Kill the Dead (Sandman Slim 2)

“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.”

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.