The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower #2)(62)

"Before your when?" the gunslinger asked.

Eddie looked at him and laughed shortly. "Yeah. If you want to put it that way, yeah."

"Hello, Miss Walker ," a tentative voice said. The view in the doorway rose so suddenly that even Eddie was a bit dizzied and he saw a saleswoman who obviously knew the owner of the black hands―knew her and either didn't like her or feared her. Or both. "Help you today?"

"This one." The owner of the black hands held up a white scarf with a bright blue edge. "Don't bother to wrap it up, babe, just stick it in a bag."

"Cash or ch―"

"Cash, it's always cash, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's fine, Miss Walker."

"I'm so glad you approve, dear."

There was a little grimace on the salesgirl's face―Eddie just caught it as she turned away. Maybe it was something as simple as being talked to that way by a woman the salesgirl considered an "uppity nigger" (again it was more his experience in movie theaters than any knowledge of history or even life on the streets as he had lived it that caused this thought, because this was like watching a movie either set or made in the '60s, something like that one with Sidney Steiger and Rod Poitier, In the Heat of the Night ), but it could also be something even simpler: Roland's Lady of the Shadows was, black or white, one rude bitch.

And it didn't really matter, did it? None of it made a damned bit of difference. He cared about one thing and one thing only and that was getting the f**k out.

That was New York , he could almost smell New York .

And New York meant smack.

He could almost smell that, too.

Except there was a hitch, wasn't there?

One big motherf*cker of a hitch.

8

Roland watched Eddie carefully, and although he could have killed him six times over at almost any time he wanted, he had elected to remain still and silent and let Eddie work the situation out for himself. Eddie was a lot of things, and a lot of them were not nice (as a fellow who had consciously let a child drop to his death, the gunslinger knew the difference between nice and not quite well), but one thing Eddie wasn't was stupid.

He was a smart kid.

He would figure it out.

So he did.

He looked back at Roland, smiled without showing his teeth, twirled the gunslinger's revolver once on his finger, clumsily, burlesquing a show-shooter's fancy coda, and then he held it out to Roland, butt first.

"This thing might as well be a piece of shit for all the good it can do me, isn't that right?"

You can talk bright when you want to, Roland thought. Why do you so often choose to talk stupid, Eddie? Is it because you think that's the way they talked in the place where your brother went with his guns?

"Isn't that right?" Eddie repeated.

Roland nodded.

"If I had plugged you, what would have happened to that door?"

"I don't know. I suppose the only way to find out would be to try it and see."

"Well, what do you think would happen?"

"I think it would disappear."

Eddie nodded. That was what he thought, too. Poof! Gone like magic! Now ya see it, my friends, now ya don't. It was really no different than what would happen if the projectionist in a movie-theater were to draw a six-shooter and plug the projector, was it?

If you shot the projector, the movie stopped.

Eddie didn't want the picture to stop.

Eddie wanted his money's worth.

"You can go through by yourself," Eddie said slowly.

"Yes."

"Sort of."

"Yes."

"You wind up in her head. Like you wound up in mine.''

"Yes."

"So you can hitchhike into my world, but that's all."

Roland said nothing. Hitchhike was one of the words Eddie sometimes used that he didn't exactly understand ... but he caught the drift.

"But you could go through in your body. Like at Balazar's." He was talking out loud but really talking to himself. "Except you'd need me for that, wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

"Then take me with you."

The gunslinger opened his mouth, but Eddie was already rushing on.

"Not now, I don't mean now," he said. "I know it would cause a riot or some goddam thing if we just ... popped out over there." He laughed rather wildly. "Like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, except without any hat, sure I did. We'll wait until she's alone, and―"

"No."

"I'll come back with you," Eddie said. "I swear it, Roland. I mean, I know you got a job to do, and I know I'm a part of it. I know you saved my ass at Customs, but I think I saved yours at Balazar's―now what do you think?"

"I think you did," Roland said. He remembered the way Eddie had risen up from behind the desk, regardless of the risk, and felt an instant of doubt.

But only an instant.

"So? Peter pays Paul. One hand washes the other. All I want to do is go back for a few hours. Grab some take-out chicken, maybe a box of Dunkin Donuts." Eddie nodded toward the doorway, where things had begun to move again. "So what do you say?"

"No," the gunslinger said, but for a moment he was hardly thinking about Eddie. That movement up the aisle―the Lady, whoever she was, wasn't moving the way an ordinary person moved―wasn't moving, for instance, the way Eddie had moved when Roland looked through his eyes, or (now that he stopped to think of it, which he never had before, any more than he had ever stopped and really noticed the constant presence of his own nose in the lower range of his peripheral vision) the way he moved himself. When one walked, vision became a mild pendulum: left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, the world rocking back and forth so mildly and gently that after awhile―shortly after you began to walk, he supposed―you simply ignored it. There was none of that pendulum movement in the Lady's walk―she simply moved smoothly up the aisle, as if riding along tracks. Ironically, Eddie had had this same perception ... only to Eddie it had looked like a SteadiCam shot. He had found this perception comforting because it was familiar.