poison, and being bitten by her would be about the same as being bitten by a copperhead or
rattler. There was no blood. And when he looked again, it was the other woman—the first
woman.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to die. PI—” Then she went out for good, and that was good. For all of them.
4
“So whatchoo think?” Julio asked.
“About who’s gonna be in the Series?” George squashed the butt under the heel of his
loafer. “White Sox. I got ’em in the pool.”
“Whatchoo think about that lady?”
“I think she might be schizophrenic,” George said slowly.
“Yeah, I know that. I mean, what’s gonna happen to her?”
“I don’t know.”
“She needs help, man. Who gonna give it?”
“Well, I already gave her one,” George said, but his face felt hot, as if he were blushing.
Julio looked at him. “If you already gave her all the help you can give her, you shoulda let her die, doc.”
George looked at Julio for a moment, but found he couldn’t stand what he saw in Julio’s
eyes—not accusation but sadness.
So he walked away.
He had places to go.
5
The Time of the Drawing:
In the time since the accident it was, for the most part, still Odetta Holmes who was in
control, but Delta Walker had come forward more and more, the thing Detta liked to do
best was steal. It didn’t matter that her booty was always little more than junk, no more than
it mattered that she often threw it away later.
The taking was what mattered.
When the gunslinger entered her head in Macy’s, Delta screamed in a combination of fury
and horror and terror, her hands freezing on the junk jewelry she was scooping into her
purse.
She screamed because when Roland came into her mind, when he came forward, she for a
moment sensed the other, as if a door had been swung open inside of her head.
And she screamed because the invading raping presence was a honky.
She could not see but nonetheless sensed his whiteness.
People looked around. A floorwalker saw the screaming woman in the wheelchair with her
purse open, saw one hand frozen in the act of stuffing costume jewelry into a purse that
looked (even from a distance of thirty feet) worth three times the stuff she was stealing.
The floorwalker yelled, “Hey Jimmy!” and Jimmy Halvorsen, one of Macy’s house
detectives, looked around and saw what was happening. He started toward the black
woman in the wheelchair on a dead run. He couldn’t help running—he had been a city cop
for eighteen years and it was built into his system—but he was already thinking it was
gonna be a shit bust. Little kids, cripples, nuns; they were always a shit bust. Busting them
was like kicking a drunk. They cried a little in front of the judge and then took a walk. It
was hard to convince judges that cripples could also be slime.
But he ran just the same.
6
Roland was momentarily horrified by the snakepit of hate and revulsion in which he found himself. . . and then he heard the woman screaming, saw the big man with the potato-sack
belly running toward her/him, saw people looking, and took control.
Suddenly he was the woman with the dusky hands. He sensed some strange duality inside
her, but couldn’t think about it now.
He turned the chair and began to shove it forward. The aisle rolled past him/her. People
dived away to either side. The purse was lost, spilling Delta’s credentials and stolen
treasure in a wide trail along the floor. The man with the heavy gut skidded on bogus gold
chains and lipstick tubes and then fell on his ass.
7
Shit!Halvorsen thought furiously, and for a moment one hand clawed under his sport-coat
where there was a .38 in a clamshell holster. Then sanity reasserted itself. This was no drug
bust or armed robbery; this was a crippled black lady in a wheelchair. She was rolling it
like it was some punk’s drag-racer, but a crippled black lady was all she was just the same.
What was he going to do, shoot her? That would be great, wouldn’t it? And where was she
going to go? There was nothing at the end of the aisle but two dressing rooms.
He picked himself up, massaging his aching ass, and began after her again, limping a little
now.
The wheelchair flashed into one of the dressing rooms. The door slammed, just clearing
the push-handles on the back.
Got you now, bitch,Jimmy thought. And I’m going to give you one hell of a scare. I don’t
care if you got five orphan children and only a year to live. I’m not gonna hurt you, but oh
babe I’m gonna shake your dice.
He beat the floorwalker to the dressing room, slammed the door open with his left
shoulder, and it was empty.
No black woman.
No wheelchair.
No nothing.
He looked at the floorwalker, starey-eyed.
“Other one!” the floorwalker yelled. “Other one!”
Before Jimmy could move, the floorwalker had busted open the door of the other dressing
room. A woman in a linen skirt and a Playtex Living Bra screamed piercingly and crossed
her arms over her chest. She was very white and very definitely not crippled.
“Pardon me,” the floorwalker said, feeling hot crimson flood his face.
“Get out of here, you pervert!”the woman in the linen skirt and the bra cried.
“Yes, ma’am,” the floorwalker said, and closed the door.
At Macy’s, the customer was always right.
He looked at Halvorsen.
Halvorsen looked back.
“What is this shit?” Halvorsen asked. “Did she go in there or not?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“So where is she?”
The floorwalker could only shake his head. “Let’s go back and pick up the mess.”
“Youpick up the mess,” Jimmy Halvorsen said. “I feel like I just broke my ass in nine pieces.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, me fine bucko, I also feel extremely confused.”
8
The moment the gunslinger heard the dressing room door bang shut behind him, he
rammed the wheelchair around in a half turn, looking for the doorway. If Eddie had done
what he had promised, it would be gone.
But the door was open. Roland wheeled the Lady of Shadows through it.
CHAPTER 3
ODETTA ON THE OTHER SIDE
1
Not long after, Roland would think: Any other woman, crippled or otherwise, suddenly
shoved all the way down the aisle of the mart in which she was doing
business—monkey-business, you may call it if you like—by a stranger inside her head,
shoved into a little room while some man behind her yelled for her to stop, then suddenly
turned, shoved again where there was by rights no room in which to shove, then finding
herself suddenly in an entirely different world . . . I think any other woman, under those
circumstances, would have most certainly have asked “Where am I?” before all else.
Instead, Odetta Holmes asked almost pleasantly, “What exactly are you planning to do
with that knife, young man?”
2
Roland looked up at Eddie, who was crouched with his knife held less than a quarter of an
inch over the skin. Even with his uncanny speed, there was no way the gunslinger could
move fast enough to evade the blade if Eddie decided to use it.
“Yes,” Roland said. “What are you planning to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie said, sounding completely disgusted with himself. “Cui bait, I guess.
Sure doesn’t look like I came here to fish, does it?”
He threw the knife toward the Lady’s chair, but well to the right. It stuck, quivering, in the
sand to its hilt.
Then the Lady turned her head and began, “I wonder if you could please explain where
you’ve taken m—”
She stopped. She had said Iwonder if you before her head had gotten around far enough to
see there was no one behind her, but the gunslinger observed with some real interest that
she went on speaking for a moment anyway, because the fact of her condition made certain things elementary truths of her life—if she had moved, for instance, someone must have
moved her. But there was no one behind her.
No one at all.
She looked back at Eddie and the gunslinger, her dark eyes troubled, confused, and
alarmed, and now she asked. “Where am I? Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can
I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o’clock news in my robe?
Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?”
“Who am I?” she asked,the gunslinger thought. The dam broke and there was a flood of questions; that was to be expected. But that one question—”Who am I?”—even now I don’t think she knows she asked it.
Or when.
Because she had asked before.