The Drawing of the Three (38 page)

“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! I 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 counter 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’Mearah 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 counter on the clerk’s side. Fat Johnny jumped and shrieked like a goosey girl who spies a mouse. His ass actually
did
lose contact with the wall for a moment, but the gunslinger overlooked it. He had no intention of putting a bullet in this man. He would throw the gun at him and poleaxe him with it before firing a shot. A gun as absurdly big as this would probably bring half the neighborhood.

“Pick it up,” the gunslinger said. “Slowly.”

Fat Johnny reached down, and as he grasped the wallet, he farted loudly and screamed. With faint amusement the gunslinger realized he had mistaken the sound of his own fart for a gunshot and his time of dying had come.

When Fat Johnny stood up, he was blushing furiously. There was a large wet patch on the front of his pants.

“Put the purse on the counter. Wallet, I mean.”

Fat Johnny did it.

“Now the shells. Winchester .45s. And I want to see your hands every second.”

“I have to reach into my pocket. For my keys.”

Roland nodded.

As Fat Johnny first unlocked and then slid open the case with the stacked cartons of bullets inside, Roland cogitated.

“Give me four boxes,” he said at last. He could not imagine
needing so many shells, but the temptation to
have
them was not to be denied.

Fat Johnny put the boxes on the counter. Roland slid one of them open, still hardly able to believe it wasn’t a joke or a sham. But they were bullets, all right, clean, shining, unmarked, never fired, never re-loaded. He held one up to the light for a moment, then put it back in the box.

“Now take out a pair of those wristbands.”

“Wristbands—?”

The gunslinger consulted the Mortcypedia. “Handcuffs.”

“Mister, I dunno what you want. The cash register’s—”

“Do what I say. Now.”

Christ, this ain’t
never
gonna end,
Fat Johnny’s mind moaned. He opened another section of the counter and brought out a pair of cuffs.

“Key?” Roland asked.

Fat Johnny put the key to the cuffs on the counter. It made a small click. One of the unconscious cops made an abrupt snoring sound and Johnny uttered a wee screech.

“Turn around,” the gunslinger said.

“You ain’t gonna shoot me, are you? Say you ain’t!”

“Ain’t,” Roland said tonelessly. “As long as you turn around right now. If you don’t do that, I will.”

Fat Johnny turned around, beginning to blubber. Of course the guy said he wasn’t going to, but the smell of mob hit was getting too strong to ignore. He hadn’t even been skimming that much. His blubbers became choked wails.

“Please, mister, for my mother’s sake don’t shoot me. My mother’s old. She’s blind. She’s—”

“She’s cursed with a yellowgut son,” the gunslinger said dourly. “Wrists together.”

Mewling, wet pants sticking to his crotch, Fat Johnny put them together. In a trice the steel bracelets were locked in place. He had no idea how the spook had gotten over or around the counter so quickly. Nor did he
want
to know.

“Stand there and look at the wall until I tell you it’s all right to turn around. If you turn around before then, I’ll kill you.”

Hope lighted Fat Johnny’s mind. Maybe the guy didn’t mean to hit him after all. Maybe the guy wasn’t crazy, just insane.

“I won’t. Swear to God. Swear before all of His saints. Swear before all His angels. Swear before all His
arch—
”

“
I
swear if you don’t shut up I’ll put a slug through your neck,” the spook said.

Fat Johnny shut up. It seemed to him that he stood facing the wall for an eternity. In truth, it was about twenty seconds.

The gunslinger knelt, put the clerk’s gun on the floor, took a quick look to make sure the maggot was being good, then rolled the other two onto their backs. Both were good and out, but not dangerously hurt, Roland judged. They were both breathing regularly. A little blood trickled from the ear of the one called Delevan, but that was all.

He took another quick glance at the clerk, then unbuckled the gunslingers’ gunbelts and stripped them off. Then he took off Mort’s blue suitcoat and buckled the belts on himself. They were the wrong guns, but it still felt good to be packing iron again.
Damned
good. Better than he would have believed.

Two guns. One for Eddie, and one for Odetta . . . when and if Odetta was ready for a gun. He put on Jack Mort’s coat again, dropped two boxes of shells into the right pocket and two into the left. The coat, formerly impeccable, now bulged out of shape. He picked up the clerk’s .357 Mag and put the shells in his pants pocket. Then he tossed the gun across the room. When it hit the floor Fat Johnny jumped, uttered another wee shriek, and squirted a little more warm water in his pants.

The gunslinger stood up and told Fat Johnny to turn around.

When Fat Johnny got another look at the geek in the blue suit and the gold-rimmed glasses, his mouth fell open. For a moment he felt an
overwhelming certainty that the man who had come in here had become a ghost when Fat Johnny’s back was turned. It seemed to Fat Johnny that through the man he could see a figure much more real, one of those legendary gunfighters they used to make movies and TV shows about when he was a kid: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Butch Cassidy, one of those guys.

Then his vision cleared and he realized what the crazy nut had done: taken the cops’ guns and strapped them around his waist. With the suit and tie the effect should have been ludicrous, but somehow it wasn’t.

“The key to the wristbands is on the counter. When the possemen wake up they’ll free you.”

He took the wallet, opened it, and, incredibly, laid four twenty dollar bills on the glass before stuffing the wallet back into his pocket.

“For the ammunition,” Roland said. “I’ve taken the bullets from your own gun. I intend to throw them away when I leave your store. I think that, with an unloaded gun and no wallet, they may find it difficult to charge you with a crime.”

Fat Johnny gulped. For one of the few times in his life he was speechless.

“Now where is the nearest—” Pause. “—nearest drugstore?”

Fat Johnny suddenly understood—or thought he understood—everything. The guy was a junkball, of course. That was the answer. No wonder he was so weird. Probably hopped up to the eyeballs.

“There’s one around the corner. Half a block down Forty-Ninth.”

“If you’re lying, I’ll come back and put a bullet in your brain.”

“I’m not lying!” Fat Johnny cried. “I swear before God the Father! I swear before all the Saints! I swear on my mother’s—”

But then the door was swinging shut. Fat Johnny stood for a moment in utter silence, unable to believe the nut was gone.

Then he walked as rapidly as he could around the counter and to the door. He turned his back to it and fumbled around until he was able to grasp and turn the lock. He fumbled some more until he had managed to shoot the bolt as well.

Only then did he allow himself to slide slowly into a sitting
position, gasping and moaning and swearing to God and all His saints and angels that he would go to St. Anthony’s this very afternoon, as soon as one of those pigs woke up and let him out of these cuffs, as a matter of fact. He was going to make confession, do an act of contrition, and take communion.

Fat Johnny Holden wanted to get right with God.

This had just been too fucking close.

The setting sun became an arc over the Western Sea. It narrowed to a single bright line which seared Eddie’s eyes. Looking at such a light for long could put a permanent burn on your retinas. This was just one of the many interesting facts you learned in school, facts that helped you get a fulfilling job like part-time bartender and an interesting hobby like the full-time search for street-skag and the bucks with which to buy it. Eddie didn’t stop looking. He didn’t think it was going to matter much longer if he got eye-burned or not.

He didn’t beg the witch-woman behind him. First, it wouldn’t help. Second, begging would degrade him. He had lived a degrading life; he discovered that he had no wish to degrade himself further in the last few minutes of it. Minutes were all he had left now. That’s all there would be before that bright line disappeared and the time of the lobstrosities came.

He had ceased hoping that a miraculous change would bring Odetta back at the last moment, just as he ceased hoping that Detta would recognize that his death would almost certainly strand her in this world forever. He had believed until fifteen minutes ago that she was bluffing; now he knew better.

Well, it’ll be better than strangling an inch at a time,
he thought, but after seeing the loathsome lobster-things night after night, he really didn’t believe that was true. He hoped he would be able to die without screaming. He didn’t think this would be possible, but he intended to try.

“They be comin fo you, honky!” Detta screeched. “Be comin any minute now! Goan be the best dinner those daddies
evah
had!”

It wasn’t just a bluff, Odetta wasn’t coming back . . . and the gunslinger wasn’t either. This last hurt the most, somehow. He had been sure he and the gunslinger had become—well, partners if not brothers—during their trek up the beach, and Roland would at least make an
effort
to stand by him.

But Roland wasn’t coming.

Maybe it isn’t that he doesn’t
want
to come. Maybe he
can’t
come. Maybe he’s dead, killed by a security guard in a drug store—shit, that’d be a laugh, the world’s last gunslinger killed by a Rent-A-Cop—or maybe run over by a taxi. Maybe he’s dead and the door’s gone. Maybe that’s why she’s not running a bluff. Maybe there’s no bluff to run.

“Goan be any minute now!” Detta screamed, and then Eddie didn’t have to worry about his retinas anymore, because that last bright slice of light disappeared, leaving only afterglow.