Shadow started the car, turned on the headlights, and headed back onto the road. “Left,” said Sam helpfully. Shadow turned left, and he drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warmth filled the car.
“You haven’t said anything yet,” said Sam. “Say something.”
“Are you human?” asked Shadow. “An honest-to-goodness, born-of-man-and-woman, living, breathing human being?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say?”
“Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have that ‘oh shit I’m in the wrong car with a crazy man’ feeling.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve had that one. What would you find reassuring?”
“Just tell me you’re not an escaped convict or a mass murderer or something.”
He thought for a moment. “You know, I’m really not.”
“You had to think about it though, didn’t you?”
“Done my time. Never killed anybody.”
“Oh.”
They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glanced to his right. The girl had a tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided, faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was looking at him.
“What were you in prison for?”
“I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry.”
“Did they deserve it?”
Shadow thought for a moment. “I thought so at the time.”
“Would you do it again?”
“Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there.”
“Mm. You got Indian blood in you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You looked like it, was all.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“S’okay. You hungry?”
Shadow nodded. “I could eat,” he said.
“There’s a good place just past the next set of lights. Good food. Cheap, too.”
Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the car. He didn’t bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out some coins to buy a newspaper. “Can you afford to eat here?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, raising her chin. “I can pay for myself.”
Shadow nodded. “Tell you what. I’ll toss you for it,” he said. “Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours.”
“Let me see the coin first,” she said, suspiciously. “I had an uncle had a double-headed quarter.”
She inspected it, satisfied herself there was nothing strange about the quarter. Shadow placed the coin head up on his thumb and cheated the toss, so it wobbled and looked like it was spinning, then he caught it and flipped it over onto the back of his left hand, and uncovered it with his right, in front of her.
“Tails,” she said, happily. “Dinner’s on you.”
“Yup,” he said. “You can’t win them all.”
Shadow ordered the meat loaf, Sam ordered lasagna. Shadow flipped through the newspaper to see if there was anything in it about dead men in a freight train. There wasn’t. The only story of interest was on the cover: crows in record numbers were infesting the town. Local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town on public buildings to frighten the others away; ornithologists said that it wouldn’t work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. “When they see the corpses of their friends,” said a spokesman, “they’ll know that we don’t want them here.”
The food came mounded high on plates and steaming, more than any one person could eat.
“So what’s in Cairo?” asked Sam, with her mouth full.
“No idea. I got a message from my boss saying he needs me down there.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m an errand boy.”
She smiled. “Well,” she said, “you aren’t mafia, not looking like that and driving that piece of shit. Why does your car smell like bananas, anyway?”
He shrugged, carried on eating.
Sam narrowed her eyes. “Maybe you’re a banana smuggler,” she said. “You haven’t asked me what I do yet.”
“I figure you’re at school.”
“UW Madison.”
“Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women’s studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffeehouse to help cover the rent.”
She put down her fork, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. “How the fuck did you do that?”
“What? Now you say, no, actually I’m studying Romance languages and ornithology.”
“So you’re saying that was a lucky guess or something?”
“What was?”
She stared at him with dark eyes. “You are one peculiar guy, Mister . . . I don’t know your name.”
“They call me Shadow,” he said.
She twisted her mouth wryly, as if she were tasting something she disliked. She stopped talking, put her head down, finished her lasagna.
“Do you know why it’s called Egypt?” asked Shadow when Sam finished eating.
“Down Cairo way? Yeah. It’s in the delta of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Like Cairo in Egypt, in the Nile delta.”
“That makes sense.”
She sat back in her chair, ordered coffee and chocolate cream pie, ran a hand through her black hair. “You married, Mister Shadow?” And then, as he hesitated, “Gee. I just asked another tricky question, didn’t I?”
“They buried her on Thursday,” he said, picking his words with care. “She was killed in a car crash.”
“Oh. God. Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”