The bullet had torn through the packaging and caught Ken in the neck, knocking his Frankenstein-like head clean off.
“My God!” Bullock said. “What have you done? You some kind of fucking animal?”
“Toss out the knife,” I said.
“That’s Munster Barbie! It took me five years to find that!”
I fired again, putting a hole through the door of Barbie’s pink Volkswagen minibus.
It then occurred to me that I’d fired three bullets. I had no idea how many I had left, and there was no sense using them all on defenseless pieces of plastic.
“Stop it!” Bullock screamed. “Stop it!”
He reached into his back pocket and threw the switchblade, closed, across the room.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Are you insane?”
Pockmark, leaning into his chair and still holding his wounded leg, looked at Bullock and said, “So now he’s insane. He shoots me in the fucking leg, you got nothing to say. “
I was ready to move out. Bullock and Pockmark, to the best of my knowledge, were disarmed. But I had to get myself and Angie down the hall, out the door, to the garage, get the door open, get us into the Virtue, get it started (fingers crossed), and drive away. Once I was out of this room and no longer able to keep a gun on Bullock, he’d probably come after us.
And Blondie was still out there.
A phone rang.
I looked at Bullock, who looked at me. The ringing was coming from inside the cardboard box where he’d found the Snapple bottle.
It was my cell phone.
Tentatively, I moved closer to the desk, still holding the gun on Bullock, and reached in with my left hand for the phone. The phone was damp, but there wasn’t time to be squeamish about picking it up. I pressed the button after the third ring and put the phone up to my left ear, half expecting it to be Bertrand Magnuson, checking in with me to make sure I wasn’t using a weapon in the performance of my duties as a Metropolitan staff member. No, I could say honestly, I was only shooting people in my off-time.
“Hello,” I said evenly.
“Mr. Walker? It’s Trevor.”
Jesus. Just what I needed.
“This isn’t really a good time, Trevor. I’ve kind of got my hands full.”
“Okay, listen, I’m sorry, but I wanted to know how it was going, because if you haven’t found Angie, I think I can tell you where she is.”
“I know where she is, Trevor. She’s here with me.”
“So you’re at the house on Wyndham Lane?”
I felt blood pounding in my temples. “That’s right, Trevor. We’re in a house on Wyndham Lane.”
“Excellent.”
“Trevor, where are you?”
“Well, I’m sort of in the bushes, by the house. I didn’t think you were here, because I didn’t see your car or anything. But that big black SUV? The one they used to take away Angie? It’s here. But if you’re with Angie, I’m assuming everything’s okay, right?”
“Not entirely, Trevor. There are still a few things to work out. How, exactly, did you know where to find us?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you, but you’re gonna be pissed.”
37
“GO AHEAD,” I said to Trevor, trying to keep my voice even. “I won’t get mad. I promise.”
Angie was feeling a bit unsteady on her feet and plopped back onto the couch while I continued to hold a gun on Bullock. Pockmark had lost a fair bit of blood, and his head hung down onto his chest as he gripped his thigh. The guy needed to get to a hospital.
“This was the thing I was going to tell you a while ago,” Trevor said, “but I couldn’t think of a way to do it, but I’ve been thinking about it and decided the best thing to do is help Angie, no matter what.”
“Okay, Trevor. I’d be real grateful if you can move this story along and just tell me.”
“I know what I’ve done, some people might call inappropriate. But I wasn’t doing it for my own purposes alone. I think there’s a larger issue at stake here, a point to be made about how we’re all being monitored in one way or another, that Big Brother is watching our every move, and that we need to take a stand against this kind of dehumanization that threatens to rob us of our—”
“Trevor!”
“Okay. You know that day you found me at your place, and I had my computer with me, and I was looking for my dog?”
“The tracking thing,” I said. “Let me guess.”