“Where’s Brigitte?”
“In the bedroom for now, until I can find a safe and more permanent place for her.”
“Thanks.”
“None are necessary.”
“I’d invite you along, but it’s dicey enough bringing one more person. I don’t think this guy’s handlers would go for two.”
Vidocq waves off the comment.
“I should stay and watch your Sleeping Beauty anyway. And, as my dear has explained to me several times this morning, she needs to see and experience the kinds of things that I have experienced to become the alchemist she will someday be.”
“Good answer,” says Allegra.
“Are you ready to go?” I ask.
She stands and pats a nylon bike-messenger bag slung across her shoulder.
“Got the scope right here.”
I hand her the bags of jelly beans.
“What are these for?”
“Tribute.”
“What’s in the cooler?”
“You’ll see soon enough. Then you’ll be sorry you asked.”
She goes around the counter and gives Vidocq a real kiss. He looks at me.
“You will look after her the way you would Alice, correct?”
“I won’t let anything happen to her.”
“And you yourself. You’re feeling all right?”
“I’m fine. You were right. The Cupbearer elixir is keeping me from changing one little bit.”
“Excellent.”
Allegra takes my arm. We step through a shadow on the wall and out onto Hollywood Boulevard.
MCQUEEN AND SONS Bail Bonds is at the end of the block next to a used medical supply store. Prosthetic arms and legs are hung from a cord and propped up in the window like today’s specials in the world’s worst butcher shop.
A couple of LAPD cars blast by, lights flashing. Are they heading to grab some gangbangers or to check out the first reports of strange cannibal killings?
The bail bond office is a clone of all the dismal DMV offices and bus stations in the world. It’s a wide single room with fluorescent lights and a white tile floor. Dented metal desks piled with papers that the last people who used the desk never bothered to file. There are message boards around the room covered in flyers for classes, cheap moving, and drug counselors who just have 800 numbers and a Web site. Everything else is calendars and wanted posters. If you shot time in the gut, this is where it would crawl off to die.
It looks like the place just opened. Someone in a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up sits at a desk at the far end of the room talking on the phone.
“Get him to give you the money or take his car, Billy. I know it’s not legal, but so the hell what?”
I recognize the voice of the woman I talked to early this morning.
“The way to keep a parolee’s attention is to threaten to call his PO or to show him that his testicles are soccer balls and you’re David Beckham. Beckham. He’s a Brit who kicks the holy hell out of things for a billion dollars a year. Look, just get the money he owes or don’t bother coming back to the office.”