She’s wearing a white shirt, black Dickies, and a black tie she might have stolen off Joe Friday’s corpse. Her upper body and shoulders are wide, like someone taught her to box when she was pretty young. She doesn’t like us strangers in her office. She doesn’t like anyone who isn’t ready to turn over the title to their car or the deed to their house.
I use the cooler to push some papers out of the way and set it on her desk. Now she really likes me.
“You must be McQueen, but I don’t see any sons.”
She looks at me steadily.
“McQueen was my dad and he’s dead. And there aren’t any sons. Daddy was an optimist, but all he got was me.”
“I know the feeling.”
“I didn’t say you could put that there,” she says, pointing a pen at the cooler. “It’ll leave a ring.”
“Then we should get going.”
She cranes her head around to look at Allegra, who’s hanging a step behind me.
“I invited Bert. I don’t remember inviting Ernie, too.”
“She’s my technical adviser. I don’t know you and I don’t know your Drifter boyfriend. She’s here to confirm that he’s what you and Cabal say he is.”
She nods.
“Cabal sent you. No wonder my ass started burning the moment you walked in. That guy is one big rectal itch and so are his friends. Why should I let you see Johnny?”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m Clark Kent and I’m here to save the world.”
“It’s not my job to take care of the world. I take care of Johnny.”
“Introduce me and maybe I can help with that.”
“We don’t need your help.”
The office is still the abandon-all-hope bunker I saw when I came in, but to my new angelic vision, it’s an X-ray of shimmering, vibrating molecules. Everything is made of the same microscopic particles and they’re almost weightless.
I turn and hand Allegra the cooler, turn back to McQueen and Sons, hook two fingers under the rim of the desk, and flip it into the air. It goes high enough to graze the ceiling tiles and lands upside down with a deep hollow metal thunk. A snow of bail forms follows it to the ground.
McQueen and Sons looks at me from her desk chair.
“I guess you really are the guy they said would be coming.”
“Who said?”
“The rectal itch.”
I nod and take the cooler back from Allegra.
McQueen says, “Sorry about the attitude, but you’re not the first person to walk in here claiming he was Saint George, the angel Gabriel, or the devil himself and start asking questions.”
“I thought Johnny was a secret.”
“He’s supposed to be. Hence, the attitude.”
“I understand. If you want I’ll put your desk back.”
She shakes her head.
“Let Billy do it. It’ll be his penance for the mortal sin of lameness.”