“If you ask me, he wants a last stand. He wants us to go out in a blaze of glory. That’s what he wants. And we are old enough, or stupid enough, that maybe some of us will say yes.”

“It’s not my job to ask questions, Mama-ji,” said Shadow. The inside of the car filled with her tinkling laughter.

The man in the backseat—not the peculiar-looking young man, the other one—said something, and Shadow replied to him, but a moment later he was damned if he could remember what had been said.

The peculiar-looking young man had said nothing, but now he started to hum to himself, a deep, melodic bass humming that made the interior of the car vibrate and rattle and buzz.

The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no image to accompany the metaphor. This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs like, yes, like tree trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham hocks. He wore a black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously, in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were the same size and shape as shoeboxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with flat, squared-off fingertips.

“That’s some hum you got,” said Shadow from the driver’s seat.

“Sorry,” said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice, embarrassed. He stopped humming.

“No, I enjoyed it,” said Shadow. “Don’t stop.”

The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words interspersed in the humming. “Down down down,” he sang, so deeply that the windows rattled. “Down down down, down down, down down.”

Christmas lights were draped across the eaves of every house and building that they drove past. They ranged from discreet golden lights that dripped twinkles to giant displays of snowmen and teddy bears and multicolored stars.

Shadow pulled up at the restaurant, a big, barnlike structure, and he let his passengers off by the front door. He drove the car to the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the restaurant alone, in the cold, to clear his head.

He parked the car beside a black truck. He wondered if it was the same one that had sped past him earlier. He closed the car door, and stood there in the parking lot, his breath steaming.

Inside the restaurant, Shadow could imagine Wednesday already sitting all his guests down around a big table, working the room. Shadow wondered whether he had really had Kali in the front of his car, wondered what he had been driving in the back . . .

“Hey bud, you got a match?” said a voice that was half familiar, and Shadow turned to apologize and say no, he didn’t, but the gun barrel hit him over the left eye, and he started to fall. He put out an arm to steady himself as he went down. Someone pushed something soft into his mouth, to stop him crying out, and taped it into position: easy, practiced moves, like a butcher gutting a chicken.

Shadow tried to shout, to warn Wednesday, to warn them all, but nothing came out of his mouth but a muffled noise.

“The quarry are all inside,” said the half-familiar voice. “Everyone in position?” A crackle of a voice, half audible through a radio. “Let’s move in and round them all up.”

“What about the big guy?” said another voice.

“Package him up, take him out,” said the first voice.

They put a baglike hood over Shadow’s head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape, and put him in the back of a truck, and drove him away.

There were no windows in the tiny room in which they had locked Shadow. There was a plastic chair, a lightweight folding table, and a bucket with a cover on it, which served Shadow as a makeshift toilet. There was also a six-foot-long strip of yellow foam on the floor, and a thin blanket with a long-since-crusted brown stain in the center: blood or shit or food, Shadow didn’t know, and didn’t care to investigate. There was a naked bulb behind a metal grille high in the room, but no light switch that Shadow had been able to find. The light was always on. There was no door handle on his side of the door.

He was hungry.

The first thing he had done, when the spooks had pushed him into the room, after they’d ripped off the tape from his ankles and wrists and mouth and left him alone, was to walk around the room and inspect it, carefully. He tapped the walls. They sounded dully metallic. There was a small ventilation grid at the top of the room. The door was soundly locked.

He was bleeding above the left eyebrow in a slow ooze. His head ached.

The floor was uncarpeted. He tapped it. It was made of the same metal as the walls.

He took the top off the bucket, pissed in it, and covered it once more. According to his watch only four hours had passed since the raid on the restaurant.

His wallet was gone, but they had left him his coins.

He sat on the chair, at the card table. The table was covered with a cigarette-burned green baize. Shadow practiced appearing to push coins through the table. Then he took two quarters and made up a Pointless Coin Trick.

He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. Then he appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that had been there all along.

The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all Shadow’s head to do it; or rather, he could not do it if he was angry or upset, so the action of practicing an illusion, even one with, on its own, no possible use—for he had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it appear that he had moved a quarter from one hand to the other, something that it takes no skill whatever to do for real—calmed him, cleared his mind of turmoil and fear.

He began a trick even more pointless: a one-handed half-dollar-to-penny transformation, but with his two quarters. Each of the coins was alternately concealed and revealed as the trick progressed: he began with one quarter visible, the other hidden. He raised his hand to his mouth and blew on the visible coin, while slipping it into a classic palm, as the first two fingers took the hidden quarter out and presented it. The effect was that he displayed a quarter in his hand, raised it to his mouth, blew on it, and lowered it again, displaying the same quarter all the while.

Tags: Neil Gaiman Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net