him back by the shirt, then went out himself, low. Eddie stood Chip beside Mr. Flannel Shirt and himself just in front of them. Behind them, bullets smacked through the EMPLOYEES ONLY
door, creating startled white eyes of daylight.
“Eddie!” Roland grunted. “To me!”
Eddie limped out. There was a loading dock here, and beyond it about an acre of unlovely,
churned-up ground. Trash barrels had been stacked haphazardly to the right of the dock and there were two Dumpsters to the left, but it didn’t look to Eddie Dean as if anyone had worried too
much about putting litter in its place. There were also several piles of beercans almost big
enough to qualify as archaeological middens. Nothing like relaxing on the back porch after a hard day at the store, Eddie thought.
Roland was pointing his gun at another oil-pump, this one rustier and older than the ones out
front. On it was a single word. “Diesel,” Roland said. “Does that mean fuel? It does, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Chip, does the diesel pump work?”
“Sure, sure,” Chip said in a disinterested tone of voice. “Lotsa guys fill up back here.”
“I can run it, mister,” said Flannel Shirt. ‘You better let me, too — it’s tetchy. Can you and your buddy cover me?”
“Yes,” Roland said. “Pour it in there.” And jerked a thumb at the storeroom.
“Hey, no!” Chip said, startled.
How long did all these things take? Eddie could not have said, not for sure. All he was aware
of was a clarity he had known only once before: while riddling Blaine the Mono. It overwhelmed
everything with its brilliance, even the pain in his lower leg, where the tibia might or might not have been chipped by a bullet. He was aware of how funky it smelled back here — rotted meat
and moldy produce, the yeasty scent of a thousand departed brewskis, the odors of don’t-care
laziness — and the divinely sweet fir-perfume of the woods just beyond the perimeter of this
dirty little roadside store. He could hear the drone of a plane in some distant quadrant of the sky.
He knew he loved Mr. Flannel Shirt because Mr. Flannel Shirt was here, was with them, linked to Roland and Eddie by the strongest of bonds for these few minutes. But time? No, he had no
true sense of that. But it couldn’t have been much more than ninety seconds since Roland had
begun their retreat, or surely they would have been overwhelmed, crashed truck or no crashed
truck.
Roland pointed left, then turned right himself. He and Eddie stood back to back on the loading
dock with about six feet between them, guns raised to their cheeks like men about to commence
a duel. Mr. Flannel Shirt hopped off the end of the dock, spry as a cricket, and seized the chrome crank on the side of the old diesel pump. He began to spin it rapidly. The numbers in their little windows spun backward, but instead of returning to all zeros, they froze at 0 0 1 9. Mr. Flannel Shirt tried the crank again. When it refused to turn, he shrugged and yanked the nozzle out of its rusty cradle.
“John, no!” Chip cried. He was still standing in the doorway of his storeroom and holding up his hands, one clean and the other bloody all the way up the forearm.
“Get out of the way, Chip, or you’re gonna — ”
Two men dashed around Eddie’s side of the East Stoneham General Store. Both were dressed
in jeans and flannel shirts, but unlike Chip’s shirt, these looked brand-new, with the creases still in the sleeves. Purchased especially for the occasion, Eddie had no doubt. And one of the goons Eddie recognized quite well; had last seen him in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Calvin
Tower’s bookshop. Eddie had also killed this fellow once before. Ten years in the future, if you could believe it. In The Leaning Tower, Balazar’s joint, and with the same gun he now held in his hand. A snatch of old Bob Dylan lyric occurred to him, something about the price you had to pay to keep from going through everything twice . . .
“Hey, Big Nose!” Eddie cried (as he seemed to each time he saw this particular piece of pond scum). “How you doing, pal?” In truth, George Biondi did not appear to be doing well at all. Not even his mother would have considered him, much more than presentable, even on his best day
(that humungous beak), and now his features were puffed and discolored by bruises that had only just begun to fade. The worst of them was right between the eyes.
I did that, Eddie thought. In the back of Tower’s bookstore. It was true, but it also seemed like something that had happened a thousand years ago.
” You, ” said George Biondi. He seemed too stunned to even raise his gun. ” You. Here. ”
“Me here,” Eddie agreed. “As for you, you should have stayed in New York.” With that said, he blew George Biondi’s face off. His friend’s face, too.
Flannel Shirt squeezed the pump handle’s pistol grip and dark diesel sprayed from the nozzle.
It doused Chip, who cawed indignantly and then staggered out onto the loading; dock. ” Stings! ”
he shouted. ” Gorry, don’t that sting! Quit it, John! ”
John did not. Another three men came dashing around Roland’s side of the store, took one
look at the gunslinger’s calm and awful face, tried to backtrack. They were dead before they
could do more than get the heels of their new country walking shoes planted. Eddie thought of
the half-dozen cars and the big Winnebago that had been parked across the street and had time to wonder just how many men Balazar had sent on this little expedition. Certainly not just his own guys. How had he paid for the imports?
He didn’t have to, Eddie thought. Someone loaded him up with dough and told him to go buy the farm. As many out-of-town goons as he could get. And somehow convinced him the guys they were going after deserved that kind of coverage.
From inside the store there came a dull, percussive thud. Soot blew out of the chimney and
was lost against the darker, oilier cloud rising from the crashed pulp truck. Eddie thought
somebody had tossed a grenade. The door to the storeroom blew off its hinges, walked halfway
down the aisle surrounded by a cloud of smoke, and fell flat. Soon the fellow who’d thrown the
grenade would throw another, and with the floor of the storeroom now covered in an inch of
diesel fuel —
“Slow him down if you can,” Roland said. “It’s not wet enough in there yet.”
“Slow down Andolini?” Eddie asked. “How do I do that?”
“With your everlasting mouth. ” Roland cried, and Eddie saw a wonderful, heartening thing: Roland was grinning. Almost laughing. At the same time he looked at Flannel Shirt — John —
and made a spinning gesture with his right hand: keep pumping.
“Jack!” Eddie shouted. He had no idea where Andolini might be at this point, and so simply yelled as loud as he could. Having grown up ramming around Brooklyn’s less savory streets, this was quite loud.
There was a pause. The gunfire slowed, then stopped.
“Hey,” Jack Andolini called back. He sounded surprised, but in a good-humored way. Eddie doubted he was really surprised at all, and he had no doubt whatsoever that what Jack wanted
was payback. He’d been hurt in the storage area behind Tower’s bookshop, but that wasn’t the
worst of it. He’d also been humiliated. “Hey, Slick! Are you the guy who was gonna send my brains to Hoboken, then stuck a gun under my chin? Man, I got a mark there!”
Eddie could see him making this rueful little speech, all the time gesturing with his hands,
moving his remaining men into position. How many was that? Eight? Maybe ten? They’d already
taken out a bunch, God knew. And where would the remainder be? A couple on the left of the
store. A couple more on the right. The rest with Monsieur Grenades R Us. And when Jack was
ready, those guys would charge. Right into the new shallow lake of diesel fuel.
Or so Eddie hoped.
“I’ve got the same gun with me today!” he called to Jack. “This time I’ll jam it up your ass, how’d that be?”
Jack laughed. It was an easy, relaxed sound. An act, but a good one. Inside, Jack would be
redlining: heart-rate up over one-thirty, blood-pressure up over one-seventy. This was it, not just payback for some little punk daring to blind-side him but the biggest job of his stinking bad-guy career, the Super Bowl.
Balazar gave the orders, undoubtedly, but Jack Andolini was the one on the spot, the field