American Gods (72 page)

Shadow looked down at the floor. There were still glimmers
and sparks in the carpet, where the poker tip had rested. Hinzelmann followed
the look with his own, and crushed the embers out with his foot, twisting. In
Shadow’s mind came, unbidden, children, more than a hundred of them, staring at
him with bone-blind eyes, the hair twisting slowly around their faces like
fronds of seaweed. They were looking at him reproachfully.

He knew that he was letting them down. He just didn’t know
what else to do.

Shadow said, “I can’t kill you. You saved my life.”

He shook his head. He felt like crap, in every way he could
feel like crap. He didn’t feel like a hero or a detective anymore—just another
fucking sell-out, waving a stern finger at the darkness before turning his back
on it.

“You want to know a secret?” asked Hinzelmann.

“Sure,” said Shadow, with a heavy heart. He was ready to be
done with secrets.

“Watch this.”

Where Hinzelmann had been standing “stood a male child, no
more than five years old. His hair was dark brown, and long. He was perfectly
naked, save for a worn leather band around his neck. He was pierced with two
swords, one of them going through his chest, the other entering at his
shoulder, with the point coming out beneath the rib-cage. Blood flowed through
the wounds without stopping and ran down the child’s body to pool and puddle on
the floor. The swords looked unimaginably old.

The little boy stared up at Shadow with eyes that held only
pain.

And Shadow thought to himself, of course. That’s as good a
way as any other of making a tribal god. He did not have to be told. He knew. You
take a baby and you bring it up in the darkness, letting it see no one, touch
no one, and you feed it well as the years pass, feed it better than any of the
village’s other children, and then, five winters on, when the night is at its
longest, you drag the terrified child out of its hut and into the circle of
bonfires, and you pierce it with blades of iron and of bronze. Then you smoke
the small body over charcoal fires until it is properly dried, and you wrap it
in furs and carry it with you from encampment to encampment, deep in the Black
Forest, sacrificing animals and children to it, making it the luck of the
tribe. When, eventually, the thing falls apart from age, you place its fragile
bones in a box, and you worship the box; until one day the bones are scattered
and forgotten, and the tribes who worshipped the child-god of the box are long
gone; and the child-god, the luck of the village, will be barely remembered,
save as a ghost or a brownie: a kobold.

Shadow wondered which of the people who had come to northern
Wisconsin 150 years ago, a woodcutter, perhaps, or a mapmaker, had crossed the
Atlantic with Hinzelmann living in his head.

And then the bloody child was gone, and the blood, and there
was only an old man with a fluff of white hair and a goblin smile, his
sweater-sleeves still soaked from putting Shadow into the bath that had saved
his life.

“Hinzelmann?” the voice came from the doorway of the den.

Hinzelmann turned. Shadow turned too.

“I came over to tell you,” said Chad Mulligan, and his voice
was strained, “that the klunker went through the ice. I saw it had gone down
when I drove over that way, and thought I’d come over and let you know, in case
you’d missed it.”

He was holding his gun. It was pointed at the floor.

“Hey, Chad,” said Shadow.

“Hey, pal,” said Chad Mulligan. ‘They sent me a note said
you’d died in custody. Heart attack.”

“How about that?” said Shadow. “Seems like I’m dying all
over the place.”

“He came down here, Chad,” said Hinzelmann. “He threatened
me.”

“No,” said Chad Mulligan. “He didn’t. I’ve been here for the
last ten minutes, Hinzelmann. I heard everything you said. About my old man.
About the lake.” He walked farther into the den. He did not raise the gun. “Jesus,
Hinzelmann. You can’t drive through this town without seeing that goddamned
lake. It’s at the center of everything. So what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“You got to arrest him. He said he was going to kill me,”
said Hinzelmann, a scared old man in a dusty den. “Chad, I’m pleased you’re
here.”

“No,” said Chad Mulligan. “You’re not.”

Hinzelmann sighed. He bent down, as if resigned, and he
pulled the poker out from the fire. The tip of it was burning bright orange.

“Put that down, Hinzelmann. Just put it down slowly, keep
your hands in the air where I can see-them, and turn and face the wall.”

There was an expression of pure fear on the old man’s face,
and Shadow would have felt sorry for him, but he remembered the frozen tears on
the cheeks of Alison Mc-Govern. Hinzelmann did not move. He did not put down
the poker. He did not turn to the wall. Shadow was about to reach for
Hinzelmann, to try to take the poker away from him, when the old man threw the
burning poker at Mulligan.

Hinzelmann threw it awkwardly—lobbing it across the room as
if for form’s sake—and as he threw it he was already hurrying for the door.

The poker glanced off Mulligan’s left arm. The noise of the
shot, in the close quarters of the old man’s room, was deafening.

One shot to the head, and that was all.

Mulligan said, “Better get your clothes on.” His voice was
dull and dead.

Shadow nodded. He walked to the room next door, opened the
door of the clothes drier and pulled out his clothes. The jeans were still
damp, but he put them on anyway. By the time he got back to the den, fully
dressed—except for his coat, which was somewhere deep in the freezing mud of
the lake, and his boots, which he could not find—Mulligan had already hauled
several smoldering logs out from the fireplace.

Mulligan said, “It’s a bad day for a cop when he has to
commit arson, just to cover up a murder.” Then he looked up at Shadow. “You
need boots,” he said.

“I don’t know where he put them,” said Shadow.

“Hell,” said Mulligan. Then he said, “Sorry about mis,
Hinzelmann,” and he picked the old man up by the collar and by the belt buckle,
and he swung him forward, dropped the body with its head resting in the open
fireplace. The white hair crackled and flared, and the room began to fill with
the smell of charring flesh.

“It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense,” said Shadow.

“I know what it was,” said Mulligan, flatly. He had already
turned his attention to the smoking logs he had scattered about the room. He
pushed one of them to the edge of the sofa, picked up an old copy of the
Lakeside News and pulled it into its component pages, which he crumpled up and
dropped onto the log. The newspaper pages browned and then burst into flame.

“Get outside,” said Chad Mulligan.

He opened the windows as they walked out of the house, and
he sprang the lock on the front door to lock it before he closed it.

Shadow followed him out to the police car in his bare feet.
Mulligan opened the front passenger door for him, and Shadow got in and wiped
his feet off on the mat. Then he put on his socks, which were pretty much dry
by now.

“We can get you some boots at Hennings Farm and Home,” said
Chad Mulligan.

“How much did you hear in there?” asked Shadow.

“Enough,” said Mulligan. Then he said, “Too much.”

They drove to Hennings Farm and Home in silence. When they
got there the police chief said, “What size feet?”

Shadow told him.

Mulligan walked into the store. He returned with a pair of
thick woolen socks, and a pair of leather farm-boots. “All they had left in
your size,” he said. “Unless you wanted gumboots. I figured you didn’t.”

Shadow pulled on the socks and the boots. They fitted fine. “Thanks,”
he said.

“You got a car?” asked Mulligan.

“It’s parked by the road down to the lake. Near the bridge.”

Mulligan started the car and pulled out of the Hennings
parking lot.

“What happened to Audrey?” asked Shadojv.

“Day after they took you away, she said she liked me as a
friend, but it would never work out between us, us being family and all, and
she went back to Eagle Point. Broke my gosh-darn heart.”

“Makes sense,” said Shadow. “And it wasn’t personal.
Hinzelmann didn’t need her here anymore.”

They drove back past Hinzelmann’s house. A thick plume of
white smoke was coming up from the chimney.

“She only came to town because he wanted her here. She
helped him get me out of town. I was bringing attention he didn’t need.”

“I thought she liked me.”

They pulled up beside Shadow’s rental car. “What are you going
to do now?” asked Shadow.

“I don’t know,” said Mulligan. His normally harassed face
was starting to look more alive than it had at any point since Hinzelmann’s
den. It also looked more troubled. “I figure, I got a couple of choices. Either
I’ll”—he made a gun of his first two fingers, put the fingertips into his open
mouth, and removed them—”put a bullet through my brain. Or I’ll wait another
couple of days until the ice is mostly gone, and tie a concrete block to my leg
and jump off the bridge. Or pills. Sheesh. Maybe I should just drive a while,
out to one of the forests. Take pills out there. I don’t want to make one of my
guys have to do the cleanup. Leave it for the county, huh?” He sighed, and
shook his head.

“You didn’t kill Hinzelmann, Chad. He died a long time ago,
a long way from here.”

“Thanks for saying that, Mike. But I killed him. I shot a
man in cold blood, and I covered it up. And if you asked me why I did it, why I
really did it, I’m darned if I could tell you.”

Shadow put out a hand, touched Mulligan on the arm. “Hinzelmann
owned this town,” he said. “I don’t think you had a lot of choice about what
happened back there. I mink he brought you there. He wanted you to hear what
you heard. He set you up. I guess it was the only way he could leave.”

Mulligan’s miserable expression did not change. Shadow could
see that the police chief had barely heard anything that he had said. He had
killed Hinzelmann, and built him a pyre, and now, obeying the last of
Hinzelmann’s desires, he would commit suicide.

Shadow closed his eyes, remembering the place in his head
that he had gone when Wednesday had told him to make snow: that place that
pushed, mind to mind, and he smiled a smile he did not feel and he said, “Chad.
Let it go.” There was a cloud in the man’s mind, a dark, oppressive cloud, and
Shadow could almost see it and, concentrating on it, imagined it fading away
like a fog in the morning.

“Chad,” he said, fiercely, trying to penetrate the cloud, “this
town is going to change now. It’s not going to be the only good town in a
depressed region anymore. It’s going to be a lot more like the rest of this
part of the world. There’s going to be a lot more trouble. People out of work.
People out of their heads. More people getting hurt. More bad shit going down.
They are going to need a police chief with experience. The town needs you.” And
then he said, “Marguerite needs you.”

Something shifted in the storm cloud that filled the man’s
head. Shadow could feel it change. He pushed then, envisioning Marguerite Olsen’s
practical brown hands and her dark eyes, and her long, long black hair. He
pictured the way she tipped her head on one side and half smiled when she was
amused. “She’s waiting for you,” said Shadow, and he knew it was true as he
said it.

“Margie?” said Chad Mulligan.

And at that moment, although he could never tell you how he
had done it, and he doubted that he could ever do it again, Shadow reached into
Chad Mulligan’s mind, easy as anything, and he plucked the events of that
afternoon out from it as precisely and dispassionately as a raven picks an eye
from roadkill.

The creases in Chad’s forehead smoothed, and he blinked,
sleepily.

“Go see Margie,” said Shadow. “It’s been good seeing you,
Chad. Take care of yourself.”

“Sure,” yawned Chad Mulligan.

A message crackled over the police radio, and Chad reached
out for the handset. Shadow got out of the car.

Shadow walked over to his rental car. He could see the gray flatness
of the lake at the center of the town. He thought of the dead children who
waited at the bottom of the water.

Soon, Alison would float to the surface ...

As Shadow drove past Hinzelmann’s place he could see the
plume of smoke had already turned into a Maze. He could hear a siren wail.

He drove south, heading for Highway 51. He was on his way to
keep his final appointment. But before that, he thought, he would stop off in
Madison, for one last goodbye.

«

Best of everything, Samantha Black Crow liked closing up the
Coffee House at night. It was a perfectly calming thing to do: it gave her a
feeling that she was putting order back into the world. She would put on an
Indigo Girls CD, and she would do her final chores of the night at her own pace
and in her own way. First, she would clean the espresso machine. Then she would
do the final rounds, ensuring that any missed cups or plates were deposited
back in the kitchen, and that the newspapers that were always scattered around
the Coffee House by the end of each day were collected together and piled
neatly by the front door, all ready for recycling.

She loved the Coffee House. It was a long, winding series of
rooms filled with armchairs and sofas and low tables, on a street lined with
secondhand bookstores.

She covered the leftover slices of cheesecake and put them
into the large refrigerator for the night, then she took a cloth and wiped the
last of the crumbs away. She enjoyed being alone.

A tapping on the window jerked her attention from her chores
back to the real world. She went to the door and opened it to admit a woman of
about Sam’s age., with pig-tailed magenta hair. Her name was Natalie.