Almost empty.
     There was one car ugg boots on sale remaining on the ice, parked out on the frozen lake almost beneath the bridge, so that anyone driving through the town, anyone crossing the town, could not help but see it. It was a dirty green in color; the sort of car that people abandon in parking lots. It had no engine. It was a symbol of a wager, waiting for the ice to become rotten enough and soft enough and dangerous enough to allow the lake to take it forever.
     There was a chain across the short driveway that led down to ugg boots cheap sale the lake, and a warning sign forbidding entrance to people or to vehicles. THIN ICE, it read. Beneath it was a hand-painted sequence of pictograms with lines through them: NO CARS, NO PEDESTRIANS, NO SNOWMOBILES. DANGER.
     Shadow ignored the warnings and scrambled down the bank. It was slippery-the snow had already melted, turning the earth to mud under his feet, and the brown grass barely offered traction. He skidded and slid, down to the lake and walked, carefully, out onto a short wooden jetty, and from there he ugg boots cheap sale stepped down onto the ice.
     The layer of water on the ice, made up of melted ice and melted snow, was deeper than it had looked from above, and the ice beneath the water was slicker and more slippery than any skating rink, so that Shadow was forced to fight to keep his footing. He splashed though the water as it covered his boots to the laces and seeped inside. Ice water. It numbed where it touched. He felt strangely distant as he trudged across the frozen lake, uggs discount as if he were watching himself on a movie screen-a movie in which he was the hero: a detective, perhaps.
     He walked toward the klunker, painfully aware that the ice was too rotten for this, and that the water beneath the ice was as cold as water could be without freezing. He kept walking, and he slipped and slid. Several times he fell.
     He passed empty beer bottles and cans left to litter the ice, and he passed round holes cut into the ice, for fishing, holes that had discount uggs for women not frozen again, each hole filled with black water.
     The klunker seemed farther away than it had looked from the road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking, followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size of a lake were vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could.