“Yeah. In the ignition. Look, I’d like to see my daughter now.”

“I’ll just bet you would,” he said. “That’s the boss’s area. He’ll be here in a minute.” To his blond friend, he said, “You gonna pat him down?”

Something in my stomach did a somersault.

“Huh?” said Blondie. “He’s just some fucking doofus, not a cop or a detective or anything.”

“Yeah, well, check him anyway.”

I was sure, now, that the slight bulge at the bottom of my right pant leg was as obvious as a football. Maybe I could tell them it was a rare leg goiter. But when I glanced down, I realized it wasn’t all that noticeable. Blondie came up behind me, told me to lift up my arms, patted under there without a great deal of enthusiasm, then reached into the inside pockets of my coat.

“Ooh,” he said to Pockmark. “He’s carrying a ballpoint. He could have stabbed us to death. There’s nothing else on him but a cell phone.”

“You should probably take that,” Pockmark said.

Blondie came around in front of me and held out his hand while I fished the cell out of my jacket and placed it in his palm. He took a few steps over to the counter and set it there. Pockmark had all the car doors open now, plus the trunk lid.

There was a crackly, staticky noise, and then a voice over a speaker. “Hello?” It was Bullock. “Is this thing working? Hello?”

Blondie walked over to a small intercom panel on the wall and pressed a button. “Yeah?”

“Hello?”

“Don’t press the button when I’m pressing the button, boss,” Blondie said.

“Okay, you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t press the button when I’m pressing the button,” Bullock said. “This system is supposed to make things easier, asshole.”

“I know, I know.”

“I need one of you here to watch the girl,” Bullock said.

“I’ll be right there,” Blondie said, taking his finger off the button and disappearing out the side door. A couple of minutes later, the door reopened, and in walked the man from the auction. Short, not much hair on top, but solid looking, like if you tried to push him over you’d need half a dozen other guys, or else you’d have to attach a bunch of ropes to him and pull him down like he was a Saddam Hussein statue. He was in another expensive-looking suit that didn’t fit him all that well, bunched up around the tops of his shoes, the sleeves too long. I guessed he was one of those kinds of guys you couldn’t fit off the rack, at least not the racks that were in that garage. He’d be wise to kidnap someone sometime who could do alterations.