"Believe what?" asked Shadow. "What should I believe?"
He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth.
"Everything," roared the buffalo man.
The world tipped and spun, and Shadow was on the plane once more; but the tipping continued. In the front of the plane a woman screamed halfheartedly.
Lightning burst in blinding flashes around the plane. The captain came on the intercom to tell them that he was going to try and gain some altitude, to get away from the storm.
The plane shook and shuddered, and Shadow wondered, coldly and idly, if he was going to die. It seemed possible, he decided, but unlikely. He stared out of the window and watched the lightning illuminate the horizon.
Then he dozed once more, and dreamed he was back in prison and that Low Key had whispered to him in the food line that someone had put out a contract on his life, but that Shadow could not find out who or why; and when he woke up they were coming in for a landing.
He stumbled off the plane, blinking into wakefulness.
All airports, he thought, look very much the same. It doesn't actually matter where you are, you are in an airport: tiles and walkways and restrooms, gates and newsstands and fluorescent lights. This airport looked like an airport. The trouble is, this wasn't the airport he was going to. This was a big airport, with way too many people, and way too many gates.
"Excuse me, ma'am?"
The woman looked at him over the clipboard. "Yes?"
"What airport is this?"
She looked at him, puzzled, trying to decide whether or not he was joking, then she said, "St. Louis."
"I thought this was the plane to Eagle Point."
"It was. They redirected it here because of the storms. Didn't they make an announcement?"
"Probably. I fell asleep."
"You'll need to talk to that man over there, in the red coat."
The man was almost as tall as Shadow: he looked like the father from a seventies sitcom, and he tapped something into a computer and told Shadow to run-run!-to a gate on the far side of the terminal.
Shadow ran through the airport, but the doors were already closed when he got to the gate. He watched the plane pull away from the gate, through the plate glass.
The woman at the passenger assistance desk (short and brown, with a mole on the side of her nose) consulted with another woman and made a phone call ("Nope, that one's out. They've just cancelled it."), then she printed out another boarding card. "This will get you there," she told him. "We'll call ahead to the gate and tell them you're coming."
Shadow felt like a pea being flicked between three cups, or a card being shuffled through a deck. Again he ran through the airport, ending up near where he had gotten off originally.
A small man at the gate took his boarding pass. "We've been waiting for you," he confided, tearing off the stub of the boarding pass, with Shadow's seat assignment-17D-on it. Shadow hurried onto the plane, and they closed the door behind him.
He walked through first class-there were only four first-class seats, three of which were occupied. The bearded man in a pale suit seated next to the unoccupied seat at the very front grinned at Shadow as he got onto the plane, then raised his wrist and tapped his watch as Shadow walked past.
Yeah, yeah, I'm making you late, thought Shadow. Let that be the worst of your worries.
The plane seemed pretty full, as he made his way down toward the back. Actually, Shadow found, it was completely full, and there was a middle-aged woman sitting in seat 17D. Shadow showed her his boarding card stub, and she showed him hers: they matched.
"Can you take your seat, please?" asked the flight attendant.
"No," he said, "I'm afraid I can't."
She clicked her tongue and checked their boarding cards, then she led him back up to the front of the plane and pointed him to the empty seat in first class. "Looks like it's your lucky day," she told him. "Can I bring you something to drink? We'll just have time before we take off. And I'm sure you need one after that."
"I'd like a beer, please," said Shadow. "Whatever you've got."
The flight attendant went away.
The man in the pale suit in the seat beside Shadow 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.
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. The man in the pale suit grinned at her and said, "Don't worry, I'll hold onto 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 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.