Chapter 1 (p.10)
The man in the pale suit in the seat beside Shadow put out his arm and tapped his watch with his fingernail. It was a black Rolex. “You're late,” said the man, and he grinned a huge grin with no warmth in it at all.
“Sorry?”
“I said, you're late.”
The flight attendant handed Shadow a glass of beer. He sipped it. For one moment, he wondered if the man was crazy, and then he decided he must have been referring to the plane, waiting for one last passenger.
“Sorry if I held you up,” he said, politely. “You in a hurry?”
The plane backed away from the gate. The flight attendant came back and took away Shadow's beer, half-finished. The man in the pale suit grinned at her and said, “Don't worry, I'll hold on to this tightly,” and she let him keep his glass of Jack Daniel's, while protesting, weakly, that it violated airline regulations. (“Let me be the judge of that, m'dear.”)
“Time is certainly of the essence,” said the man. “But no, I am not in a hurry. I was merely concerned that you would not make the plane.”
“That was kind of you.”
The plane sat restlessly on the ground, engines throbbing, aching to be off.
“Kind my ass,” said the man in the pale suit. “I've got a job for you, Shadow.”
A roar of engines. The little plane jerked forward into a take-off, pushing Shadow back into his seat. Then they were airborne, and the airport lights were falling away below them. Shadow looked at the man in the seat next to him.
His hair was a reddish-gray; his beard, little more than stubble, was grayish-red. He was smaller than Shadow, but he seemed to take up a hell of a lot of room. A craggy, square face with pale gray eyes. The suit looked expensive, and was the color of melted vanilla ice cream. His tie was dark gray silk, and the tiepin was a tree, worked in silver: trunk, branches, and deep roots.
He held his glass of Jack Daniel's as they took off, and did not spill a drop.
“Aren't you going to ask me what kind of job?”
“How do you know who I am?”
The man chuckled. “Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world to know what people call themselves. A little thought, a little luck, a little memory. Ask me what kind of job.”
“No,” said Shadow. The attendant brought him another glass of beer, and he sipped at it.
“Why not?”
“I'm going home. I've got a job waiting for me there. I don't want any other job.”
The man's craggy smile did not change, outwardly, but now he seemed, actually, amused. “You don't have a job waiting for you at home,” he said. “You have nothing waiting for you there. Meanwhile, I am offering you a perfectly legal job—good money, limited security, remarkable fringe benefits. Hell, if you live that long, I could throw in a pension plan. You think maybe you'd like one of them?”
Shadow said, “You could have seen my name on my boarding pass. Or on the side of my bag.”
The man said nothing.
“Whoever you are,” said Shadow, “you couldn't have known I was going to be on this plane. I didn't know I was going to be on this plane, and if my plane hadn't been diverted to St. Louis, I wouldn't have been. My guess is you're a practical joker. Maybe you're hustling something. But I think maybe we'll have a better time if we end this conversation here.”
The man shrugged.
Shadow picked up the in-flight magazine. The little plane jerked and bumped through the sky, making it harder to concentrate. The words floated through his mind like soap bubbles, there as he read them, gone completely a moment later.
The man sat quietly in the seat beside him, sipping his Jack Daniel's. His eyes were closed.
