There was a bang, muted by the television speakers, and the side of Wednesday’s head exploded. His body tumbled backward.
Mr. World stood up, his back still to the camera, and walked out of shot.
“Let’s see that again, in slow motion this time,” said the announcer’s voice, reassuringly.
The words LIVE FEED became REPLAY. Slowly now the red laser pointer traced its bead onto Wednesday’s glass eye, and once again the side of his face dissolved into a cloud of blood. Freeze frame.
“Yes, it’s still God’s Own Country,” said the announcer, a news reporter pronouncing the final tag line. “The only question is, which gods?”
Another voice—Shadow thought that it was Mr. World’s, it had that same half-familiar quality—said, “We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”
On Cheers Coach assured his daughter that she was truly beautiful, just like her mother.
The telephone rang, and Officer Liz sat up with a start. She picked it up. Said, “Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay, I’ll be over there,” put the phone down and got up from behind the counter. She said to Shadow, “Sorry. I’m going to have to put you in the cell. Don’t use the can. If you need to go, press the buzzer by the door, and I’ll come down as soon as I can and escort you to the restrooms out back. The Lafayette sheriff’s department should be here to collect you soon.”
She removed the cuffs and the hobble, locked him into the holding cell. The smell was worse, now that the door was closed.
Shadow sat down on the concrete bed, slipped the Liberty dollar from his sock and began moving it from finger to palm, from position to position, from hand to hand, his only aim to keep the coin from being seen by anyone who might look in. He was passing the time. He was numb.
He missed Wednesday, then, sudden and deep. He missed the man’s confidence, his attitude. His conviction.
He opened his hand, looked down at Lady Liberty, a silver profile. He closed his fingers over the coin, held it tightly. He wondered if he’d get to be one of those guys who got life for something they didn’t do. If he even made it that far. From what he’d seen of Mr. World and Mr. Town, they would have little trouble pulling him out of the system. Perhaps he’d suffer an unfortunate accident on the way to the next holding facility. He could be shot while making a break for it. It did not seem at all unlikely.
There was a stir of activity in the room on the other side of the glass. Officer Liz came back in. She pressed a button, a door that Shadow could not see opened, and a black deputy in a brown sheriff’s uniform entered and walked briskly over to the desk.
Shadow slipped the dollar coin back into his sock, pushing it down toward his ankle.
The new deputy handed over some papers, Liz scanned them and signed. Chad Mulligan came in, said a few words to the new man, then he unlocked the cell door and walked inside.
“It stinks in here.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Okay. Folk are here to pick you up. Seems you’re a matter of national security. You know that?”
“It’ll make a great front-page story for the Lakeside News,” said Shadow.
Chad looked at him without expression. “That a drifter got picked up for parole violations? Not much of a story.”
“So that’s the way it is?”
“That’s what they tell me,” said Chad Mulligan. Shadow put his hands in front of him this time, and Chad cuffed him. Chad locked on the ankle hobbles, and a rod from the cuffs to the hobbles.
Shadow thought, They’ll take me outside. Maybe I can make a break for it, some kind of break for it, in hobbles and cuffs and lightweight orange clothes, out into the snow, and even as he thought it he knew how stupid and hopeless it was.
Chad walked him out into the office. Liz had turned the TV off now. The black deputy looked him over. “He’s a big guy,” he said to Chad. Liz passed the new deputy the paper bag with Shadow’s possessions in it, and he signed for it.
Chad looked at Shadow, then at the deputy. He said to the deputy, quietly, but loudly enough for Shadow to hear, “Look. I just want to say, I’m not comfortable with the way this is happening.”
The deputy nodded. His voice was deep, and cultured: the voice of a man who could as easily organize a press briefing as a massacre. “You’ll have to take it up with the appropriate authorities, sir. Our job is simply to bring him in.”
Chad made a sour face. He turned to Shadow. “Okay,” said Chad. “Through that door and into the sally port.”
“What?”
“Out there. Where the car is.”
Liz unlocked the doors. “You make sure that orange uniform comes right back here,” she said to the deputy. “The last felon we sent down to Lafayette, we never saw the uniform again. They cost the county money.” They walked Shadow out to the sally port, where a car was waiting. It wasn’t a sheriff’s-department car. It was a black town car. Another deputy, a grizzled white guy with a moustache, stood by the car, smoking a cigarette. He crushed it out underfoot as they came close, and opened the back door for Shadow.
Shadow sat down, awkwardly, his movements hampered by the cuffs and the hobble. There was no grille between the back and the front of the car.
The two deputies climbed into the front of the car. The black deputy started the motor. They waited for the sally port door to open.
“Come on, come on,” said the black deputy, his fingers drumming against the steering wheel.
Chad Mulligan tapped on the side window. The white deputy glanced at the driver, then he lowered the window. “This is wrong,” said Chad. “I just wanted to say that.”
“Your comments have been noted, and will be conveyed to the appropriate authorities,” said the driver.
The doors to the outside world opened. The snow was still falling, dizzying into the car’s headlights. The driver put his foot on the gas, and they were heading back down the street and onto Main Street.
“You heard about Wednesday?” said the driver. His voice sounded different, now, older, and familiar. “He’s dead.”
“Yeah. I know,” said Shadow. “I saw it on TV.”
“Those fuckers,” said the white officer. It was the first thing he had said, and his voice was rough and accented and, like the driver’s, it was a voice that Shadow knew. “I tell you, they are fuckers, those fuckers.”
“Thanks for coming to get me,” said Shadow.
“Don’t mention it,” said the driver. In the light of an oncoming car his face already looked older. He looked smaller, too. The last time Shadow had seen him he had been wearing lemon-yellow gloves and a check jacket. “We were in Milwaukee. Still had to drive like demons when Ibis called.”
“You think we let them lock you up and send you to the chair, when I’m still waiting to break your head with my hammer?” asked the white deputy gloomily, fumbling in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. His accent was east European.
“The real shit will hit the fan in an hour or less,” said Mr. Nancy, looking more like himself with each moment, “when they really turn up to collect you. We’ll pull over before we get to Highway 53 and get you out of those shackles and back into your own clothes.” Czernobog held up a handcuff key and smiled.