Chapter 1 (p7) Capítulo 1 (p7) Capítulo 1 (p7) Глава 1 (стр. 7) Bölüm 1 (s7) Розділ 1 (стор. 7)

He found himself thinking about a guy named Johnnie Larch he’d shared a cell with when he’d first been put inside, who told Shadow how he’d once got out after five years behind bars, with $100 and a ticket to Seattle, where his sister lived. Он поймал себя на мысли о парне по имени Джонни Ларч, с которым он делил камеру, когда его впервые посадили в тюрьму, и который рассказал Шэдоу, как он однажды вышел после пяти лет за решеткой со 100 долларами и билетом до Сиэтла. где жила его сестра.

Johnnie Larch had got to the airport, and he handed his ticket to the woman on the counter, and she asked to see his driver’s license. Джонни Кедр добрался до аэропорта и передал свой билет женщине за стойкой, и она попросила предъявить его водительские права.

He showed it to her. It had expired a couple of years earlier. She told him it was not valid as ID. He told her it might not be valid as a driver’s license, but it sure as hell was fine identification, and it had a photo of him on it, and his height and his weight, and damn it, who else did she think he was, if he wasn’t him?

She said she’d thank him to keep his voice down.

He told her to give him a fucking boarding pass, or she was going to regret it, and that he wasn’t going to be disrespected. You don’t let people disrespect you in prison.

Then she pressed a button, and a few moments later the airport security showed up, and they tried to persuade Johnnie Larch to leave the airport quietly, and he did not wish to leave, and there was something of an altercation.

The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his $100 was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Кончилось тем, что Джонни Ларч так и не добрался до Сиэтла, и следующие пару дней он провел в городе в барах, а когда его 100 долларов закончились, он ограбил заправочную станцию с игрушечным пистолетом, чтобы вымогать деньги, чтобы продолжать пить. , и полиция, наконец, задержала его за то, что он мочился на улице. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job.

And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don’t piss off people who work in airports.

“Are you sure it’s not something like ‘kinds of behavior that work in a specialized environment, such as a prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment'?” said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story. “No, listen to me, I’m telling you, man,” said Johnnie Larch, “don’t piss off those bitches in airports.”

Shadow half-smiled at the memory. His own driver’s license had several months still to go before it expired.

“Bus station! Everybody out!”

The building stank of piss and sour beer. Shadow climbed into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. He told him that there was an extra five dollars if he could do it in silence. Он сказал ему, что есть дополнительные пять долларов, если он сможет сделать это молча. They made it in twenty minutes and the driver never said a word.

Then Shadow was stumbling through the brightly lit airport terminal. Shadow worried about the whole e-ticket business. He knew he had a ticket for a flight on Friday, but he didn’t know if it would work today. Он знал, что у него есть билет на рейс в пятницу, но не знал, сработает ли он сегодня. Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to evaporate at any moment. Все электронное казалось Шэдоу магическим и могло испариться в любой момент. He liked things he could hold and touch.

Still, he had his wallet, back in his possession for the first time in three years, containing several expired credit cards and one Visa card which, he was pleasantly surprised to discover, didn’t expire until the end of January. Тем не менее, его бумажник снова оказался у него впервые за три года, в нем было несколько кредитных карт с истекшим сроком действия и одна карта Visa, срок действия которой, как он был приятно удивлен, истекал только в конце января. He had a reservation number. And, he realized, he had the certainty that once he got home everything would, somehow, be right once more. Laura would be fine again. Maybe it was some kind of scam to spring him a few days early. Может быть, это была какая-то афера, чтобы вытащить его на несколько дней раньше. Or perhaps it was a simple mix-up: some other Laura Moon’s body had been dragged from the highway wreckage.

Lightning flickered outside the airport, through the windows-walls. Shadow realized he was holding his breath, waiting for something. Тень понял, что затаил дыхание, ожидая чего-то. A distant boom of thunder. He exhaled.

A tired white woman stared at him from behind the counter.