On Cheers Coach assured his daughter that she was truly beautiful, just like her mother.
The telephone rang, and Officer Liz sat up with a start. She picked it up. Said, “Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay, I’ll be over there,” put the phone down and got up from behind the counter. She said to Shadow, “Sorry. I’m going to have to put you in the cell. Don’t use the can. If you need to go, press the buzzer by the door, and I’ll come down as soon as I can and escort you to the restrooms out back. The Lafayette sheriff’s department should be here to collect you soon.”
She removed the cuffs and the hobble, locked him into the holding cell. The smell was worse, now that the door was closed.
Shadow sat down on the concrete bed, slipped the Liberty dollar from his sock and began moving it from finger to palm, from position to position, from hand to hand, his only aim to keep the coin from being seen by anyone who might look in. He was passing the time. He was numb.
He missed Wednesday, then, sudden and deep. He missed the man’s confidence, his attitude. His conviction.
He opened his hand, looked down at Lady Liberty, a silver profile. He closed his fingers over the coin, held it tightly. He wondered if he’d get to be one of those guys who got life for something they didn’t do. If he even made it that far. From what he’d seen of Mr. World and Mr. Town, they would have little trouble pulling him out of the system. Perhaps he’d suffer an unfortunate accident on the way to the next holding facility. He could be shot while making a break for it. It did not seem at all unlikely.
There was a stir of activity in the room on the other side of the glass. Officer Liz came back in. She pressed a button, a door that Shadow could not see opened, and a black deputy in a brown sheriff’s uniform entered and walked briskly over to the desk.
Shadow slipped the dollar coin back into his sock, pushing it down toward his ankle.
The new deputy handed over some papers, Liz scanned them and signed. Chad Mulligan came in, said a few words to the new man, then he unlocked the cell door and walked inside.
“It stinks in here.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Okay. Folk are here to pick you up. Seems you’re a matter of national security. You know that?”
“It’ll make a great front-page story for the Lakeside News,” said Shadow.
Chad looked at him without expression. “That a drifter got picked up for parole violations? Not much of a story.”
“So that’s the way it is?”
“That’s what they tell me,” said Chad Mulligan. Shadow put his hands in front of him this time, and Chad cuffed him. Chad locked on the ankle hobbles, and a rod from the cuffs to the hobbles.
Shadow thought, They’ll take me outside. Maybe I can make a break for it, some kind of break for it, in hobbles and cuffs and lightweight orange clothes, out into the snow, and even as he thought it he knew how stupid and hopeless it was.
Chad walked him out into the office. Liz had turned the TV off now. The black deputy looked him over. “He’s a big guy,” he said to Chad. Liz passed the new deputy the paper bag with Shadow’s possessions in it, and he signed for it.
Chad looked at Shadow, then at the deputy. He said to the deputy, quietly, but loudly enough for Shadow to hear, “Look. I just want to say, I’m not comfortable with the way this is happening.”
The deputy nodded. His voice was deep, and cultured: the voice of a man who could as easily organize a press briefing as a massacre. “You’ll have to take it up with the appropriate authorities, sir. Our job is simply to bring him in.”
Chad made a sour face. He turned to Shadow. “Okay,” said Chad. “Through that door and into the sally port.”
“What?”
“Out there. Where the car is.”
Liz unlocked the doors. “You make sure that orange uniform comes right back here,” she said to the deputy. “The last felon we sent down to Lafayette, we never saw the uniform again. They cost the county money.” They walked Shadow out to the sally port, where a car was waiting. It wasn’t a sheriff’s-department car. It was a black town car. Another deputy, a grizzled white guy with