“Well, the noise and the shock is enough to make that buck just about jump out of his skin, and seein’ that his legs are iced in, that’s just what he proceeds to do. He leaves his hide and his antlers stuck to the ice, while he charges back into the woods, pink as a newborn mouse and shivering fit to bust.
“I felt bad enough for that old buck that I talked the Lakeside Ladies’ Knitting Circle into making him something warm to wear all the winter, and they knitted him an all-over one-piece woolen suit, so he wouldn’t freeze to death. ‘Course, the joke was on us, because they knitted him a suit of bright orange wool, so no hunter ever shot at it. Hunters in these parts wear orange at hunting season,” he added, helpfully. “And if you think there’s a word of a lie in that, I can prove it to you. I’ve got the antlers up on my rec room wall to this day.”
Shadow laughed, and the old man smiled the satisfied smile of a master craftsman. They pulled up outside a brick building with a large wooden deck, from which golden holiday lights hung and twinkled invitingly.
“That’s five-oh-two,” said Hinzelmann. “Apartment three would be on the top floor, around the other side, overlooking the lake. There you go, Mike.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hinzelmann. Can I give you anything toward gas?”
“Just Hinzelmann. And you don’t owe me a penny. Merry Christmas from me and from Tessie.”
“Are you sure you won’t accept anything?”
The old man scratched his chin. “Tell you what,” he said. “Sometime in the next week or so I’ll come by and sell you some tickets. For our raffle. Charity. For now, young man, you can be getting onto bed.”
Shadow smiled. “Merry Christmas, Hinzelmann,” he said.
The old man shook Shadow’s hand with one red-knuckled hand. It felt as hard and as callused as an oak branch. “Now, you watch the path as you go up there, it’s going to be slippery. I can see your door from here, at the side there, see it? I’ll just wait in the car down here until you’re safely inside. You just give me the thumbs-up when you’re in okay, and I’ll drive off.”
He kept the Wendt idling until Shadow was safely up the wooden steps on the side of the house and had opened the apartment door with his key. The door to the apartment swung open. Shadow made a thumbs-up sign, and the old man in the Wendt—Tessie, thought Shadow, and the thought of a car with a name made him smile one more time—Hinzelmann and Tessie swung around and made their way back across the bridge.
Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to seventy degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the fridge smelled clean inside, not musty.
There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An aged cigarette butt sat in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow flushed it away. He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed. Then he took off his shoes, his jacket, and his watch, and he climbed into the bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm.
The lights were off, and there was silence, mostly, nothing but the hum of the refrigerator, and, somewhere in the building, a radio playing. He lay there in the darkness, wondering if he had slept himself out on the Greyhound, if the hunger and the cold and the new bed and the craziness of the last few weeks would combine to keep him awake that night.
In the stillness he heard something snap like a shot. A branch, he thought, or the ice. It was freezing out there.
He wondered how long he would have to wait until Wednesday came for him. A day? A week? However long he had, he knew he had to focus on something in the meantime. He would start to work out again, he decided, and practice his coin sleights and palms until he was smooth as anything (practice all your tricks, somebody whispered inside his head, in a voice that was not his own, all of them but one, not the trick that poor dead Mad Sweeney showed you, dead of exposure and the cold and of being forgotten and surplus to requirements, not that trick. Oh, not that one).
But this was a good town. He could feel it.
He thought of his dream, if it had been a dream, that first night in Cairo. He thought of Zorya ... what the hell was her name? The midnight sister.
And then he thought of Laura ...
It was as if thinking of her opened a window in his mind. He could see her. He could, somehow, see her.