said Shadow.
“And what do you think of your employer’s plans, Mister Shadow?”
He slowed, as a large black truck sped past, overtaking them with a spray of slush. “I don’t ask, he don’t tell,” he said.
“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 back seat—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 shoe boxes. 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 and he let his passengers off by the front door, then he got back into the car. He would park it at the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the restaurant on his own, 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 have a match, 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 bag-like 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