For a moment Katz could only look at him, his mouth open, his heart struggling in his chest, his stomach a sickly boiling pot of acid.
Had he thought he had hit rock bottom?
Had he really?
15
“You don’t understand,” Katz managed at last. His voice sounded strange to himself, and there was really nothing very odd about that, since his mouth felt like a flannel shirt and his tongue like a strip of cotton batting. “There is no cocaine here. It is not a drug which is dispensed under any cir—”
“I did not say cocaine,” the man in the blue suit and the gold-rimmed glasses said. “I said Keflex.”
That’s what I thought you said, Katz almost told this crazy momser, and then decided that might provoke him. He had heard of drug stores getting held up for speed, for Bennies, for half a dozen other things （including Mrs. Rathbun’s precious Valium）， but he thought this might be the first penicillin robbery in history.
The voice of his father （God rot the old bastard） told him to stop dithering and gawping and do something.
But he could think of nothing to do.
The man with the gun supplied him with something.
“Move,” the man with the gun said. “I’m in a hurry.”
“H-How much do you want?” Katz asked. His eyes flicked momentarily over the robber’s shoulder, and he saw something he could hardly believe. Not in this city. But it looked like it was happening, anyway. Good luck? Katz actually has some good luck? That you could put in The Guinness Book of World Records!
“I don’t know,” the man with the gun said. “As much as you can put in a bag. A big bag.” And with no warning at all, he whirled and the gun in his fist crashed again. A man bellowed. Plate glass blew onto the sidewalk and the street in a sparkle of shards and splinters. Several passing pedestrians were cut, but none seriously. Inside Katz’s drugstore, women （and not a few men） screamed. The burglar alarm began its own hoarse bellow. The customers panicked and stampeded toward and out the door. The man with the gun turned back to Katz and his expression had not changed at all: his face wore the same look of frightening （but not inexhaustible） patience that it had worn from the first. “Do as I say rapidly. I’m in a hurry.”
Katz gulped.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
16
The gunslinger had seen and admired the curved mirror in the upper left corner of the shop while he was still halfway to the counter behind which they kept the powerful potions. The creation of such a curved mirror was beyond the ability of any craftsman in his own world as things were now, although there had been a time when such things—and many of the others he saw in Eddie and Odetta’s world—might have been made. He had seen the remains of some in the tunnel under the mountains, and he had seen them in other places as well . . . relics as ancient and mysterious as the Druit stones that sometimes stood in the places where demons came.
He also understood the mirror’s purpose.
He had been a bit late seeing the guard’s move—he was still discovering how disastrously the lenses Mort wore over his eyes restricted his peripheral vision—but he’d still time to turn and shoot the gun out of the guard’s hand. It was a shot Roland thought as nothing more than routine, although he’d needed to hurry a little. The guard, however, had a different opinion. Ralph Lennox would swear to the end of his days that the guy had made an impossible shot . . . except, maybe, on those old kiddie Western shows like Annie Oakley.
Thanks to the mirror, which had obviously been placed where it was to detect thieves, Roland was quicker dealing with the other one.
He had seen the alchemist’s eyes flick up and over his shoulder for a moment, and the gunslinger’s own eyes had immediately gone to the mirror. In it he saw a man in a leather jacket moving up the center aisle behind him. There was a long knife in his hand and, no doubt, visions of glory in his head.