He beat the floorwalker to the dressing room, slammed the door open with his left shoulder, and it was empty.
No black woman.
No wheelchair.
No nothing.
He looked at the floorwalker, starey-eyed.
“Other one!” the floorwalker yelled. “Other one!”
Before Jimmy could move, the floorwalker had busted open the door of the other dressing room. A woman in a linen skirt and a Playtex Living Bra screamed piercingly and crossed her arms over her chest. She was very white and very definitely not crippled.
“Pardon me,” the floorwalker said, feeling hot crimson flood his face.
“Get out of here, you pervert!” the woman in the linen skirt and the bra cried.
“Yes, ma’am,” the floorwalker said, and closed the door.
At Macy’s, the customer was always right.
He looked at Halvorsen.
Halvorsen looked back.
“What is this shit?” Halvorsen asked. “Did she go in there or not?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“So where is she?”
The floorwalker could only shake his head. “Let’s go back and pick up the mess.”
“You pick up the mess,” Jimmy Halvorsen said. “I feel like I just broke my ass in nine pieces.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, me fine bucko, I also feel extremely confused.”
8
The moment the gunslinger heard the dressing room door bang shut behind him, he rammed the wheelchair around in a half turn, looking for the doorway. If Eddie had done what he had promised, it would be gone.
But the door was open. Roland wheeled the Lady of Shadows through it.
CHAPTER 3
Odetta on the Other Side
1
Not long after, Roland would think: Any other woman, crippled or otherwise, suddenly shoved all the way down the aisle of the mart in which she was doing business—monkeybusiness, you may call it if you like—by a stranger inside her head, shoved into a little room while some man behind her yelled for her to stop, then suddenly turned, shoved again where there was by rights no room in which to shove, then finding herself suddenly in an entirely different world . . . I think any other woman, under those circumstances, would have most certainly have asked, “Where am I?” before all else.
Instead, Odetta Holmes asked almost pleasantly, “What exactly are you planning to do with that knife, young man?”
2
Roland looked up at Eddie, who was crouched with his knife held less than a quarter of an inch over the skin. Even with his uncanny speed, there was no way the gunslinger could move fast enough to evade the blade if Eddie decided to use it.
“Yes,” Roland said. “What are you planning to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie said, sounding completely disgusted with himself. “Cut bait, I guess. Sure doesn’t look like I came here to fish, does it?”
He threw the knife toward the Lady’s chair, but well to the right. It stuck, quivering, in the sand to its hilt.
Then the Lady turned her head and began, “I wonder if you could please explain where you’ve taken m—”
She stopped. She had said I wonder if you before her head had gotten around far enough to see there was no one behind her, but the gunslinger observed with some real interest that she went on speaking for a moment anyway, because the fact of her condition made certain things elementary truths of her life—if she had moved, for instance, someone must have moved her. But there was no one behind her.