"No, listen to me, I'm telling you, man," said Johnnie Larch, "don't piss off those bitches in airports."
Shadow half smiled at the memory. His own driver's license had several months still to go before it expired.
"Bus station! Everybody out!"
The building stank of piss and sour beer. Shadow climbed into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. He told him that there was an extra five dollars if he could do it in silence. They made it in twenty minutes and the driver never said a word.
Then Shadow was stumbling through the brightly lit airport terminal. Shadow worried about the whole e-ticket business. He knew he had a ticket for a flight on Friday, but he didn't know if it would work today. Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to evaporate at any moment.
Still, he had his wallet, back in his possession for the first time in three years, containing several expired credit cards and one Visa card, which, he was pleasantly surprised to discover, didn't expire until the end of January. He had a reservation number. And, he realized, he had the certainty that once he got home everything would, somehow, be okay. Laura would be fine again. Maybe it was some kind of scam to spring him a few days early. Or perhaps it was a simple mix-up: some other Laura Moon's body had been dragged from the highway wreckage.
Lightning flickered outside the airport, through the windows-walls. Shadow realized he was holding his breath, waiting for something. A distant boom of thunder. He exhaled.
A tired white woman stared at him from behind the counter.
"Hello," said Shadow. You're the first strange woman I've spoken to, in the flesh, in three years. "I've got an e-ticket number. I was supposed to be traveling on Friday but I have to go today. There was a death in my family."
"Mm. I'm sorry to hear that." She tapped at the keyboard, stared at the screen, tapped again. "No problem. I've put you on the three-thirty. It may be delayed because of the storm, so keep an eye on the screens. Checking any baggage?"
He held up a shoulder bag. "I don't need to check this, do I?"
"No," she said. "It's fine. Do you have any picture ID?"
Shadow showed her his driver's license.
It was not a big airport, but the number of people wandering, just wandering, amazed him. He watched people put down bags casually, observed wallets stuffed into back pockets, saw purses put down, unwatched, under chairs. That was when he realized he was no longer in prison.
Thirty minutes to wait until boarding. Shadow bought a slice of pizza and burned his lip on the hot cheese. He took his change and went to the phones. Called Robbie at the Muscle Farm, but the machine picked up.
"Hey Robbie," said Shadow. "They tell me that Laura's dead. They let me out early. I'm coming home."
Then, because people do make mistakes, he'd seen it happen, he called home, and listened to Laura's voice.
"Hi," she said. "I'm not here or I can't come to the phone. Leave a message and I'll get back to you. And have a good day."
Shadow couldn't bring himself to leave a message.
He sat in a plastic chair by the gate, and held his bag so tight he hurt his hand.
He was thinking about the first time he had ever seen Laura. He hadn't even known her name then. She was Audrey Burton's friend. He had been sitting with Robbie in a booth at Chi-Chi's when Laura had walked in a pace or so behind Audrey, and Shadow had found himself staring. She had long, chestnut hair and eyes so blue Shadow mistakenly thought she was wearing tinted contact lenses. She had ordered a strawberry daiquiri, and insisted that Shadow taste it, and laughed delightedly when he did.
Laura loved people to taste what she tasted.
He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again.
A woman announced that his plane was boarding, and Shadow's row was the first to be called. He was in the very back, an empty seat beside him. The rain pattered continually against the side of the plane: he imagined small children tossing down dried peas by the handful from the skies.
As the plane took off he fell asleep.
Shadow was in a dark place, and the thing staring at him wore a buffalo's head, rank and furry with huge wet eyes. Its body was a man's body, oiled and slick.
"Changes are coming," said the buffalo without moving its lips. "There are certain decisions that will have to be made."
Firelight flickered from wet cave walls.
"Where am I?" Shadow asked.
"In the earth and under the earth," said the buffalo man. "You are where the forgotten wait." His eyes were liquid black marbles, and his voice was a rumble from beneath the world. He smelled like wet cow. "Believe," said the rumbling voice. "If you are to survive, you must believe."
"Believe what?" asked Shadow. "What should I believe?"
He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth.
"Everything," roared the buffalo man.
The world tipped and spun, and Shadow was on the plane once more; but the tipping continued. In the front of the plane a woman screamed halfheartedly.
Lightning burst in blinding flashes around the plane. The captain came on the intercom to tell them that he was going to try and gain some altitude, to get away from the storm.
The plane shook and shuddered, and Shadow wondered, coldly and idly, if he was going to die. It seemed possible, he decided, but unlikely. He stared out of the window and watched the lightning illuminate the horizon.
Then he dozed once more, and dreamed he was back in prison and that Low Key had whispered to him in the food line that someone had put out a contract on his life, but that Shadow could not find out who or why; and when he woke up they were coming in for a landing.
He stumbled off the plane, blinking into wakefulness.
All airports, he thought, look very much the same. It doesn't actually matter where you are, you are in an airport: tiles and walkways and restrooms, gates and newsstands and fluorescent lights. This airport looked like an airport. The trouble is, this wasn't the airport he was going to. This was a big airport, with way too many people, and way too many gates.
"Excuse me, ma'am?"
The woman looked at him over the clipboard. "Yes?"
"What airport is this?"
She looked at him, puzzled, trying to decide whether or not he was joking, then she said, "St. Louis."
"I thought this was the plane to Eagle Point."
"It was. They redirected it here because of the storms. Didn't they make an announcement?"
"Probably. I fell asleep."
"You'll need to talk to that man over there, in the red coat."
The man was almost as tall as Shadow: he looked like the father from a seventies sitcom, and he tapped something into a computer and told Shadow to run-run!-to a gate on the far side of the terminal.
Shadow ran through the airport, but the doors were already closed when he got to the gate. He watched the plane pull away from the gate, through the plate glass.
The woman at the passenger assistance desk (short and brown, with a mole on the side of her nose) consulted with another woman and made a phone call ("Nope, that one's out. They've just cancelled it."), then she printed out another boarding card. "This will get you there," she told him. "We'll call ahead to the gate and tell them you're coming."
Shadow felt like a pea being flicked between three cups, or a card being shuffled through a deck. Again he ran through the airport, ending up near where he had gotten off originally.
A small man at the gate took his boarding pass. "We've been waiting for you," he confided, tearing off the stub of the boarding pass, with Shadow's seat assignment-17D-on it. Shadow hurried onto the plane, and they closed the door behind him.
He walked through first class-there were only four first-class seats, three of which were occupied. The bearded man in a pale suit seated next to the unoccupied seat at the very front grinned at Shadow as he got onto the plane, then raised his wrist and tapped his watch as Shadow walked past.
Yeah, yeah, I'm making you late, thought Shadow. Let that be the worst of your worries.
The plane seemed pretty full, as he made his way down toward the back. Actually, Shadow found, it was completely full, and there was a middle-aged woman sitting in seat 17D. Shadow showed her his boarding card stub, and she showed him hers: they matched.
"Can you take your seat, please?" asked the flight attendant.
"No," he said, "I'm afraid I can't."
She clicked her tongue and checked their boarding cards, then she led him back up to the front of the plane and pointed him to the empty seat in first class. "Looks like it's your lucky day," she told him. "Can I bring you something to drink? We'll just have time before we take off. And I'm sure you need one after that."
"I'd like a beer, please," said Shadow. "Whatever you've got."
The flight attendant went away.
The man in the pale suit in the seat beside Shadow tapped his watch with his fingernail. It was a black Rolex. "You're late," said the man, and he grinned a huge grin with no warmth in it at all.
"Sorry?"
"I said, you're late."
The flight attendant handed Shadow a glass of beer.
For one moment, he wondered if the man was crazy, and then he decided he must have been referring to the plane, waiting for one last passenger. "Sorry if I held you up," he said, politely. "You in a hurry?"
The plane backed away from the gate. The flight attendant came back and took away Shadow's beer. The man in the pale suit grinned at her and said, "Don't worry, I'll hold onto this tightly," and she let him keep his glass of Jack Daniel's, while protesting, weakly, that it violated airline regulations. ("Let me be the judge of that, m'dear.")
"Time is certainly of the essence," said the man. "But no. I was merely concerned that you would not make the plane."
"That was kind of you."
The plane sat restlessly on the ground, engines throbbing, aching to be off.
"Kind my ass," said the man in the pale suit. "I've got a job for you, Shadow."
A roar of engines. The little plane jerked forward, pushing Shadow back into his seat. Then they were airborne, and the airport lights were falling away below them. Shadow looked at the man in the seat next to him.
His hair was a reddish gray; his beard, little more than stubble, was grayish red. A craggy, square face with pale gray eyes. The suit looked expensive, and was the color of melted vanilla ice cream. His tie was dark gray silk, and the tie pin was a tree, worked in silver: trunk, branches, and deep roots.
He held his glass of Jack Daniel's as they took off, and did not spill a drop.
"Aren't you going to ask me what kind of job?" he asked.
"How do you know who I am?"
The man chuckled. "Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world to know what people call themselves. A little thought, a little luck, a little memory. Ask me what kind of job."
"No," said Shadow. The attendant brought him another glass of beer, and he sipped at it.