Seeing another bar, he peeked inside. People inside stared at him with milky eyes. Coop had been in a lot of bars over the years. Some were open and friendly. The people in most bars couldn’t give a shit whether you came in or not. But there were others that you knew not to go into the minute you stuck your head in. It wasn’t that they were hostile. It was more like someone had sprayed people repellent around the door. At least your kind of people. Going inside could result in a systematic kicking of your ass. That’s the feeling Coop got from this place. And all he’d done was look in the window.

He jumped a little when Giselle tapped him on the shoulder.

“What’s your problem, Mr. Chicken?” she said.

“What’s up with this crowd? They look like they want to snack on my skull.”

Giselle looked past him and pulled Coop back to the escalator. “It’s a mook bar. They’re touchy about the living wandering in and eating their peanuts.”

“Your boss, Salzman, seems like a charming corpse. What’s his story?”

Giselle shrugged. “He’s not so bad. Just ambitious. There are a million guys like him at the DOPS.”

“I get a bad feeling if you were a dick when you were alive, being dead isn’t going to fix it.”

“You got that right.” Giselle stepped off the escalator. “The DOPS loves mooks. They work hard and don’t complain.”

Coop leaned on the escalator railing, trying to get over the onslaught of weirdness. “Of course they don’t complain. Where else are they going to go? I don’t think they let dead people run Dairy Queens.”

Giselle gave him a look. “You’d be surprised how many fast-food joints are run by the undead. Personally, I think a lot of mooks like the DOPS because they hope someone is going to figure out a way to make them alive again.”

“And they can all be real boys. Just like Pinocchio.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Be nice.”

“Or pretend to be.”

“Pretend it is.”

Coop could see the moon from the top of the next escalator. Or something that looked a lot like it. The dark floor where they stepped off was icy. Coop blew into his hands. He looked around and saw a cart giving out free samples of drinks. He wandered over hoping it was some kind of supernatural whiskey.

“Would you like to try something today, sir?” said the pretty vampire in charge of the cart. Her name tag said KRISTEN.

“Hi, Kristen. What do you have that’s got a kick? And warm. But mostly a kick.”