“…and this,” concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, “is Mabel’s.”
He got out of the car, opened the rear door for Shadow. The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked bread, of pastry and soup and bacon.
The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat down at a table and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a feel for the stranger in town. Then again, the police chief might simply be what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good.
A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, a big woman in her sixties, her hair bottle-bronze.
“Hello, Chad,” she said. “You’ll want a hot chocolate while you’re thinking.” She handed them two laminated menus.
“No cream on the top, though,” he agreed. “Mabel knows me too well,” he said to Shadow. “What’ll it be, pal?”
“Hot chocolate sounds great,” said Shadow. “And I’m happy to have the whipped cream on the top.”
“That’s good,” said Mabel. “Live dangerously, hon. Are you going to introduce me, Chad? Is this young man a new officer?”
“Not yet,” said Chad Mulligan, with a flash of white teeth. “This is Mike Ainsel. He moved to Lakeside last night. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He got up, walked to the back of the room, through the door marked POINTERS. It was next to a door marked SETTERS.
“You’re the new man in the apartment up on Northridge Road. The old Pilsen place. Oh yes,” she said, happily, “I know just who you are. Hinzelmann was by this morning for his morning pasty, he told me all about you. You boys only having hot chocolate or you want to look at the breakfast menu?”
“Breakfast for me,” said Shadow. “What’s good?”
“Everything’s good,” said Mabel. “I make it. But this is the furthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties, and they are particularly good. Warming and filling too. My specialty.”
Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat, potatoes, carrots, onions. “First pasty I’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s real good.”
“They’re a yoopie thing,” she told him. “Mostly you need to be at least up Ironwood way to get one. The Cornish men who came over to work the iron mines brought them over.”
“Yoopie?”
“Upper Peninsula. UP. Yoopie. Where the Yoopers come from. It’s the little chunk of Michigan to the northeast.”
The chief of police came back. He picked up the hot chocolate and slurped it. “Mabel,” he said, “are you forcing this nice young man to eat one of your pasties?”
“It’s good,” said Shadow. It was, too—a savory delight wrapped in hot pastry.
“They go straight to the belly,” said Chad Mulligan, patting his own stomach. “I warn you. Okay. So, you need a car?” With his parka off, he was revealed as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked harassed and competent, more like an engineer than a cop.
Shadow nodded, mouth full.
“Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitz’s selling his jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers have had their Toyota 4Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but at this point they’d probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if you don’t care about ugly, it’s got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the men’s room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she wasn’t in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheila’s.”
The pasty remained good as Shadow chewed his way through it. It was astonishingly filling. “Stick-to-your-ribs food,” as his mother would have said. “Sticks to your sides.”
“So,” said Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, wiping the hot chocolate foam from around his lips. “I figure we stop off next at Henning’s Farm and Home Supplies, get you a real winter wardrobe, swing by Dave’s Finest Food, so you can fill your larder, then I’ll drop you up by Lakeside Realty. If you can put down a thousand up front for the car they’ll be happy, otherwise five hundred a month for four months should see them okay. It’s an ugly car, like I said, but if the kid hadn’t painted it purple it’d be a ten-thousand-dollar car, and reliable, and you’ll need something like that to get around this winter, you ask me.”
“This is very good of you,” said Shadow. “But shouldn’t you be out catching criminals, not helping newcomers? Not that I’m complaining, you understand.”
Mabel chuckled. “We all tell him that,” she said.
Mulligan shrugged. “It’s a good town,” he said, simply. “Not much trouble. You’ll always get someone speeding within city limits—which is a good thing, as traffic tickets pay my wages. Friday, Saturday nights you get some jerk who gets drunk and beats on a spouse—and that one can go both ways, believe me. Men and women. And I learned when I was on the force in Green Bay, I’d rather attend a bank robbery than a domestic in a big city. But out here things are quiet. They call me out when someone’s locked their keys in their vehicle. Barking dogs. Every year there’s a couple of high school kids caught with weed behind the bleachers. Biggest police case we’ve had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun, shouting that he would shoot anyone who got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his with the bumper sticker on the back. MY JUVENILE DELINQUENT IS SCREWING YOUR HONOR STUDENT. You remember, Mabel?”
She nodded, lips pursed. She did not seem to find it as funny as Mulligan did.
“What did you do?” asked Shadow.
“I talked to him. He gave me the shotgun. Slept it off down at the jail. Dan’s not a bad guy, he was just drunk and upset.”
Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligan’s halfhearted protests, both hot chocolates.
Henning’s Farm and Home was a warehouse-sized building on the south of the town that sold everything from tractors to toys (the toys, along with the Christmas ornaments, were already on sale). The store was bustling with post-Christmas shoppers. Shadow recognized the younger of the girls who had sat in front of him on the bus. She was trailing after her parents. He waved at her and she gave him a hesitant, blue-rubber-banded smile. Shadow wondered idly what she’d look like in ten years’ time.
Probably as beautiful as the girl at the Henning’s Farm and Home checkout counter, who scanned in his purchases with a chattering hand-held gun, capable, Shadow had no doubt, of ringing up a tractor if someone drove it through.
“Ten pairs of long underwear?” said the girl. “Stocking up, huh?” She looked like a movie starlet.