“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.