And then, on something slightly more than a whim, Shadow flipped the pages forward to the winter of 1877. He found what he was looking for mentioned as an aside in the January minutes: Jessie Lovat, age not given, “a Negro child,” had vanished on the night of December 28. It was believed that she might have been “abducted by traveling so-called pedlars.” Condolences were not sent to the Lovat family.
Shadow was scanning the minutes of winter 1878 when Chad Mulligan knocked and entered, looking shamefaced, like a child bringing home a bad report card.
“Mister Ainsel,” he said. “Mike. I’m truly sorry about this. Personally, I like you. But that don’t change anything, you know?”
Shadow said he knew.
“I got no choice in the matter,” said Chad, “but to place you under arrest for violating your parole.” Then Mulligan read Shadow his rights. He filled out some paperwork. He took Shadow’s prints. He walked him down the hall to the county jail, on the other side of the building.
There was a long counter and several doorways on one side of the room, two glassed-in holding cells and a doorway on the other. One of the cells was occupied—a man slept on a cement bed under a thin blanket. The other was empty.
There was a sleepy-looking woman in a brown uniform behind the counter, watching Jay Leno on a small white portable television. She took the papers from Chad, and signed for Shadow. Chad hung around, filled in more papers. The woman came around the counter, patted Shadow down, took all his possessions—wallet, coins, front door key, book, watch—and put them on the counter, then gave him a plastic bag with orange clothes in it and told him to go into the open cell and change into them. He could keep his own underwear and socks. He went in and changed into the orange clothes and the shower footwear. It stank evilly in there. The orange top he pulled over his head had LUMBER COUNTY JAIL written on the back in large black letters.
The metal toilet in the cell had backed up, and was filled to the brim with a brown stew of liquid feces and sour, beerish urine.
Shadow came back out, gave the woman his clothes, which she put into the plastic bag with the rest of his possessions. He had thumbed through the wallet before he handed it over. “You take care of this,” he had said to the woman, “My whole life is in here.” The woman took the wallet from him, and assured him that it would be safe
with them. She asked Chad if that wasn’t true, and Chad, looking up from the last of his paperwork, said Liz was telling the truth, they’d never lost a prisoner’s possessions yet.
Shadow had slipped the four hundred-dollar bills that he had palmed from the wallet into his socks, when he had changed, along with the silver Liberty dollar he had palmed as he had emptied his pockets.
“Say,” Shadow asked, when he came out. “Would it be okay if I finished reading the book?”
“Sorry, Mike. Rules are rules,” said Chad.
Liz put Shadow’s possessions in a bag in the back room. Chad said he’d leave Shadow in Officer Bute’s capable hands. Liz looked tired and unimpressed. Chad left. The telephone rang, and Liz—Officer Bute—answered it. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. No problem. Okay. No problem. Okay.” She put down the phone and made a face.
“Problem?” asked Shadow.
“Yes. Not really. Kinda. They’re sending someone up from Milwaukee to collect you.”
“Why is that a problem?”
“I got to keep you in here with me for three hours,” she said. “And the cell over there”—she pointed to the cell by the door, with the sleeping man in it—“that’s occupied. He’s on suicide watch. I shouldn’t put you in with him. But it’s not worth the trouble to sign you in to the county and then sign you out again.” She shook her head. “And you don’t want to go in there”—she pointed to the empty cell in which he’d changed his clothes—“because the can is shot. It stinks in there, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. It was gross.”
“It’s common humanity, that’s what it is. The sooner we get into the new facilities, it can’t be too soon for me. One of the women we had in yesterday must’ve flushed a tampon away. I tell ’em not to. We got bins for that. They clog the pipes. Every damn tampon down that john costs the county a hundred bucks in plumbers’ fees. So, I can keep you out here, if I cuff you. Or you can go in the cell.” She looked at him. “Your call,” she said.
“I’m not crazy about them,” he said. “But I’ll take the cuffs.”
She took a pair from her utility belt, then patted the semiautomatic in its holster, as if to remind him that it was there. “Hands behind your back,” she said.
The cuffs were a tight fit: he had big wrists. Then she put hobbles on his ankles and sat him down on a bench on the far side of the counter, against the wall. “Now,” she said. “You don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you.” She tilted the television so that he could see it.
“Thanks,” he said.
“When we get our new offices,” she said, “there won’t be none of this nonsense.”
The Tonight Show finished. An episode of Cheers began. Shadow had never watched Cheers. He had only ever seen one episode of it—the one where Coach’s daughter comes to the bar—although he had seen that several times. Shadow had noticed that you only ever catch one episode of shows you don’t watch, over and over, years apart; he thought it must be some kind of cosmic law.
Officer Liz Bute sat back in her chair. She was not obviously dozing, but she was by no means awake, so she did not notice when the gang at Cheers stopped talking and getting off one-liners and just started staring out of the screen at Shadow.
Diane, the blonde barmaid who fancied herself an intellectual, was the first to talk. “Shadow,” she said. “We were so worried about you. You’d fallen off the world. It’s so good to see you again—albeit in bondage and orange couture.”
“What I figure is the thing to do,” pontificated bar bore Cliff, “is to escape in hunting season, when everybody’s wearing orange anyway.”
Shadow said nothing.