Odd Hours

Homeland Security I might be able to share with them: “What the hell do you care what we think?”
    “Sinatra,” the chief said dismissively. “Who listens to that crap anymore?”
    The Voice, voiceless since death, pivoted toward Shackett.
    “I had this girlfriend,” I said, “she swooned for Sinatra, but I say he was just a gutless punk.”
    “They’re all punks,” the chief said. “Fact is, they’re all pansies.”
    “You think so?” I asked.
    “Sure. The big rock stars, the heavy-metal idiots, the lounge lizards like Sinatra, they all act tough, want you to believe they’re true wise guys who made their bones, but they’re all light in the loafers.”
    Here was contempt, bigotry, and insult served up steaming on a platter, and I was so grateful to the chief that I almost cried.
    “In World War Two,” I told Shackett, “Sinatra dodged the draft.”
    Mr. Sinatra snapped his head toward me so fast that had he been alive, he would have broken his neck. He knew that I knew this was a lie, which made my attack on his character especially unfair. His face contorted so extremely that it conveyed both astonishment and rage at the same time.
    “Of course he dodged,” the chief said. “What would he have done if he’d come up against Nazi badasses—slap them with his perfumed handkerchief?”
    Concentric rings of power, visible only to me, began to radiate from Mr. Sinatra’s fists.
    “So,” I said to Hoss Shackett as, in blissful ignorance of the building storm, he settled on his chair, “then you think maybe he and Dean Martin were more than just friends?”
    Utgard Rolf stepped around the polygraph, scowling. “What’re you going on about?”
    In the corner, the third chair began to rock slowly side to side as the pulses of power from Mr. Sinatra disturbed it.
    “I’m just saying he was a gutless punk,” I replied, wishing I could think of a new insult.
    “Anyway,” the chief volunteered, “that old music—Rod Stewart sings it better.”
    “That should just about do it,” I said.
    Utgard’s yellow eyes were not half as scary as Mr. Sinatra’s blues had become. Looming over me, he said, “Why don’t you shut up?”
    “Why? Are you a big Rod Stewart fan or something?”
    He was such a solid package of bone and beef that most punches he took probably resulted in shattered hands for those who threw them.
    With the menace of a grizzly suffering a toothache, he growled, “Sit down.”
    “Hey, pal, take it easy, okay? We want the same thing. Don’t you want this stinking country nuked to its knees?”
    Perhaps one of Grandma Melvina Belmont Singleton’s gorillas had been an ancestor of Utgard’s, because the big man’s instincts were closer to the jungle than were the chief’s. He knew something about me was wrong, and he acted on it.
    Utgard backhanded me across the face so quick I hardly saw his arm move, and so hard that gorillas in Africa would be looking up in surprise from their bananas when the crack of the blow reached them at the speed of sound.
    I thought I had taken the hit without losing my footing, but when I tried to run, I discovered that I was sprawled on the floor.
    Licking my lips, tasting blood, I shouted inspiration to Mr. Sinatra: “God bless America!”
    Denied the chance to fight for his country in World War II, Old Crazy-Whirling-Blue Eyes seized this opportunity. He went ballistic.
    He opened his fists and held his arms out straight, palms bared, fingers spread. Pulses of power, pale-blue rings, flew from him and animated the inanimate.
    In the corner, the third chair started spinning on one leg, striking from the concrete a shriek as shrill as a drill bit might have made.
    Instead of decorating my face with repeated impressions of his shoe tread, Utgard turned toward the whirling chair.
    Chief Hoss Shackett, about to face the consequences of comparing Rod Stewart and Mr. Sinatra to the latter’s disadvantage, rose from his chair in astonishment.
    As a first strategic step toward the door, toward freedom, toward the hope of living to eat another bacon cheeseburger, I crawled under the table with the expectation that it would provide a temporary shelter while I calculated my next move.
    The whirling chair exploded to the ceiling, ricocheted off the concrete, and bounced off the table with a boom! that made me feel as if I had taken refuge inside a drum.
    A greater clatter arose, and I figured all three chairs must now be whacking around the room, a