"Mickey Jo," O'Leary told him. "She's a Prime agent, like you."
"Jest part-time, is all," Tode reminded Lafayette. He holstered his weapon. "Reckon we better get started," he added. "You got any clothes to put on?" he inquired vaguely.
"In the closet," O'Leary improvised, mentally picturing a row of natty outfits in both his size and Marv's, plus an assortment of Western costumes for Mickey Jo. There was a faint bump, he thought—or was it a distant explosion?
There was a moment of disorientation; then the gray room was back. This time, O'Leary told himself, crouching behind the nearest chair, he'd play it a little smarter. No jumping out and yelling BOO! If he just laid low and listened ... there were faint voices. Lafayette peeked out from behind the chair and saw Frumpkin clad in a wine-colored bathrope, deep in conversation with Special Ed and a paunchy, sly-faced fellow in a dowdy alpaca suit and worn cowboy boots.
"... no danger of that; he's a simpleton," Frumpkin was saying.
"I dunno, Chief," Ed countered. "He made the takeout slicker'n owl-do, and I tole you he had them pitchers."
"He couldn't have," Frumpkin snapped. "You'd been sampling your stock again, Ed." He scribbled a note in a small pad and turned to the other man.
"Now, Chuck, I don't like your coming here like this without specific instructions," Frumpkin said in a sharp tone. The paunchy man threw up his hands.
"Don't go getting riled, boss. I cun't help it. I and the missus had just went out for a bite, and"—he paused to gulp—"and it jest happened. Makes me nervous." He looked around, failing to note O'Leary as he ducked back.
"No matter," Frumpkin dismissed the subject. "All can yet be retrieved. These aberrant inputs have kept me a bit off-balance, I'll admit. It's time to recalibrate. Just follow along, gentlemen."
Lafayette poked his head out to watch, and it struck a large gong which someone had put there while he wasn't looking. The clang echoed and reechoed, louder and softer, on and on ...
Sheriff Tode's meaty face seemed to be hanging disembodied before him. "Easy, Shurf," Lafayette said soothingly. "As soon as I can get the world slowed down to a slow whirl—or whirled slowed down to a world, I'll explain everything—except possibly the moose in the bedroom."
"You're a-foolin' me," Tode accused, but he turned and watched as O'Leary went to the closet door and opened it on precisely the gaudy wardrobe he had envisioned, plus a row of well-shined boots on a rack below.
"I can see somebody's been a-funnin' me," Tode remarked. O'Leary ignored the comment and invited Marv, now pink from a vigorous toweling, to pick out a suitable outfit for himself.
"Oh, boy," Marv purred appreciatively as he looked over a scarlet doorman's uniform with gold epaulets, but passed it up in favor of a powder-blue confection with silver braid and buttons. A drawer at one end of the closet supplied socks and undergarments.
The roar of the shower ceased, and Mickey Jo, a towel around her hair and another held carelessly before her, emerged and uttered a yelp of joy at sight of the closet.
"I always wanted one o' them cowgirl getups," she cried, "just like Dale used to wear." She hurried over and suited up while Marv struggled with his tie, lingering before the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door.
"Marv," Mickey Jo cooed, "I never dreamed you were so handsome! But how about a shave to go with it? Or do you want me to just shape it a little?"
O'Leary finished dressing in a well-fitted hussar's tunic and breeches, complete with nickle-plated helmet and sword-hilt, a costume selected for him by Mickey Jo, who had transferred the contents of his pockets to his new finery; there came a peremptory knock at the door, followed at once by a pounding as with a pistol-butt; then an authoritative voice yelled:
"Open up, you in there! Police business!"
"Why, fur as that goes, I'm a police orfiser myself," Sheriff Tode began as he opened the door, only to be thrust aside by a bulky fellow in greasy rags which may have been the remains of a regulation dark-blue city-cop suit. He looked from Mickey Jo to Marv to O'Leary, then planted his feet solidly before the latter and barked:
"You'd be the boy I want, I don't doubt. Are you coming quiet, or do I hafta cuff ya up?" He jingled a set of rusty bracelets at his belt and shifted his cigar butt to the other corner of his mouth.
"No need for force, Chief," Lafayette assured the intruder. "I'll come quietly. And perhaps you can tell me something about just what it is that's going on here."
"Don't count on it, rube," the cop snarled, whacking his palm with his billy club. "The rest o' you riffraff stay here," he added, eyeing Tode without approval. "I'll get to you later."
"Sir," Tode stated firmly. "I myself am Shurf Tode of Colby County. You may depend on my cooperation in any police matter."
"Happens the shire reeve's a close acquaintance o' mine," the cop growled, "and he's over to the ducal quarters right now tryna splain to His Grace how he happen to be in that lynch mob."
Trailed by Marv with Tode at his side while Mickey Jo disappeared into the bathroom, O'Leary followed the cop out into moonlit darkness along a catwalk improvised from debris. The catwalk protected his mirror-polished boots from the mud, from which at irregular intervals the ruins of former masonry buildings projected, vaguely visible by moonlight. The moon itself, Lafayette noted, had resumed its normal size. Studying the ragged rows of huts, Lafayette was struck by a thought: "Marv," he said quietly to the gaudily dressed Prime agent, "this used to be a city, and the shacks are lined up along the old streets. Do you think it could be Colby Corners? If it is, it means the Chantspell Mountains ought to be over there, to the west, but there's nothing there but those low hillocks. Somehow we're close to home, but an awful long way off, too."
"Beats me," Marv muttered. O'Leary now noticed up ahead a curiously rickety structure some fifty feet tall, with a solid-looking room at the top. He pointed it out to Marv. "As I figure it," he said, "That's just about where the Y is back in Colby Corners—and the palace, in Artesia."
"That don't look safe," Marv said, eyeing the fragile underpinnings of the top-heavy building. Ignoring the curious edifice, their guide turned in at a tumble-down affair he referred to grandly as the Palace of Justice, a collapsed building with one brick wall and two more of packing crates and tarpaper, roofed with a rotted tarpaulin. Only the top step of a wide flight projected above the mud level.
"Had a flood here, eh?" O'Leary hazarded.
"You could say that, wise guy," Lafayette's escort grunted. "Now, you ack nice in front of the Inspector, and I'll try to make it easy on you."
O'Leary looked around at the squatter's village of mean hovels linked, he could now see, by a network of catwalks of an extent that indicated more than a brief occupation of the site. A few drably clad people were in sight, apparently engaged in routine tasks.
"C'mon, feller," the cop urged from the step. "Ain't got no backlog in the courts anyways. Jedge's waitin' on ye." Tode hurried up the steps; Lafayette followed. Marv was nowhere to be seen. Tode forged ahead confidently.
They pushed through heavy oak doors with pieces of billboard nailed over the broken plate-glass panels. Inside, Lafayette detected the stale odor of boredom, incompetence, bribery, treachery, and poor sanitation common to all such institutions of law-without-justice. He trailed Tode and the arresting officer to an inner pair of swinging oak doors and inside into a small theatrelike room where a middle-aged man with a plump and half-familiar face sat hunched in a black robe behind a lectern on a raised platform. The smack of the gavel made O'Leary jump.
"All right, Agent X-9," the presumed judge muttered, not quite looking at O'Leary's guard. "Case of the Supreme Authority versus O'Leary. Court is now in session." He looked vaguely at O'Leary. "Do you have anything to say before I pronounce sentence?"