in half an hour, a few scrambled brains were to be expected.
As Delevan went down, suddenly as boneless as a sack of oats, Roland took the
scatter-rifle from his relaxing hands.
“Hold it!”O’Mearah screamed, his voice a mixture of anger and dismay. He was starting to raise Fat Johnny’s Mag- num, but it was as Roland had suspected: the gunslingers of this
world were pitifully slow. He could have shot O’Mearah three times, but there was no need.
He simply swung the scatter-gun in a strong, climbing arc. There was a flat smack as the
stock connected with O’Mearah’s left cheek, the sound of a baseball bat connecting with a
real steamer of a pitch. All at once O’Mearah’s entire face from the cheek on down moved
two inches to the right. It would take three operations and four steel pegs to put him
together again. He stood there for a moment, unbelieving, and then his eyes rolled up the
whites. His knees unhinged and he collapsed.
Roland stood in the doorway, oblivious to the approach- ing sirens. He broke the
scatter-rifle, then worked the pump action, ejecting all the fat red cartridges onto Delevan’s
body. That done, he dropped the gun itself onto Delevan.
“You’re a dangerous fool who should be sent west,” he told the unconscious man. “You have forgotten the face of your father.”
He stepped over the body and walked to the gunslingers’ carriage, which was still idling.
He climbed in the door on the far side and slid behind the driving wheel.
8
Can you drive this carriage?he asked the screaming, gibbering thing that was Jack Mort.
He got no coherent answer; Mort just went on screaming. The gunslinger recognized this
as hysteria, but one which was not entirely genuine. Jack Mort was having hysterics on
pur- pose, as a way of avoiding any conversation with this weird kidnapper.
Listen,the gunslinger told him. Ionly have time to say this—and everything else—once. My
time has grown very short. If you don’t answer my question, I am going to put your right
thumb into your right eye. I’ll jam it in as far as it will go, and then I’ll pull your eyeball right out of your head and wipe it on the seat of this carriage like a booger. I can get along with one eye just fine. And, after all, it isn’t as if it were mine.
He could no more have lied to Mort than Mort could have lied to him; the nature of their
relationship was cold and reluctant on both their parts, yet it was much more intimate than
the most passionate act of sexual intercourse would have been. This was, after all, not a
joining of bodies but the ultimate meeting of minds.
He meant exactly what he said.
And Mort knew it.
The hysterics stopped abruptly. Ican drive it, Mort said. It was the first sensible
communication Roland had gotten from Mort since he had arrived inside the man’s head.
Then do it.
Where do you want me to go?
Do you know a place called “The Village”?
Yes.
Go there.
Where in the Village?
For now, just drive.
We’ll be able to go faster if I use the siren.
Fine. Turn it on. Those flashing lights, too.
For the first time since he had seized control of him, Roland pulled back a little and
allowed Mort to take over. When Mort’s head turned to inspect the dashboard of Delevan’s
and O’Mearah’s blue-and-white, Roland watched it turn but did not initiate the action. But
if he had been a physical being instead of only his own disembodied ka, he would have been standing on the balls of his feet, ready to leap forward and take control again at the slightest
sign of mutiny.
There was none, though. This man had killed and maimed God knew how many innocent
people, but he had no intention of losing one of his own precious eyes. He flicked switches,
pulled a lever, and suddenly they were in motion. The siren whined and the gunslinger saw
red pulses of light kicking off the front of the carriage.
Drive fast,the gunslinger commanded grimly.
9
In spite of lights and siren and Jack Mort beating steadily on the horn, it took them twenty
minutes to reach Greenwich Village in rush-hour traffic. In the gunslinger’s world Eddie
Dean’s hopes were crumbling like dykes in a downpour. Soon they would collapse
altogether.
The sea had eaten half the sun.
Well,Jack Mort said, we’re here. He was telling the truth (there was no way he could lie) although to Roland everything here looked just as it had everywhere else: a choke of
buildings, people, and carriages. The carriages choked not only the streets but the air
itself—with their endless clamor and their noxious fumes. It came, he supposed, from
whatever fuel it was they burned. It was a wonder these people could live at all, or the
women give birth to children that were not monsters, like the Slow Mutants under the
mountains.
Now where do we go?Mort was asking.
This would be the hard part. The gunslinger got ready— as ready as he could, at any rate.
Turn off the siren and the lights. Stop by the sidewalk.
Mort pulled the cruiser up beside a fire hydrant.
There are underground railways in this city,the gun- slinger said. Iwant you to take me to a station where these trains stop to let passengers on and off.
Which one?Mort asked. The thought was tinged with the mental color of panic. Mort
could hide nothing from Roland, and Roland nothing from Mort—not, at least, for very
long.
Some years ago—I don’t know how many—you pushed a young woman in front of a train
in one of those underground stations. That’s the one I want you to take me to.
There ensued a short, violent struggle. The gunslinger won, but it was a surprisingly hard
go. In his way, Jack Mort was as divided as Odetta. He was not a schizophrenic as she was;
he knew well enough what he did from time to time. But he kept his secret self—the part of
him that was The Pusher— as carefully locked away as an embezzler might lock away his
secret skim.
Take me there, you bastard,the gunslinger repeated. He slowly raised the thumb toward
Mort’s right eye again. It was less than half an inch away and still moving when he gave in.
Mort’s right hand moved the lever by the wheel again and they rolled toward the
Christopher Street station where that fabled A-train had cut off the legs of a woman named
Odetta Holmes some three years before.
10
“Well looky there,” foot patrolman Andrew Staunton said to his partner, Norris Weaver, as Delevan’s and O’Mearah’s blue-and-white came to a stop halfway down the block. There
were no parking spaces, and the driver made no effort to find one. He simply
double-parked and let the clog of traffic behind him inch its laborious way through the
loophole remaining, like a trickle of blood trying to serve a heart hope- lessly clogged with
cholesterol.
Weaver checked the numbers on the side by the right front headlight. 744. Yes, that was
the number they’d gotten from dispatch, all right.
The flashers were on and everything looked kosher— until the door opened and the driver
stepped out. He was wearing a blue suit, all right, but not the kind that came with gold
buttons and a silver badge. His shoes weren’t police issue either, unless Staunton and
Weaver had missed a memo notify- ing officers that duty footwear would henceforth come
from Gucci. That didn’t seem likely. What seemed likely was that this was the creep who
had hijacked the cops uptown. He got out oblivious to the honkings and cries of protest
from the drivers trying to get by him.
“Goddam,” Andy Staunton breathed.
Approach with extreme caution,the dispatcher had said. This man is armed and
extremely dangerous. Dispatchers usually sounded like the most bored human beings on
earth— for all Andy Staunton knew, they were—and so the almost awed emphasis this one
put on the word extremely had stuck to his consciousness like a burr.
He drew his weapon for the first time in his four years on the force, and glanced at Weaver.
Weaver had also drawn. The two of them were standing outside a deli about thirty feet
from the IRT stairway. They had known each other long enough to be attuned to each other
in a way only cops and professional soldiers can be. Without a word between them they
stepped back into the doorway of the delicatessen, weapons pointing upward.
“Subway?” Weaver asked.
“Yeah.” Andy took one quick glance at the entrance. Rush hour was in high gear now, and the subway stairs were clogged with people heading for their trains. “We’ve got to take him
right now, before he can get close to the crowd.”
“Let’s do it.”