Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6) - Page 7

One

Roland Deschain was the last of Gilead's last great band of warriors, for good reason; with his queerly romantic nature, his lack of imagination, and his deadly hands, he had ever been the best of them. Now he had been invaded by arthritis, but there was no dry twist in his ears or eyes. He heard the thud of Eddie's head against the side of the Unfound Door as they were sucked through (and, ducking down at the last split second, only just avoided having his own skull broken in by the Door's top jamb). He heard the sound of birds, at first strange and distant, like birds singing in a dream, then immediate and prosaic and completely there. Sunlight struck his face and should have dazzled him blind, coming as he was from the dimness of the cave. But Roland had turned his eyes into slits the moment he'd seen that bright light, had done it without thinking. Had he not, he surely would have missed the circular flash from two o'clock as they landed on hard-packed, oil-darkened earth. Eddie would have died for sure. Maybe both of them would have died. In Roland's experience, only two things glared with that perfect brilliant circularity: eyeglasses and the long sight of a weapon.

The gunslinger grabbed Eddie beneath the arm as unthinkingly as he'd slitted his eyes against the glare of onrushing sunlight. He'd felt the tension in the younger man's muscles as their feet left the rock-and bone-littered floor of the Doorway Cave, and he felt them go slack when Eddie's head connected with the side of the Unfound Door. But Eddie was groaning, still trying to talk, so he was at least partly aware.

"Eddie, to me!"Roland bellowed, scrambling to his feet. Bitter agony exploded in his right hip and raced almost all the way down to his knee, but he gave no sign. Barely registered it, in fact. He hauled Eddie with him toward a building, some building, and past what even Roland recognized as oil or gasoline pumps. These were marked MOBIL instead of CITGO or SUNOCO, two other names with which the gunslinger was familiar.

Eddie was semiconscious at best. His left cheek was drenched with blood from a laceration in his scalp. Nevertheless, he put his legs to work as best he could and stumbled up three wooden steps to what Roland now recognized as a general store. It was quite a bit smaller than Took's, but otherwise not much d –

A limber whipcrack of sound came from behind and slightly to the right. The shooter was close enough for Roland to feel confident that if he had heard the sound of the shot, the man with the rifle had already missed.

Something passed within an inch of his ear, making its own perfectly clear sound:Mizzzzzz! The glass in the little mercantile's front door shattered inward. The sign which had been hanging there ( WE'RE OPEN, SO COME IN 'N VISIT ) jumped and twisted.

"Rolan…" Eddie's voice, weak and distant, sounded as if it were coming through a mouthful of mush. "Rolan wha…who…OWF!" This last a grunt of surprise as Roland threw him flat inside the door and landed on top of him.

Now came another of those limber whipcracks; there was a gunner with an extremely high-powered rifle out there. Roland heard someone shout "Aw, fuck 'at, Jack!" and a moment later a speed-shooter – what Eddie and Jake called a machine-gun – opened up. The dirty display windows on both sides of the door came crashing down in bright shards. The paperwork which had been posted inside the glass – town notices, Roland had no doubt – went flying.

Two women and a gent of going-on-elderly years were the only customers in the store's aisles. All three were turned toward the front – toward Roland and Eddie – and on their faces was the eternal uncomprehending look of the gunless civilian. Roland sometimes thought it a grass-eating look, as though such folk – those in Calla Bryn Sturgis mostly no different – were sheep instead of people.

"Down!"Roland bellowed from where he lay on his semiconscious (and now breathless) companion. "For the love of your godsget DOWN! "

The going-on-elderly gent, who was wearing a checked flannel shirt in spite of the store's warmth, let go of the can he'd been holding (there was a picture of a tomato on it) and dropped. The two women did not, and the speed-shooter's second burst killed them both, caving in the chest of one and blowing off the top of the other's head. The chest-shot woman went down like a sack of grain. The one who'd been head-shot took two blind, blundering steps toward Roland, blood spewing from where her hair had been like lava from an erupting volcano. Outside the store a second and third speed-shooter began, filling the day with noise, filling the air above them with a deadly crisscross of slugs. The woman who'd lost the top of her head spun around twice in a final dance-step, arms flailing, and then collapsed. Roland went for his gun and was relieved to find it still in its holster: the reassuring sandalwood grip. So that much was well. The gamble had paid off. And he and Eddie certainly weren't todash. The gunners had seen them, seen them very well.

More. Had beenwaiting for them.

"Move in!" someone was screaming. "Move in, move in, don't give em a chance to find their peckers, move in, youcatzarros !"

"Eddie!" Roland roared. "Eddie, you have to help me now!"

"Hizz…?" Faint. Bemused. Eddie looking at him with only one eye, the right. The left was temporarily drowned in blood from his scalp-wound.

Roland reached out and slapped him hard enough to make blood fly from his hair. "Harriers!Coming to kill us! Kill all here!"

Eddie's visible eye cleared. It happened fast. Roland saw the effort that took – not to regain his wits but to regain them at such speed, and despite a head that must be pounding monstrously – and took a moment to be proud of Eddie. He was Cuthbert Allgood all over again, Cuthbert to the life.

"What the hell's this?" someone called in a cracked, excited voice. "Justwhat in the bluehell isthis? "

"Down," Roland said, without looking around. "If you want to live, get on the floor."

"Do what he says, Chip," someone else replied – probably, Roland thought, the man who'd been holding the can with the tomato on it.

Roland crawled through litters of broken glass from the door, feeling pricks and prinks of pain as some cut his knees and knuckles, not caring. A bullet buzzed past his temple. Roland ignored that, too. Outside was a brilliant summer day. In the foreground were the two oil-pumps with MOBIL printed on them. To one side was an old car, probably belonging to either the women shoppers (who'd never need it again) or to Mr. Flannel Shirt. Beyond the pumps and the oiled dirt of the parking area was a paved country road, and on the other side of that a little cluster of buildings painted a uniform gray. One was marked TOWN OFFICE, one STONEHAM FIRE AND RESCUE. The third and largest was the TOWN GARAGE. The parking area in front of these buildings was also paved (metaledwas Roland's word for it), and a number of vehicles had been parked there, one the size of a large bucka-waggon. From behind them came more than half a dozen men at full charge. One hung back and Roland recognized him: Enrico Balazar's ugly lieutenant, Jack Andolini. The gunslinger had seen this man die, gunshot and then eaten alive by the carnivorous lobstrosities which lived in the shallow waters of the Western Sea, but here he was again. Because infinite worlds spun on the axle which was the Dark Tower, and here was another of them. Yet only one world was true; only one where, when things were finished, theystayed finished. It might be this one; it might not be. In either case, this was no time to worry about it.

Up on his knees, Roland opened fire, fanning the trigger of his revolver with the hard ridge of his right hand, aiming first at the boys with the speed-shooters. One of them dropped dead on the country road's white centerline with blood boiling out of his throat. The second was flung backward all the way to the road's dirt shoulder with a hole between his eyes.

Then Eddie was beside him, also on his knees, fanning the trigger of Roland's other gun. He missed at least two of his targets, which wasn't surprising, given his condition. Three others dropped to the road, two dead and one screaming"I'm hit! Ah, Jack, help me, I'm hit in the guts!"

Someone grabbed Roland's shoulder, unaware of what a dangerous thing that was to do to a gunslinger, especially one in a fire-fight. "Mister, what in the hell – "

Roland took a quick look, saw a fortyish man wearing both a tie and a butcher's apron, had time to think,Shopkeeper, probably the one who gave Pere directions to the post office, and then shoved the man violently backward. A split second later, blood dashed backward from the left side of the man's head. Grooved, the gunslinger judged, but not seriously hurt, at least not yet. If Roland hadn't pushed him, however –

Eddie was reloading. Roland did the same, taking a bit longer thanks to the missing fingers on his right hand. Meanwhile, two of the surviving harriers had taken cover behind one of the old cars on this side of the road. Too close. Not good. Roland could hear the rumble of an approaching motor. He looked back at the fellow who'd been quick-witted enough to drop when Roland told him to, thus avoiding the fate of the ladies.

"You!" Roland said. "Do you have a gun?"

The man in the flannel shirt shook his head. His eyes were a brilliant blue. Frightened, but not, Roland judged, panicky. In front of this customer, the shopkeeper was sitting up, spread-legged, looking with sickened amazement at the red droplets pattering down and spreading on his white apron.

"Shopkeeper, do you keep a gun?" Roland asked.

Before the shopkeeper could answer – if he was capable of answering – Eddie grabbed Roland's shoulder. "Charge of the Light Brigade," he said. The words came out mushy – sharr uvva lie briggay – but Roland wouldn't have understood the reference in any case. The important thing was that Eddie had seen another six men dashing across the road. This time they were spread out and zig-zagging from side to side.

"Vai, vai, vai!"Andolini bawled from behind them, sweeping both hands in the air.

"Christ, Roland, that's Tricks Postino," Eddie said. Tricks was once more toting an extremely large weapon, although Eddie couldn't be sure it was the oversized M-16 he'd called The Wonderful Rambo Machine. In any case, he was no luckier here than he'd been in the shootout at the Leaning Tower: Eddie fired and Tricks went down on top of one of the guys already lying in the road, still firing his assault weapon at them as he did so. This was probably nothing more heroic than a finger-spasm, final signals sent from a dying brain, but Roland and Eddie had to throw themselves flat again, and the other five outlaws reached cover behind the old cars on this side of the road. Worse still. Backed by covering fire from the vehicles across the street – the vehicles these boys had come in, Roland was quite sure – they would soon be able to turn this little store into a shooting gallery without too much danger to themselves.

All of this was too close to what had happened at Jericho Hill.

It was time to beat a retreat.

The sound of the approaching vehicle continued to swell – a big engine, laboring under a heavy load, from the sound. What topped the rise to the left of the store was a gigantic truck filled with enormous cut trees. Roland saw the driver's eyes widen and his mouth drop open, and why not? Here in front of this small-town mercantile where he had doubtless stopped many times for a bottle of beer or ale at the end of a long, hot day in the woods, lay half a dozen bleeding bodies scattered in the road like soldiers killed in a battle. Which was, Roland knew, exactly what they were.

The big truck's front brakes shrieked. From the rear came the angry-dragon chuff of the airbrakes. There was an accompanying scream of huge rubber tires first locking and then smoking black tracks on the metaled surface of the road. The truck's multi-ton load began to slew sideways. Roland saw splinters flying from the trees and into the blue sky as the outlaws on the far side of the road continued to fire heedlessly. There was something almost hypnotic about all this, like watching one of the Lost Beasts of Eld come tumbling out of the sky with its wings on fire.

The truck's horseless front end ran over the first of the bodies. Guts flew in red ropes and splashed the dirt of the shoulder. Legs and arms were torn off. A wheel squashed Tricks Postino's head, the sound of his imploding skull like a chestnut bursting in a hot fire. The truck's load broached sideways and began to totter. Wheels fully as high as Roland's shoulders dug in and tossed up clouds of bloody dirt. The truck slid by the store with a majestic lack of speed. The driver was no longer visible in the cab. For a moment the store and the people inside it were blocked from the superior firepower on the other side of the road. The shopkeeper – Chip – and the surviving customer – Mr. Flannel Shirt – were staring at the broaching truck with identical expressions of helpless amazement. The shopkeeper absently wiped blood from the side of his head and flicked it onto the floor like water. His wound was worse than Eddie's, Roland judged, yet he seemed unaware of it. Maybe that was good.

"Out back," the gunslinger said to Eddie. "Now."

"Good call."

Roland grabbed the man in the flannel shirt by the arm. The man's eyes immediately left the truck and went to the gunslinger. Roland nodded toward the back, and the elderly gent nodded back. His unquestioning quickness was an unexpected gift.

Outside, the truck's load finally overturned, mashing one of the parked cars (and the harriers hiding behind it, Roland dearly hoped), spilling logs first off the top and then simply spilling them all. There was a gruesome, endless sound of scraping metal that made the gunfire seem puny by comparison.

Two

Eddie grabbed the storekeeper just as Roland had grabbed the other man, but Chip showed none of his customer's awareness or instinct for survival. He merely went on staring through the jagged hole where his windows had been, eyes wide with shock and awe as the pulp-truck out there entered the final phase of its self-destructive ballet, the cab twisting free of the overloaded carrier and bouncing down the hill beyond the store and into the woods. The load itself went sliding up the right side of the road, creating a huge bow-wave of dirt and leaving behind a deep groove, a flattened Chevrolet, and two more flattened harriers.

There were plenty more where those came from, though. Or so it seemed. The gunfire continued.

"Come on, Chip, time to split," Eddie said, and this time when he tugged the shopkeeper toward the back of the store Chip came, still looking back over his shoulder and wiping blood from the side of his face.

At the rear of the market, on the left, was an added-on lunchroom with a counter, a few patched stools, three or four tables, and an old lobster-pot over a newsstand which seemed to contain mostly out-of-date girlie magazines. As they reached this part of the building, the gunfire from outside intensified. Then it was dwarfed again, this time by an explosion. The pulper's fuel-tank, Eddie assumed. He felt the droning passage of a bullet and saw a round black hole appear in the picture of a lighthouse mounted on the wall.

"Whoare those guys?" Chip asked in a perfectly conversational voice. "Who are you? Am I hit? My son was in Viet Nam, you know. Did you see that truck?"

Eddie answered none of his questions, just smiled and nodded and hustled Chip along in Roland's wake. He had absolutely no idea where they were going or how they were going to get out of this fuckaree. The only thing he was completely sure of was that Calvin Tower wasn't here. Which was probably good. Tower might or might not have brought down this particular batch of hellfire and brimstone, but the hellfire and brimstone wasabout old Cal, of that Eddie had no doubt. If old Cal had only –

A darning-needle of heat suddenly tore through his arm and Eddie shouted in surprise and pain. A moment later another punched him in the calf. His lower right leg exploded intoserious pain, and he cried out again.

"Eddie!" Roland chanced a look back. "Are you – "

"Yeah, fine, go, go!"

Ahead of them now was a cheap fiberboard back wall with three doors in it. One was marked BUOYS, one GULLS, one EMPLOYEES ONLY.

"E MPLOYEES ONLY! " Eddie shouted. He looked down and saw a blood-ringed hole in his bluejeans about three inches below his right knee. The bullet hadn't exploded the knee itself, which was to the good, but oh Mama, it hurt like the veriest motherfucker of creation.

Over his head, a light-globe exploded. Glass showered down on Eddie's head and shoulders.

"I'm insured, but God knows if it covers somethin likethis, " Chip said in his perfectly conversational voice. He wiped more blood from his face, then slatted it off his fingertips and onto the floor, where it made a Rorschach inkblot. Bullets buzzed around them. Eddie saw one flip up Chip's collar. Somewhere behind them, Jack Andolini – old Double-Ugly – was hollering in Italian. Eddie somehow didn't think he was calling retreat.

Roland and the customer in the flannel shirt went through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. Eddie followed, pumped up on the wine of adrenaline and still dragging Chip. This was a storeroom, and of quite a good size. Eddie could smell different kinds of grain, some sort of minty tang, and, most of all, coffee.

Now Mr. Flannel Shirt had taken the lead. Roland followed him quickly down the storeroom's center aisle and between pallets stacked high with canned goods. Eddie limped gamely along after, still hauling the shopkeeper. Old Chip had lost a lot of blood from the wound on the side of his head and Eddie kept expecting him to pass out, but Chip actually seemed…well, chipper. He was currently asking Eddie what had happened to Ruth Beemer and her sister. If he meant the two women who'd been in the store (Eddie was pretty sure he did), Eddie hoped that Chip wouldn't suddenly regain his memory.

There was another door at the back. Mr. Flannel Shirt opened it and started out. Roland hauled him back by the shirt, then went out himself, low. Eddie stood Chip beside Mr. Flannel Shirt and himself just in front of them. Behind them, bullets smacked through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door, creating startled white eyes of daylight.

"Eddie!" Roland grunted. "To me!"

Eddie limped out. There was a loading dock here, and beyond it about an acre of unlovely, churned-up ground. Trash barrels had been stacked haphazardly to the right of the dock and there were two Dumpsters to the left, but it didn't look to Eddie Dean as if anyone had worried too much about putting litter in its place. There were also several piles of beercans almost big enough to qualify as archaeological middens.Nothing like relaxing on the back porch after a hard day at the store, Eddie thought.

Roland was pointing his gun at another oil-pump, this one rustier and older than the ones out front. On it was a single word. "Diesel," Roland said. "Does that mean fuel? It does, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," Eddie said. "Chip, does the diesel pump work?"

"Sure, sure," Chip said in a disinterested tone of voice. "Lotsa guys fill up back here."

"I can run it, mister," said Flannel Shirt. "You better let me, too – it's tetchy. Can you and your buddy cover me?"

"Yes," Roland said. "Pour it in there." And jerked a thumb at the storeroom.

"Hey, no!" Chip said, startled.

How long did all these things take? Eddie could not have said, not for sure. All he was aware of was a clarity he had known only once before: while riddling Blaine the Mono. It overwhelmed everything with its brilliance, even the pain in his lower leg, where the tibia might or might not have been chipped by a bullet. He was aware of how funky it smelled back here – rotted meat and moldy produce, the yeasty scent of a thousand departed brewskis, the odors of don't-care laziness – and the divinely sweet fir-perfume of the woods just beyond the perimeter of this dirty little roadside store. He could hear the drone of a plane in some distant quadrant of the sky. He knew he loved Mr. Flannel Shirt because Mr. Flannel Shirt washere, waswith them, linked to Roland and Eddie by the strongest of bonds for these few minutes. But time? No, he had no true sense of that. But it couldn't have been much more than ninety seconds since Roland had begun their retreat, or surely they would have been overwhelmed, crashed truck or no crashed truck.

Roland pointed left, then turned right himself. He and Eddie stood back to back on the loading dock with about six feet between them, guns raised to their cheeks like men about to commence a duel. Mr. Flannel Shirt hopped off the end of the dock, spry as a cricket, and seized the chrome crank on the side of the old diesel pump. He began to spin it rapidly. The numbers in their little windows spun backward, but instead of returning to all zeros, they froze at0019. Mr. Flannel Shirt tried the crank again. When it refused to turn, he shrugged and yanked the nozzle out of its rusty cradle.

"John, no!" Chip cried. He was still standing in the doorway of his storeroom and holding up his hands, one clean and the other bloody all the way up the forearm.

"Get out of the way, Chip, or you're gonna – "

Two men dashed around Eddie's side of the East Stoneham General Store. Both were dressed in jeans and flannel shirts, but unlike Chip's shirt, these looked brand-new, with the creases still in the sleeves. Purchased especially for the occasion, Eddie had no doubt. And one of the goons Eddie recognized quite well; had last seen him in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Calvin Tower's bookshop. Eddie had also killed this fellow once before. Ten years in the future, if you could believe it. In The Leaning Tower, Balazar's joint, and with the same gun he now held in his hand. A snatch of old Bob Dylan lyric occurred to him, something about the price you had to pay to keep from going through everything twice.

"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 would he