“Oh, we call him worse than that on occasion,” Delevan said. “What happened after you showed him your P.C., Mr. Mort?”
“He asked for a closer look. I gave him my wallet but he didn’t look at the picture. He
dropped it on the floor. I asked him what he did that for. He said that was a stupid question.
Then I told him to give me back my wallet. I was mad.”
“I bet you were.” Although, looking at the man’s dead face, Delevan thought you’d never guess this man could get mad.
“He laughed. I started to come around the counter and get it. That was when he pulled the
gun.”
They had been walking toward the shop. Now they stopped. They looked excited rather
than fearful. “Gun?” O’Mearah asked, wanting to be sure he had heard right.
“It was under the counter, by the cash register,” the man in the blue suit said. Roland remembered the moment when he had almost junked his original plan and gone for the
man’s weapon. Now he told these gunslingers why he hadn’t. He wanted to use them, not
get them killed. “I think it was in a docker’s clutch.”
“A what?” O’Mearah asked.
“A longer pause this time. The man’s forehead wrinkled. “I don’t know exactly how to say it… a thing you put your gun into. No one can grab it but you unless they know how to
push—”
“A spring-clip!” Delevan said. “Holy shit!” Another exchange of glances between the partners. Neither wanted to be the first to tell this guy that Fat Johnny had probably
harvested the cash from his wallet already, shucked his buns out the back door, and tossed
it over the wall of the alley behind the building. . . but a gun in a spring-clip. . . that was
different. Robbery was a possible, but all at once a concealed weapons charge looked like a
sure thing. Maybe not as good, but a foot in the door.
“What then?” O’Mearah asked.
“Then he told me I didn’t have a wallet. He said—” pause”—that I got my picket
pocked—my pocket picked, I mean— on the street and I’d better remember it if I wanted to
stay healthy. I remembered seeing a police car parked up the block and I thought you might
still be there. So I left.”
“Okay,” Delevan said. “Me and my partner are going in first, and fast. Give us about a minute— a full minute—just in case there’s some trouble. Then come in, but stand by the
door. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Let’s bust this motherfucker.”
The two cops went in. Roland waited thirty seconds and then followed them.
9
“Fat Johnny” Holden was doing more than protesting. He was bellowing.
“Guy’s crazy! Guy comes in here, doesn’t even know what he wants, then, when he sees it
in the Shooter’s Bible, he don’t know how many comes in a box, how much they cost, and what he says about me wantin’ a closer look at his P.C. is the biggest pile of shit I ever
heard, because he don’t have no Permit to—” Fat Johnny broke off. “There he is! There’s the creep! Right there! I see you, buddy! I see your face! Next time you see mine you’re gonna
be fuckin sorry! I guarantee you that! I fuckin guarantee—”
“You don’t have this man’s wallet?” O’Mearah asked.
“You know I don’t have his wallet!”
“You mind if we take a look behind this display case?” Delevan countered. “Just to be sure?”
“Jesus-fuckin-jumped-up-Christ-on-a-pony! The case is glass! You see any wallets there?”
“No, not there … I meant here,” Delevan said, moving toward the register. His voice was a cat’s purr. At this point a chrome-steel reinforcing strip almost two feet wide ran down the
shelves of the case. Delevan looked back at the man in the blue suit, who nodded.
“I want you guys out of here right now,” Fat Johnny said. He had lost some of his color.
“You come back with a warrant, that’s different. But for now, I want you the fuck out. Still a free fuckin country, you kn—hey! hey! HEY, QUIT THAT!”
O’Mearah was peering over the counter.
“That’s illegal!”Fat Johnny was howling. “That’s fuckin illegal, the Constitution . . . my fuckin lawyer. . . you get back on your side right now or—”
“I just wanted a closer look at the merchandise,” O’Mea- rah said mildly, “on account of the glass in your display case is so fucking dirty. That’s why I looked over. Isn’t it, Carl?”
“True shit, buddy,” Delevan said solemnly.
“And look what I found.”
Roland heard a click, and suddenly the gunslinger in the blue uniform was holding an
extremely large gun in his hand.
Fat Johnny, who had finally realized he was the only person in the room who would tell a
story that differed from the fairy tale just told by the cop who had taken his Mag, turned
sullen.
“I got a permit,” he said.
“To carry?” Delevan asked.
“Yeah.”
“To carry concealed?”
“Yeah.”
“This gun registered?” O’Mearah asked. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Well … I mighta forgot.”
“Might be it’s hot, and you forgot that, too.”
“Fuck you. I’m calling my lawyer.”
Fat Johnny started to turn away. Delevan grabbed him.
“Then there’s the question of whether or not you got a permit to conceal a deadly weapon
in a spring-clip device,” he said in the same soft, purring voice. “That’s an interesting question, because so far as I know, the City of New York doesn’t issue a permit like that.”
The cops were looking at Fat Johnny; Fat Johnny was glaring back at them. So none of
them noticed Roland turn the sign hanging in the door from OPEN to CLOSED.
“Maybe we could start to resolve this matter if we could find the gentleman’s wallet,”
O’Mearah said. Satan himself could not have lied with such genial persuasiveness. “Maybe
he just dropped it, you know.”
“I told you! 1 don’t know nothing about the guy’s wallet! Guy’s out of his mind!”
Roland bent down. “There it is,” he remarked. “I can just see it. He’s got his foot on it.”
This was a lie, but Delevan, whose hand was still on Fat Johnny’s shoulder, shoved the
man back so rapidly that it was impossible to tell if the man’s foot had been there or not.
It had to be now. Roland glided silently toward the coun- ter as the two gunslingers bent to
peer under the counter. Because they were standing side by side, this brought their heads
close together. O’Mearah still had the gun the clerk had kept under the counter in his right
hand.
“Goddam, it’s there!” Delevan said excitedly. “I see it!”
Roland snapped a quick glance at the man they had called Fat Johnny, wanting to make
sure he was not going to make a play. But he was only standing against the wall— pushing
against it, actually, as if wishing he could push himself into it—with his hands hanging at
his sides and his eyes great wounded O’s. He looked like a man wondering how come his
horoscope hadn’t told him to beware this day.
No problem there.
“Yeah!”O’Mearah replied gleefully. The two men peered under the counter, hands on
uniformed knees. Now O’Mea- rah’s left his knee and he reached out to snag the wallet. “I
see it, t-”
Roland took one final step forward. He cupped Delevan’s right cheek in one hand,
O’Mearah’s left cheek in the other, and all of a sudden a day Fat Johnny Holden
believed had to have hit rock bottom got a lot worse. The spook in the blue suit brought the cops’ heads together hard enough to make a sound like rocks wrapped in felt colliding with
each other.
The cops fell in a heap. The man in the gold-rimmed specs stood. He was pointing the .357
Mag at Fat Johnny. The muzzle looked big enough to hold a moon rocket.
“We’re not going to have any trouble, are we?” the spook asked in his dead voice.
“No sir,” Fat Johnny said at once, “not a bit.”
“Stand right there. If your ass loses contact with that wall, you are going to lose contact
with life as you have always known it. You understand?”
“Yes sir,” Fat Johnny said, “I sure do.”
“Good.”
Roland pushed the two cops apart. They were both still alive. That was good. No matter
how slow and unobservant they might be, they were gunslingers, men who had tried to help
a stranger in trouble. He had no urge to kill his own.
But he had done it before, hadn’t he? Yes. Had not Alain himself, one of his sworn brothers,
died under Roland’s and Cuthbert’s own smoking guns?
Without taking his eyes from the clerk, he felt under the counter with the toe of Jack Mort’s
Gucci loafer. He felt the wallet. He kicked it. It came spinning out from underneath the