His fingers burned. His toes burned.
He began to whimper from the pain.
“Easy now, Mike. Easy there,” said a voice he knew.
“What?” he said, or tried to say. “What’s happening?” It sounded strained and strange to his ears.
He was in a bathtub. The water was hot. He thought the water was hot, although he could not be certain. The water was up to his neck.
“Dumbest thing you can do with a fellow freezing to death is to put him in front of a fire. The second dumbest thing you can do is to wrap him in blankets—especially if he’s in cold wet clothes already. Blankets insulate him—keep the cold in. The third dumbest thing—and this is my private opinion—is to take the fellow’s blood out, warm it up and put it back. That’s what doctors do these days. Complicated, expensive. Dumb.” The voice was coming from above and behind his head.
“The smartest, quickest thing you can do is what sailors have done to men overboard for hundreds of years. You put the fellow in hot water. Not too hot. Just hot. Now, just so you know, you were basically dead when I found you on the ice back there. How are you feeling now, Houdini?”
“It hurts,” said Shadow. “Everything hurts. You saved my life.”
“I guess maybe I did, at that. Can you hold your head up on your own now?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m going to let you go. If you start sinking below the water I’ll pull you back up again.”
The hands released their grip on his head.
He felt himself sliding forward in the tub. He put out his hands, pressed them against the side of the tub, and leaned back. The bathroom was small. The tub was metal, and the enamel was stained and scratched.
An old man moved into his field of vision. He looked concerned.
“Feeling better?” asked Hinzelmann. “You just lay back and relax. I’ve got the den nice and warm. You tell me when you’re ready, I got a robe you can wear, and I can throw your jeans into the dryer with the rest of your clothes. Sound good, Mike?”
“That’s not my name.”
“If you say so.” The old man’s goblin face twisted into an expression of discomfort.
Shadow had no real sense of time: he lay in the bathtub until the burning stopped and his toes and fingers flexed without real discomfort. Hinzelmann helped Shadow to his feet and let out the warm water. Shadow sat on the side of the bathtub and together they pulled off his jeans.
He squeezed, without much difficulty, into a terrycloth robe too small for him, and, leaning on the old man, he went into the den and flopped down on an ancient sofa. He was tired and weak: deeply fatigued, but alive. A log fire burned in the fireplace. A handful of surprised-looking deer heads peered down dustily from around the walls, where they jostled for space with several large varnished fish.
Hinzelmann went away with Shadow’s jeans, and from the room next door Shadow could hear a brief pause in the rattle of a clothes dryer before it resumed. The old man returned with a steaming mug.
“It’s coffee,” he said, “which is a stimulant. And I splashed a little schnapps into it. Just a little. That’s what we always did in the old days. A doctor wouldn’t recommend it.”
Shadow took the coffee with both hands. On the side of the mug was a picture of a mosquito and the message, GIVE BLOOD—VISIT WISCONSIN!!
“Thanks,” he said.
“It’s what friends are for,” said Hinzelmann. “One day, you can save my life. For now, forget about it.”
Shadow sipped the coffee. “I thought I was dead.”
“You were lucky. I was up on the bridge—I’d pretty much figured that today was going to be the big day, you get a feel for it, when you get to my age—so I was up there with my old pocket watch, and I saw you heading out onto the lake. I shouted, but I sure as heck don’t think you coulda heard me. I saw the car go down, and I saw you go down with it, and I thought I’d lost you, so I went out onto the ice. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. You must have been under the water for the best part of two minutes. Then I saw your hand come up through the place where the car went down—it was like seeing a ghost, seeing you there . . .” He trailed off. “We were both damn lucky that the ice took our weight as I dragged you back to the shore.”
Shadow nodded.
“You did a good thing,” he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed all over his goblin face.
Somewhere in the house, Shadow heard a door close. He sipped at his coffee.
Now that he was able to think clearly, he was starting to ask himself questions.