“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.”