From Neil Gaiman’s American Gods:
A sad cockroach lay on its back in the middle of the tiled floor. Shadow took a towel and cleaned off the inside of the tub with it, then ran the water.
Besides being in the same paragraph, there’s nothing syntactically linking the cockroach to the “it” in the second sentence. Regardless, I read it as Shadow cleaning the tub with the cockroach’s guts smeared on the towel, much like a carpenter might stain wood with a cloth wrapped around his finger. Gaiman removes doubt at the end of the paragraph when he mentions the cockroach remaining unmolested on the floor.
Slightly off-topic: I had just finished Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which seems to have a lot of parallel plot points to this book (a magic carousel, for one). Bradbury went full poetic blast in that book, which was a bit of a turn off compared to Fahrenheit 451, where he (or his editor) held back just enough to make the text flow instead of stutter along. Bradbury writes fantastically about plain things becoming fantastic. Gaiman is the same, but writes very plainly without being simplistic. That’s hard to do.