remembered as a monster. You could be remembered forever, but as a Manson, a Hitler…how would you like that?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m kind of tired,” said Shadow. “I’d be grateful if you’d leave now.”
“I offered you the world,” she said. “When you’re dying in a gutter, you remember that.”
“I’ll make a point of it,” he said.
After she had gone her perfume lingered. He lay on the bare mattress and thought about Laura, but whatever he thought about—Laura playing Frisbee, Laura eating a root-beer float without a spoon, Laura giggling, showing off the exotic underwear she had bought when she attended a travel agents’ convention in Anaheim—always morphed, in his mind, into Laura sucking Robbie’s cock as a truck slammed them off the road and into oblivion. And then he heard her words, and they hurt every time.
You’re not dead, said Laura in her quiet voice, in his head. But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either.
There was a knock. Shadow got up and opened the door. It was the fat kid. “Those hamburgers,” he said. “They were just icky. Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald’s. I didn’t think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald’s.”
“This place is turning into Grand Central Station,” said Shadow. “Okay, so I guess you’re here to offer me the freedom of the Internet if I come over to your side of the fence. Right?”
The fat kid was shivering. “No. You’re already dead meat,” he said. “You-you’re a fucking illuminated gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn’t be hypertext if you tried. I’m…I’m synaptic, while, while you’re synoptic…” He smelled strange, Shadow realized. There was a guy in the cell across the way, whose name Shadow had never known. He had taken off all his clothes in the middle of the day and told everyone that he had been sent to take them away, the truly good ones, like him, in a silver spaceship to a perfect place. That had been the last time Shadow had seen him. The fat kid smelled like that guy.
“Are you here for a reason?”
“Just wanted to talk,” said the fat kid. There was a whine in his voice. “It’s creepy in my room. That’s all. It’s creepy in there. Fifty miles to a McDonald’s, can you believe that? Maybe I could stay in here with you.”
“What about your friends from the limo? The ones who hit me? Shouldn’t you ask them to stay with you?”
“The children wouldn’t operate out here. We’re in a dead zone.”
Shadow said, “It’s a while until midnight, and it’s longer to dawn. I think maybe you need rest. I know I do.”
The fat kid said nothing for a moment, then he nodded, and walked out of the room.
Shadow closed his door, and locked it with the key. He lay back on the mattress.
After a few moments the noise began. It took him a few moments to figure out what it had to be, then he unlocked his door and walked out into the hallway. It was the fat kid, now back in his own room. It sounded like he was throwing something huge against the walls of the room. From the sounds, Shadow guessed that what he was throwing was himself. “It’s just me!” he was sobbing. Or perhaps, “It’s just meat.” Shadow could not tell.
“Quiet!” came a bellow from Czernobog’s room, down the hall.
Shadow walked down to the lobby and out of the motel. He was tired.
The driver still stood beside the Humvee, a dark shape in a peaked cap.
“Couldn’t sleep, sir?” he asked.
“No,” said Shadow.
“Cigarette, sir?”
“No, thank you.”
“You don’t mind if I do?”
“Go right ahead.”
The driver used a Bic disposable lighter, and it was in the yellow light of the flame that Shadow saw the man’s face, actually saw it for the first time, and recognized him, and began to understand.
Shadow knew that thin face. He knew that there would be close-cropped orange hair beneath the black driver’s cap, cut close to the scalp like the embers of a fire. He knew that when the man’s lips smiled they would crease into a network of rough scars.
“You’re looking good, big guy,” said the driver.
“Low Key?” Shadow stared at his old cellmate warily.
Prison friendships are good things: they get you through bad places and through dark times. But a prison friendship ends at the prison gates, and a prison friend who reappears in your life is at best a mixed blessing.
“Jesus. Low Key Lyesmith,” said Shadow, and then he