John jumped, then turned around. He answered Alan with a grin of his own, one which was both shamefaced and distracted.
"Sorry, Alan. I-" Then Alan was moving. He crossed the room with the same liquid, silent speed that had so struck Polly Chalmers on Friday evening. John LaPointe's mouth fell open. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw what Alan was up to-the two drawers on top of the stack he had made were starting to tumble.
Alan was fast enough to avert an utter disaster, but not fast enough to catch the first drawer. It landed on his feet, scattering papers, paper-clips, and loose bunches of staples everywhere. He pinned the other two against the side of John's desk with his palms.
"Holy Jesus! That was lickety-split, Alan!" John exclaimed.
"Thank you, John," Alan said with a pained smile. The drawers were starting to slip. Pushing harder did no good; it only made the desk start to move. Also, his toes hurt. "Toss all the compliments you want, by all means. But in between, maybe you could take the goddam drawer off my feet."
"Oh! Shit! Right! Right!" John hurried to do it. In his eagerness to remove the drawer, he bumped Alan. Alan lost his tenuous pressure-hold on the rwo drawers he had caught in time. They also landed on his feet.
"Ouch!" Alan yelled. He started to grab his right foot and then decided the left one hurt worse. "Bastard!"
"Holy Jesus, Alan, I'm sorry!"
"What have you got in there?" Alan asked, hopping away with his left foot in his hand. "Half of Castle Land Quarry?"
"I guess it has been awhile since I cleaned em out." John smiled guiltily and began stuffing papers and office supplies helter-skelter back into the drawers. His conventionally handsome face was flaming scarlet. He was on his knees, and when he pivoted to get the paper-clips and staples which had gone under Clut's desk, he kicked over a tall stack of forms and reports that he had stacked on the floor. Now the bullpen area of the Sheriff's Office was beginning to resemble a tornado zone.
"Whoops!" John said.
"Whoops," Alan said, sitting on Norris Ridgewick's desk and trying to massage his toes through his heavy black police-issue shoes. "Whoops is good, John. A very accurate description of the situation. This is a whoops if I ever saw one."
"Sorry," John said again, and actually wormed under his desk on his stomach, sweeping errant clips and staples toward him with the sides of his hands. Alan was not sure if he should laugh or cry.
John's feet were wagging back and forth as he moved his hands, spreading the papers on the floor widely and evenly.
"John, get out of there!" Alan yelled. He was trying hard not to laugh, but he could tell already it was going to be a lost cause.
LaPointe jerked. His head honked briskly against the underside of his desk. And another stack of papers, one which had been deposited on the very edge of gravity to make room for the drawers, fell over the side. Most floomped straight to the floor, but dozens went seesawing lazily back and forth through the air.
He's gonna be filing those all day, Alan thought resignedly.
Maybe all week.
Then he could hold on no longer. He threw back his head and bellowed laughter. Andy Clutterbuck, who had been in the dispatcher's office, came out to see what was going on.
"Sheriff?" he asked. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah," Alan said. Then he looked at the reports and forms, scattered hell to breakfast, and began to laugh again. "John's doing a little creative paperwork here, that's all."
John crawled out from under his desk and stood up. He looked like a man who wishes mightily that someone would ask him to stand at attention, or maybe hit the deck and do forty pushupsThe front of his previously immaculate uniform was covered with dust, and in spite of his amusement, Alan made a mental note it had been a long time since Eddie Warburton had taken care of the floor under these bullpen desks.
Then he began laughing again.
There was simply no help for it. Clut looked from John to Alan and then back to John again, puzzled.
"Okay," Alan said, getting himself under control at last. "What were you looking for, John? The Holy Grail? The Lost Chord?
What?"
"My wallet," John said, brushing ineffectually at the front of his uniform. "I can't find my goddam wallet."
"Did you check your car?"
"Both of them," John said. He passed a disgusted glance over the asteroid belt of junk around his desk. "The cruiser I was driving last night and my Pontiac. But sometimes when I'm here I stick it in a desk drawer because it makes a lump against my butt when I sit down. So I was checking-"
"It wouldn't bust your ass like that if you didn't keep your whole goddam life in there, John," Andy Clutterbuck said reasonably.
"Clut," Alan said, "go play in the traffic, would you?"
"Huh?"
Alan rolled his eyes. "Go find something to do. I think John and I can handle this; we're trained investigators. If it turns out we can't, we'll let you know."
"Oh, sure. just trying to help, you know. I've seen his wallet.
It looks like he's got the whole Library of Congress in there. In fact-"