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!”
I felt no compunction to point out to Bullock that while he had that wrong, he was closer than he knew.
Pockmark thought, and had every reason to believe, that his boss must be dying. He rushed across the room at the first signs of Bullock’s distress, then dodged as Bullock spewed across his desk, hitting the box and phone and intercom and the envelopes of cash Trimble had taken off Eddie Mayhew.
“What?” Pockmark said. “Is the juice bad?”
He’d totally forgotten about me, and his gun hung down at his side as he went to save his boss, who was now spitting repeatedly, and not particularly fussy about where any of it landed.
Angie’s mouth was hanging open in shock. And I was on my feet, taking the gun out of my pocket and, gripping it with both hands, pointing it at Pockmark, then Bullock, then back at Pockmark, not having to waver too much, because the two of them were now pretty much shoulder to shoulder.
“Ewww,” said Pockmark.
“Fuck!” Bullock said, spitting onto the top of his desk. “What the fuck is this?” He glanced at the bottle, put it up to his nose, and turned his head away, disgusted.
I didn’t have a lot of time to think about what I was going to say, so I said the first thing that came to mind, and that was “Freeze!” I was close to saying “Freeze, motherfuckers!” but it struck me as even more of a cliché, and besides, my daughter was standing right there.
Bullock and Pockmark looked at me, stupidly at first, a kind of “Huh?” expression on both their faces. Bullock wiped the back of his left sleeve across his mouth. When Pockmark saw the gun in my hand, he went to raise his and I shouted at him, “Freeze, motherfucker!”
I couldn’t help myself. I could always apologize to Angie later. And the thing was, it worked this time.
Pockmark froze.
Angie, who two seconds earlier had been reeling from Bullock’s explosive performance, now looked at me with further astonishment, wondering, perhaps, what I had done with her real father.
“I want you to put that gun on the floor,” I said, pointing my gun now directly at Pockmark.
“I thought you dumbfucks searched him,” Bullock said.
“We did! He had nothing on him!”
“You call that nothing?”
“I asked you to put that gun down,” I said, stepping around in front of Angie to shield her in case Pockmark decided to try something stupid.
But he still wouldn’t drop it. It hung there at the end of his arm, still pointing down. He glared at me, as if we were engaged in a staring contest, that he would no more drop his gun than look away.
I didn’t see this situation getting any better if something wasn’t done about it right away. Blondie was still out there somewhere, probably coming back soon. At the moment, I only had two of them to deal with, and it wasn’t going to get any easier with three.
So I shot Pockmark.
For a second, I couldn’t believe I’d done it. No one was more surprised than I. Well, maybe Pockmark. And Angie seemed a bit taken aback as well, because she screamed. From where she stood, slightly behind and to the side of me, she didn’t know for a moment who’d actually pulled the trigger. And in that room, the shot sounded like a cannon going off.
I’d aimed a bit low when I squeezed the trigger, not wanting to actually shoot Pockmark in the head or chest, even though I realized that if you want to bring someone down, you aim for the biggest part of his body, the torso. Aiming for someone’s leg and actually hitting it was not something you could count on, so I guess you could say I got lucky. Certainly luckier than Pockmark.
“Jesus!” he yelped, and the gun hit the floor. He stumbled over to a chair, both hands pressed over a growing shiny patch on his black jeans. “Jesus Christ.”
There was a time when I might have apologized for something like this, but not tonight.
Bullock said nothing. He kept glaring at me.
“Angie, sweetheart,” I said.
From behind me, she said, “Yes, Daddy?”
“Do you think you could go over and pick up that gun? Very carefully, by the handle?”
“Okay.”
She came around me, and I noticed that she was still a bit unsteady on her feet. When she bent over to pick up the gun, I thought she might fall over, but she steadied herself, grabbed it gingerly, found it a bit heavier than she’d anticipated, I think, and handed it to me. I slipped it into my other pocket.
Now all we had to do was get out of there. Get to the Virtue, hope it would start, get Angie to a hospital to make sure she was okay. But Blondie was still out there someplace. In the house, maybe out in the garage. And, as thick as the walls seemed to be in this old house, he might still have heard the shot, or Angie’s scream, and be on his way back to investigate.
To Bullock, I said, “Take out your knife.”
“I don’t have a knife.” Didn’t even blink.
“The one in your back pocket, the one you put to my neck when we were in the garage.”
“I don’t have it now,” he said.
“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.