Mabel chuckled. “We all tell him that,” she said.
Mulligan shrugged. “It’s a good town,” he said, simply. “Not much trouble. You’ll always get someone speeding within city limits—which is a good thing, as traffic tickets pay my wages. Friday, Saturday nights you get some jerk who gets drunk and beats on a spouse—and that one can go both ways, believe me. Men and women. But out here things are quiet. They call me out when someone’s locked their keys in their vehicle. Barking dogs. Every year there’s a couple of high school kids caught with weed behind the bleachers. Biggest police case we’ve had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun, shouting that he would shoot anyone who got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his with the bumper sticker on the back. ‘My Juvenile Delinquent is Screwing Your Honor Student.’ You remember, Mabel?”
She nodded, lips pursed. She did not seem to find it as funny as Mulligan did.
“What did you do?” asked Shadow.
“I talked to him. He gave me the shotgun. Slept it off down at the jail. Dan’s not a bad guy, he was just drunk and upset.”
Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligan’s halfhearted protests, both hot chocolates.
Hennings Farm and Home Supplies was a warehouse-sized building on the south of the town that sold everything from tractors to toys (the toys, along with the Christmas ornaments, were already on sale). The store was bustling with post-Christmas shoppers. Shadow recognized the younger of the girls who had sat in front of him on the bus. She was trailing after her parents. He waved at her and she gave him a hesitant, blue-rubber-banded smile. Shadow wondered idly what she’d look like in ten years’ time.
Probably as beautiful as the girl at the Hennings Farm and Home checkout counter, who scanned in his-purchases with a chattering hand-held gun, capable, Shaded had no doubt, of ringing up a tractor if someone drove it through.
‘Ten pairs of long underwear?” said the girl. “Stocking up, huh?” She looked like a movie starlet.
Shadow felt fourteen again, and tongue-tiea and foolish. He said nothing while she rang up the thermal boots, the gloves, the sweaters, and the goose-down-filled coat.
He had no wish to put the credit card that Wednesday had given him to the test, not with Chief of Police Mulligan standing helpfully beside him, so he paid for everything in cash. Then he took his bags into the men’s rest room, came out wearing many of his purchases.
“Looking good, big fella,” said Mulligan.
“At least I’m warm,” said Shadow, and outside, in the parking lot, although the wind burned cold on the skin of his face, the rest of him was warm enough. At Mulligan’s invitation, he put his shopping bags in the back of the police car, arid rode in the passenger seat, in the front.
“So, what do you do, Mister Ainsel?” asked the chief of police. “Big guy like you. What’s your profession, and will you be practicing it in Lakeside?”
Shadow’s heart began to pound, but his voice was steady. “I work for my uncle. He buys and sells stuff all over the country. I just do the heavy lifting.”
“Does he pay well?”
“I’m family. He knows I’m not going to rip him off, and I’m learning a little about the trade on the way. Until I figure out what it is I really want to do.” It was coming out of him with conviction, smooth as a snake. He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in that moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (“You want to see Lucy’s tits?” asked a voice in his head). Mike Ainsel didn’t have bad dreams, or believe that there was a storm coming.