American Gods Read Online Free PDF

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 in the first place.
    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—17-D—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 nextto 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 quickly discovered, it was completely full, and there was a middle-aged woman sitting in seat 17-D. 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. This lady is sitting in it.”
    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.
    Shadow sat down. “Can I bring you something to drink?” she asked him. “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 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