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. “