The lights were off, and there was silence, mostly, nothing but the hum of the refrigerator, and, somewhere in the building, a radio playing. He lay there in the darkness, wondering if he had slept himself out on the Greyhound, if the hunger and the cold and the new bed and the craziness of the last few weeks would combine to keep him awake that night.
In the stillness he heard something snap like a shot. A branch, he thought, or the ice. It was freezing out there.
He wondered how long he would have to wait until Wednesday came for him. A day? A week? However long he had, he knew he had to focus on something in the meantime. He would start to work out again, he decided, and practice his coin sleights and palms until he was smooth as anything (practice all your tricks, somebody whispered inside his head, in a voice that was not his own, all of them but one, not the trick that poor dead Mad Sweeney showed you, dead of exposure and the cold and of being forgotten and surplus to requirements, not that trick. Oh, not that one).
But this was a good town. He could feel it.
He thought of his dream, if it had been a dream, that first night in Cairo. He thought of Zorya . . . what the hell was her name? The midnight sister.
And then he thought of Laura . . .
It was as if thinking of her opened a window in his mind. He could see her. He could, somehow, see her.
She was in Eagle Point, in the backyard outside her mother’s big house.
She stood in the cold, which she did not feel anymore or which she felt all the time, she stood outside the house that her mother had bought in 1989 with the insurance money after Laura’s father, Harvey McCabe, had passed on, a heart attack while straining on the can, and she was staring in, her cold hands pressed against the glass, her breath not fogging it, not at all, watching her mother, and her sister and her sister’s children and husband in from Texas, home for Christmas. Out in the darkness, that was where Laura was, unable not to look.
Tears prickled in Shadow’s eyes, and he rolled over in his bed.
He felt like a Peeping Tom, turned his thoughts away, willed them to come back to him: he could see the lake spread out below him as the wind blew down from the arctic, prying jack-frost fingers a hundred times colder than the fingers of any corpse.
Shadow’s breath came shallowly now. He could hear a wind rising, a bitter screaming around the house, and for a moment he thought he could hear words on the wind.
If he was going to be anywhere, he might as well be here, he thought, and then he slept.
MEANWHILE. A CONVERSATION.
Dingdong.
“Miz Crow?”
“Yes.”
“Miz Samantha Black Crow?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind if we ask you a few questions, ma’am?”
“Are you cops? What are you?”
“My name is Town. My colleague here is Mister Road. We’re investigating the disappearance of two of our associates.”
“What were their names?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Tell me their names. I want to know what they were called. Your associates. Tell me their names and maybe I’ll help you.”
“. . . Okay. Their names were Mister Stone and Mister Wood. Now, can we ask you some questions?”
“Do you guys just see things and pick names? ‘Oh, you be Mister Sidewalk, he’s Mister Carpet, say hello to Mister Airplane’?”
“Very funny, young lady. First question: we need to know if you’ve seen this man. Here. You can hold the photograph.”
“Whoah. Straight on and profile, with numbers on the bottom . . . And big. He’s cute, though. What did he do?”
“He was mixed up in a small-town bank robbery, as a driver, some years ago. His two colleagues decided to keep all the loot for themselves and ran out on him. He got angry. Found them. Came close to killing them with his hands. The state cut a deal with the men he hurt: they testified against him. Shadow here got six years. He served three. You ask me, guys like that, they should just lock them up and throw away the key.”