Then his vision cleared and he realized what the crazy nut had done: taken the cops’ guns and strapped them around his waist. With the suit and tie the effect should have been ludicrous, but somehow it wasn’t.
“The key to the wristbands is on the counter. When the possemen wake up they’ll free you.”
He took the wallet, opened it, and, incredibly, laid four twenty dollar bills on the glass before stuffing the wallet back into his pocket.
“For the ammunition,” Roland said. “I’ve taken the bullets from your own gun. I intend to throw them away when I leave your store. I think that, with an unloaded gun and no wallet, they may find it difficult to charge you with a crime.”
Fat Johnny gulped. For one of the few times in his life he was speechless.
“Now where is the nearest—” Pause. “—nearest drugstore?”
Fat Johnny suddenly understood—or thought he understood—everything. The guy was a junkball, of course. That was the answer. No wonder he was so weird. Probably hopped up to the eyeballs.
“There’s one around the corner. Half a block down Forty-Ninth.”
“If you’re lying, I’ll come back and put a bullet in your brain.”
“I’m not lying!” Fat Johnny cried. “I swear before God the Father! I swear before all the Saints! I swear on my mother’s—”
But then the door was swinging shut. Fat Johnny stood for a moment in utter silence, unable to believe the nut was gone.
Then he walked as rapidly as he could around the counter and to the door. He turned his back to it and fumbled around until he was able to grasp and turn the lock. He fumbled some more until he had managed to shoot the bolt as well.
Only then did he allow himself to slide slowly into a sitting position, gasping and moaning and swearing to God and all His saints and angels that he would go to St. Anthony’s this very afternoon, as soon as one of those pigs woke up and let him out of these cuffs, as a matter of fact. He was going to make confession, do an act of contrition, and take communion.
Fat Johnny Holden wanted to get right with God.
This had just been too fucking close.
11
The setting sun became an arc over the Western Sea. It narrowed to a single bright line which seared Eddie’s eyes. Looking at such a light for long could put a permanent burn on your retinas. This was just one of the many interesting facts you learned in school, facts that helped you get a fulfilling job like part-time bartender and an interesting hobby like the full-time search for street-skag and the bucks with which to buy it. Eddie didn’t stop looking. He didn’t think it was going to matter much longer if he got eye-burned or not.
He didn’t beg the witch-woman behind him. First, it wouldn’t help. Second, begging would degrade him. He had lived a degrading life; he discovered that he had no wish to degrade himself further in the last few minutes of it. Minutes were all he had left now. That’s all there would be before that bright line disappeared and the time of the lobstrosities came.
He had ceased hoping that a miraculous change would bring Odetta back at the last moment, just as he ceased hoping that Detta would recognize that his death would almost certainly strand her in this world forever. He had believed until fifteen minutes ago that she was bluffing; now he knew better.
Well, it’ll be better than strangling an inch at a time, he thought, but after seeing the loathsome lobster-things night after night, he really didn’t believe that was true. He hoped he would be able to die without screaming. He didn’t think this would be possible, but he intended to try.
“They be comin fo you, honky!” Detta screeched. “Be comin any minute now! Goan be the best dinner those daddies evah had!”
It wasn’t just a bluff, Odetta wasn’t coming back . . . and the gunslinger wasn’t either. This last hurt the most, somehow. He had been sure he and the gunslinger had become—well, partners if not brothers—during their trek up the beach, and Roland would at least make an effort to stand by him.