by Stephen King
“Hey, Big Nose!” Eddie cried (as he seemed to each time he saw this particular piece of pond scum). “How you doing, pal?” In truth, George Biondi did not appear to be doing well at all. Not even his mother would have considered him much more than presentable, even on his best day (that humungous beak), and now his features were puffed and dis-colored by bruises that had only just begun to fade. The worst of them was right between the eyes.
I did that,Eddie thought.In the back of Tower’s bookstore. It was true, but it also seemed like something that had happened a thousand years ago.
“You,”said George Biondi. He seemed too stunned to even raise his gun.“You. Here.”
“Me here,” Eddie agreed. “As for you, you should have stayed in New York.” With that said, he blew George Biondi’s face off. His friend’s face, too.
Flannel Shirt squeezed the pump handle’s pistol grip and dark diesel sprayed from the nozzle. It doused Chip, who cawed indignantly and then staggered out onto the loading dock.“Stings!” he shouted.“Gorry, don’t that sting! Quit it, John!”
John did not. Another three men came dashing around Roland’s side of the store, took one look at the gunslinger’s calm and awful face, tried to backtrack. They were dead before they could do more than get the heels of their new country walking shoes planted. Eddie thought of the half-dozen cars and the big Winnebago that had been parked across the street and had time to wonder just how many men Balazar had sent on this little expedition. Certainly not just his own guys. How had he paid for the imports?
He didn’t have to,Eddie thought.Someone loaded him up with dough and told him to go buy the farm. As many out-of-town goons as he could get. And somehow convinced him the guys they were going after deserved that kind of coverage.
From inside the store there came a dull, percussive thud. Soot blew out of the chimney and was lost against the darker, oilier cloud rising from the crashed pulp truck. Eddie thought somebody had tossed a grenade. The door to the storeroom blew off its hinges, walked halfway down the aisle surrounded by a cloud of smoke, and fell flat. Soon the fellow who’d thrown the grenade would throw another, and with the floor of the storeroom now covered in an inch of diesel fuel—
“Slow him down if you can,” Roland said. “It’s not wet enough in there yet.”
“Slow down Andolini?” Eddie asked. “How do I do that?”
“With your everlastingmouth! ” Roland cried, and Eddie saw a wonderful, heartening thing: Roland was grinning. Almost laughing. At the same time he looked at Flannel Shirt—John—and made a spinning gesture with his right hand:keep pumping.
“Jack!” Eddie shouted. He had no idea where Andolini might be at this point, and so simply yelled as loud as he could. Having grown up ramming around Brooklyn’s less savory streets, this was quite loud.
There was a pause. The gunfire slowed, then stopped.
“Hey,” Jack Andolini called back. He sounded surprised, but in a good-humored way. Eddie doubted he was really surprised at all, and he had no doubt whatsoever that what Jack wanted was payback. He’d been hurt in the storage area behind Tower’s bookshop, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He’d also been humiliated. “Hey, Slick! Are you the guy who was gonna send my brains to Hoboken, then stuck a gun under my chin? Man, I got a mark there!”
Eddie could see him making this rueful little speech, all the time gesturing with his hands, moving his remaining men into position. How many was that? Eight? Maybe ten? They’d already taken out a bunch, God knew. And where would the remainder be? A couple on the left of the store. A couple more on the right. The rest with Monsieur Grenades R Us. And when Jack was ready, those guys would charge. Right into the new shallow lake of diesel fuel.
Or so Eddie hoped.
“I’ve got the same gun with me today!” he called to Jack. “This time I’ll jam it up your ass, how’d that be?”
Jack laughed. It was an easy, relaxed sound. An act, but a good one. Inside, Jack would be redlining: heart-rate up over one-thirty, blood-pressure up over one-seventy. This was it, not just payback for some little punk daring to blind-side him but the biggest job of his stinking bad-guy career, the Super Bowl.
Balazar gave the orders, undoubtedly, but Jack Andolini was the one on the spot, the field marshal, and this time the job wasn’t just beating up a dice-dopey bartender who wouldn’t pay the vig on what he owed or convincing some Yid jewelry-store owner on Lenox Avenue that he needed protection; this was an actual war. Jack was smart—at least compared to most of the street-hoods Eddie had met while doped up and running with his brother Henry—but Jack was also stupid in some fundamental way that had nothing to do with IQ scores. The punk who was currently taunting him had already beaten him once, and quite handily, but Jack Andolini had contrived to forget that.
Diesel sloshed quietly over the loading dock and rippled along the old warped boards of the mercantile’s storeroom. John, aka Sai Yankee Flannel Shirt, gave Roland a questioning look. Roland responded by first shaking his head and then twirling his right hand again: more.
“Where’s the bookstore guy, Slick?” Andolini’s voice just as pleasant as before, but closer now. He’d crossed the road, then. Eddie put him just outside the store. Too bad diesel fuel wasn’t more explosive. “Where’s Tower? Give him to us and we’ll leave you and the other guy alone until next time.”
Sure,Eddie thought, and remembered something Susannah sometimes said (in her best growling Detta Walker voice) to indicate utter disbelief:Also I won’t come in yo’ mouth or get any in yo’ hair.
This ambush had been set up especially for visiting gunslingers, Eddie was almost sure of it. The bad boys might or might not know where Tower was (he trusted what came out of Jack Andolini’s mouth not at all), but someone had known to exactly which where and when the Unfound Door was going to deliver Eddie and Roland, and had passed that knowledge on to Balazar.You want the boy who embarrassed yourboy, Mr. Balazar? The kid who peeled Jack Andolini and George Biondi off Tower before Tower had time to give in and give you what you wanted? Fine. Here’s where he’s going to show up. Him and one other. And by the way, here’s enough dough to buy an army of mercenaries in tu-tone shoes. Might not be enough, the kid’s hard and his buddy’s worse, but you might get lucky. Even if you don’t, even if the one named Roland gets away and leaves a bunch of dead guys behind…well, getting the kid’s a start. And there are always more gunnies, aren’t there? Sure. The world’s full of them. The worlds.
And what about Jake and Callahan? Had there been a reception party waiting for them, too, and had it been twenty-two years up the line from this when? The little poem on the fence surrounding the vacant lot suggested that, if they’d followed his wife, it had been— SUSANNAH-MIO, DIVIDED GIRL OF MINE, the poem had said. PARKED HER RIG IN THE DIXIE PIG IN THE YEAR OF ’99. And if therehad been a reception party waiting, could they possibly still be alive?
Eddie clung to one idea: if any member of the ka-tet died—Susannah, Jake, Callahan, even Oy—he and Roland would know. If he was kidding himself about that, succumbing to some romantic fallacy, so be it.
Three
Roland caught the eye of the man in the flannel shirt and drew the side of his hand across his throat. John nodded and let go of the oil-pump’s squeeze-handle at once. Chip, the store owner, was now standing beside the loading dock, and where his face wasn’t lathered with blood, he was looking decidedly gray. Roland thought he would pass out soon. No loss there.
“Jack!” the gunslinger shouted. “Jack Andolini!” His pronunciation of the Italian name was a pretty thing to listen to, both precise and rippling.
“You Slick’s big brother?” Andolini asked. He sounded amused. And he sounded closer. Roland put him in front of the store, perhaps on the very spot where he and Eddie had come through. He wouldn’t wait long to make his next move; this was the countryside, but there were still people about. The rising black plume of smoke from the overturned wood-waggon would already have been noticed. Soon they woul
d hear sirens.
“I suppose you’d call me his foreman,” Roland said. He pointed at the gun in Eddie’s hand, then pointed into the storeroom, then pointed at himself:Wait for my signal. Eddie nodded.
“Why don’t you send him out,mi amigo? This doesn’t have to be your concern. I’ll take him and let you go. Slick’s the one I want to talk to. Getting the answers I need from him will be a pleasure.”
“You could never take us,” Roland said pleasantly. “You’ve forgotten the face of your father. You’re a bag of shit with legs. Your own ka-daddy is a man named Balazar, and you lick his dirty ass. The others know and they laugh at you. ‘Look at Jack,’ they say, ‘all that ass-licking only makes him uglier.’ ”
There was a brief pause. Then: “You got a mean mouth on you, mister.” Andolini’s voice was level, but all the bogus good humor had gone out of it. All the laughter. “But you know what they say about sticks and stones.”
In the distance, at last, a siren rose. Roland nodded first to John (who was watching him alertly) and then at Eddie.Soon, that nod said.
“Balazar will be building his towers of cards long after you’re nothing but bones in an unmarked grave, Jack. Some dreams are destiny, but not yours. Yours are only dreams.”
“Shut up!”
“Hear the sirens? Your time’s almost u—”
“Vai!”Jack Andolini shouted. “Vai!Get em! I want that old fucker’s head, do you hear me? I want his head! ”
A round black object arced lazily through the hole where the EMPLOYEES ONLY door had been. Another grenado. Roland had been expecting it. He fired once, from the hip, and the grenado exploded in midair, turning the flimsy wall between the storeroom and the lunchroom into a storm of destructive, splintery blowback. There were screams of surprise and agony.
“Now, Eddie!”Roland shouted, and began to fire into the diesel. Eddie joined in. At first Roland didn’t think anything was going to happen, but then a sluggish ripple of blue flame appeared in the center aisle and went snaking toward where the rear wall had been. Not enough! Gods, how he wished it had been the kind they called gasoline!
Roland tipped out the cylinder of his gun, dropped the spent casings around his boots, and reloaded.
“On your right, mister,” John said, almost conversationally, and Roland dropped flat. One bullet passed through the place where he’d been. The second flipped at the ends of his long hair. He’d only had time to reload three of his revolver’s six chambers, but that was one more bullet than he needed. The two harriers flew backward with identical holes in the center of their brows, just below the hairline.
Another hoodlum dashed around the corner of the store on Eddie’s side and saw Eddie waiting for him with a grin on his bloody face. The fellow dropped his gun immediately and began to raise his hands. Eddie put a bullet through his chest before they got as high as his shoulders.He’s learning, Roland thought.Gods help him, but he is.
“That fire’s a little slow for my taste, boys,” said John, and leaped up onto the loading dock. The store was barely visible through the rolling smoke of the deflected grenado, but bullets came flying through it. John seemed not to notice them, and Roland thanked ka for putting such a good man in their path. Such a hard man.
John took a square silver object from his pants pocket, flipped up the lid, and produced a good flame with the flick of his thumb on a small wheel. He tossed the little flaming tinderbox underhand into the storeroom. Flames burst up all around it with awhoomp sound.
“What’s the matter with you?”Andolini screamed.“Get them!”
“Come and do it yourself!” Roland called. At the same time he pulled on John’s pants leg. John jumped off the loading dock backward and stumbled. Roland caught him. Chip the storekeeper chose this moment to faint, pitching forward to the trash-littered earth with a groan so soft it was almost a sigh.
“Yeah, come on!” Eddie goaded. “Come onSlick, what-samattaSlick, don’t send a boy to do a man’s work, you ever hear that one? How many guys did you have over there, two dozen? And we’re still standing! So come on! Come on and do it yourself! Or do you want to lick Enrico Balazar’s ass for the rest of your life?”
More bullets came through the smoke and flame, but the harriers in the store showed no interest in trying to charge through the growing fire. No more came around the sides of the store, either.
Roland pointed at Eddie’s lower right leg, where the hole was. Eddie gave him a thumbs-up, but the leg of his jeans now seemed too full below the knee—swollen—and when he moved, his shor’boot squelched. The pain had settled to a steady hard ache that seemed to cycle with the beat of his heart. Yet he was coming to believe it might have missed the bone.Maybe, he admitted to himself,because I want to believe it.
The first siren had been joined by two or three others, and they were closing in.
“Go!”Jack screamed. He now sounded on the verge of hysterics.“Go, you chickenshit motherfuckers, go get them!”
Roland thought that the remaining badmen might have attacked a couple of minutes ago—maybe even thirty seconds ago—if Andolini had led their charge personally. But now the frontal-assault option had been closed off, and Andolini must surely know that if he led men around either side of the store, Roland and Eddie would pick them off like clay birds in a Fair-Day shooting contest. The only workable strategies left to him were siege or a long flanking movement through the woods, and Jack Andolini had no time for either. Standing their ground back here, however, would present its own problems. Dealing with the local constabulary, for instance, or the fire brigade if that showed up first.
Roland pulled John to him so he could speak quietly. “We need to get out of here right now. Can you help us?”
“Oh, ayuh, I think so.” The wind shifted. A draft blew through the mercantile’s broken front windows, through the place where the back wall had been, and out the back door. The diesel smoke was black and oily. John coughed and waved it away. “Follow me. Let’s step lively.”
John hurried across the ugly acre of waste ground behind the store, stepping over a broken crate and weaving his way between a rusty incinerator and a pile of even rustier machine parts. There was a name on the biggest of these that Roland had seen before in his wanderings: JOHN DEERE.
Roland and Eddie walked backward, protecting John’s back, taking little glances over their own shoulders to keep from tripping. Roland hadn’t entirely given up hope that Andolini would make a final charge and he could kill him, as he had done once before. On the beach of the Western Sea, that had been, and here he was again, not only back but ten yearsyounger.
While I,Roland thought,feel at least a thousand years older.
Yet that was not really true. Yes, he was now suffering—finally—the ills an old man could reasonably expect. But he had a ka-tet to protect again, and not just any ka-tet but one ofgunslingers, and they had refreshed his life in a way he never would have expected. It all meant something to him again, not just the Dark Tower butall of it. So he wanted Andolini to come. And if he killed Andolini in this world, he had an idea Andolini would stay dead. Because this world wasdifferent. It had a resonance all the others, even his own, lacked. He felt it in every bone and every nerve. Roland looked up and saw exactly what he expected: clouds in a line. At the rear of the barren acre, a path slipped into the woods, its head marked by a pair of good-sized granite rocks. And here the gunslinger saw herringbone patterns of shadows, overlapping but all pointing the same way. You had to look to see it, but once seen it was unmistakable. As in the version of New York where they had found the empty bag in the vacant lot and Susannah had seen the vagrant dead, this was the true world, the one where time always ran in a single direction. They might be able to hop into the future if they could find a door, as he was sure Jake and Callahan had done (for Roland also remembered the poem on the fence, and now understood at least part of it), but they could never return to the past. This was the true world, the one where no roll of the dice could ever be
taken back, the one closest to the Dark Tower. And they were still on the Path of the Beam.
John led them onto the way into the woods and quickly down it, away from the rising pillars of thick dark smoke and the approaching whine of the sirens.
Four
They hadn’t gone even a quarter of a mile before Eddie began seeing blue glints through the trees. The path was slippery with pine needles, and when they came to the final slope—the one leading down to a long and narrow lake of surpassing loveliness—Eddie saw that someone had built a birch railing. Beyond it was a stub of dock jutting out into the water. Tied to the dock was a motorboat.
“That’s mine,” John said. “I come over for m’groceries and a bite of lunch. Didn’t expect no excitement.”
“Well, you got it,” Eddie said.
“Ayuh, that’s a true thing. Mind this last bit, if you don’t want to go on your keister.” John went nimbly down the final slope, holding the rail for balance and sliding rather than walking. On his feet was a pair of old scuffed workboots that would have looked perfectly at home in Mid-World, Eddie thought.
He went next himself, favoring his bad leg. Roland brought up the rear. From behind them came a sudden explosion, as sharp and limber as that first high-powered rifleshot but far louder.
“That’d be Chip’s propane,” John said.
“Cry pardon?” Roland asked.
“Gas,” Eddie said quietly. “He means gas.”
“Ayuh, stove-gas,” John agreed. He stepped into his boat, grabbed the Evinrude’s starter-cord, gave it a yank. The engine, a sturdy little twenty-horse sewing machine of a thing, started on the first pull. “Get in here, boys, and let’s us vacate t’ area,” he grunted.