merely had a headache; Delevan felt as if someone had used the inside of his head as a
nuclear weapons testing site.
“Guy took my gun,” he said to O’Mearah. His voice was so slurry the words were almost
impossible to make out.
“Join the club.”
“He still here?” Delevan took a step toward O’Mearah, tilted to the left as if he were on the deck of a ship in a heavy sea, and then managed to right himself.
“No.”
“How long?” Delevan looked at Fat Johnny, who didn’t answer, perhaps because Fat
Johnny, whose back was turned, thought Delevan was still talking to his partner. Delevan,
not a man noted for even temper and restrained behavior under the best of circumstances,
roared at the man, even though it made his head feel like it was going to crack into a
thousand pieces:”I asked you a question, you fat shit! How long has that motherfucker been
gone?”
“Five minutes, maybe,” Fat Johnny said dully. “Took his shells and your guns.” He paused.
“Paid for the shells. I couldn’t believe it.”
Five minutes,Delevan thought. The guy had come in a cab. Sitting in their cruiser and
drinking coffee, they had seen him get out of it. It was getting close to rush-hour. Cabs
were hard to get at this time of day. Maybe—
“Come on,” he said to George O’Mearah. “We still got a chance to collar him. We’ll want a gun from this slut here—”
O’Mearah displayed the Magnum. At first Delevan saw two of them, then the image
slowly came together.
“Good.” Delevan was coming around, not all at once but getting there, like a prizefighter who has taken a damned hard one on the chin. “You keep it. I’ll use the shotgun under the
dash.” He started for the door, and this time he did more than reel; he staggered and had to claw the wall to keep his feet.
“You gonna be all right?” O’Mearah asked.
“If we catch him,” Delevan said.
They left. Fat Johnny was not as glad about their depar- ture as he had been about that of
the spook in the blue suit, but almost. Almost.
2
Delevan and O’Mearah didn’t even have to discuss which direction the perp might have
taken when he left the gun-shop. All they had to do was listen to the radio dispatcher.
“Code 19,” she said over and over again. Robbery in progress, shots fired. “Code 19, Code 19. Location is 395 West 49th, Katz’s Drugs, perpetrator tall, sandy-haired, blue suit—”
Shots fired,Delevan thought, his head aching worse than ever. I wonder if they were fired
with George’s gun or mine? Or both? If that shitbag killed someone, we’re fucked. Unless
we get him.
“Blast off,” he said curtly to O’Mearah, who didn’t need to be told twice. He understood the situation as well as Delevan did. He flipped on the lights and the siren and screamed out
into traffic. It was knotting up already, rush-hour starting, and so O’Mearah ran the cruiser
with two wheels in the gutter and two on the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians like quail. He
clipped the rear fender of a produce truck sliding onto Forty-Ninth. Ahead he could see
twinkling glass on the sidewalk. They could both hear the strident bray of the alarm.
Pedes- trians were sheltering in doorways and behind piles of gar- bage, but residents of the
overhead apartments were staring out eagerly, as if this was a particularly good TV show,
or a movie you didn’t have to pay to see.
The block was devoid of automobile traffic; cabs and commuters alike had scatted.
“I just hope he’s still there,” Delevan said, and used a key to unlock the short steel bars across the stock and barrel of the pump shotgun under the dashboard. He pulled it out of its
clips. “I just hope that rotten-crotch son of a bitch is still, there.”
What neither understood was that, when you were deal- ing with the gunslinger, it was
usually better to leave bad enough alone.
3
When Roland stepped out of Katz’s Drugs, the big bottle of Keflex had joined the cartons
of ammo in Jack Mort’s coat pockets. He had Carl Delevan’s service .38 in his right hand. It
felt so damned good to hold a gun in a whole right hand.
He heard the siren and saw the car roaring down the street. Them, he thought. He began to raise the gun and then remembered: they were gunslingers. Gunslingers doing their duty.
He turned and went back into the alchemist’s shop.
“Hold it, motherfucker!”Delevan screamed. Roland’s eyes flew to the convex mirror in
time to see one of the gunslingers—the one whose ear had bled—leaning out of the
window with a scatter-rifle. As his partner pulled their car- riage to a screaming halt that
made its rubber wheels smoke on the pavement he jacked a shell into its chamber.
Roland hit the floor.
4
Katz didn’t need any mirror to see what was about to happen. First the crazy man, now the
crazy cops. Oy vay.
“Drop!”he screamed to his assistant and to Ralph, the security guard, and then fell to his knees behind the counter without waiting to see if they were doing the same or not.
Then, a split-second before Delevan triggered the shot- gun, his assistant dropped on top of
him like an eager tackle sacking the quarterback in a football game, driving Katz’s head
against the floor and breaking his jaw in two places.
Through the sudden pain which went roaring through his head, he heard the shotgun’s blast,
heard the remaining glass in the windows shatter—along with bottles of aftershave,
cologne, perfume, mouthwash, cough syrup, God knew what else. A thousand conflicting
smells rose, creating one hell-stench, and before he passed out, Katz again called upon God
to rot his father for chaining this curse of a drug store to his ankle in the first place.
5
Roland saw bottles and boxes fly back in a hurricane of shot. A glass case containing
time-pieces disintegrated. Most of the watches inside also disintegrated. The pieces flew
back- wards in a sparkling cloud.
They can’t know if there are still innocent people in here or not,he thought. They can’t know and yet they used a scatter-rifle just the same!
It was unforgivable. He felt anger and suppressed it. They were gunslingers. Better to
believe their brains had been addled by the head-knocking they’d taken than to believe
they’d done such a thing knowingly, without a care for whom they might hurt or kill.
They would expect him to either run or shoot.
Instead, he crept forward, keeping low. He lacerated both hands and knees on shards of
broken glass. The pain brought Jack Mort back to consciousness. He was glad Mort was
back.
He would need him. As for Mort’s hands and knees, he didn’t care. He could stand the pain
easily, and the wounds were being inflicted on the body of a monster who deserved no
better.
He reached the area just under what remained of the plate-glass window. He was to the
right of the door. He crouched there, body coiled. He bolstered the gun which had been in
his right hand.
He would not need it.
6
“What are you doing, Carl?”O’Mearah screamed. In his head he suddenly saw a
Daily News headline: COP KILLS 4 IN WEST SIDE DRUG STORE SNAFU.
Delevan ignored him and pumped a fresh shell into the shotgun. “Let’s go get this shit.”
7
It happened exactly as the gunslinger had hoped it would.
Furious at being effortlessly fooled and disarmed by a man who probably looked to them
no more dangerous than any of the other lambs on the streets of this seemingly endless city,
still groggy from the head-knocking, they rushed in with the idiot who had fired the
scatter-rifle in the lead. They ran slightly bent-over, like soldiers charging an enemy
position, but that was the only concession they made to the idea that their adversary might
still be inside. In their minds, he was already out the back and fleeing down an alley.
So they came crunching over the sidewalk glass, and when the gunslinger with the
scatter-rifle pulled open the glassless door and charged in, the gunslinger rose, his hands
laced together in a single fist, and brought it down on the nape of Officer Carl Delevan’s
neck.
While testifying before the investigating committee, Delevan would claim he remembered
nothing at all after kneeling down in Clements’ and seeing the perp’s wallet under the
counter. The committee members thought such amnesia was, under the circumstances,
pretty damned conven- ient, and Delevan was lucky to get off with a sixty-day suspen- sion
without pay. Roland, however, would have believed, and, under different circumstances (if
the fool hadn’t discharged a scatter-rifle into a store which might have been full of
inno- cent people, for instance), even sympathized. When you got your skull busted twice