Gold. Solid gold.
He couldn’t believe it.
He had to believe it.
Some madman walked in off the street, shot a gun out of his guard’s hand and a knife out of another’s, all in order to obtain the most unlikely drug he could think of.
Keflex.
Maybe sixty dollars’ worth of Keflex.
For which he had paid with a $6500 Rolex watch.
“Do?” Katz asked. “Do? The first thing you do is put that wristwatch under the counter. You never saw it.” He looked at Ralph. “Neither did you.”
“No sir,” Ralph agreed immediately. “As long as I get my share when you sell it, I never saw that watch at all.”
“They’ll shoot him like a dog in the street,” Katz said with unmistakable satisfaction.
“Keflex! And the guy didn’t even seem to have the sniffles,” the aide said wonderingly.
CHAPTER 4
The Drawing
1
As the sun’s bottom arc first touched the Western Sea in Roland’s world, striking bright golden fire across the water to where Eddie lay trussed like a turkey, Officers O’Mearah and Delevan were coming groggily back to consciousness in the world from which Eddie had been taken.
“Let me out of these cuffs, would ya?” Fat Johnny asked in a humble voice.
“Where is he?” O’Mearah asked thickly, and groped for his holster. Gone. Holster, belt, bullets, gun. Gun.
Oh, shit.
He began thinking of the questions that might be asked by the shits in the Department of Internal Affairs, guys who had learned all they knew about the streets from Jack Webb on Dragnet, and the monetary value of his lost gun suddenly became about as important to him as the population of Ireland or the principal mineral deposits of Peru. He looked at Carl and saw Carl had also been stripped of his weapon.
Oh dear Jesus, bring on the clowns, O’Mearah thought miserably, and when Fat Johnny asked again if O’Mearah would use the key on the counter to unlock the handcuffs, O’Mearah said, “I ought to . . .” He paused, because he’d been about to say I ought to shoot you in the guts instead, but he couldn’t very well shoot Fat Johnny, could he? The guns here were chained down, and the geek in the gold-rimmed glasses, the geek who had seemed so much like a solid citizen, had taken his and Carl’s as easily as O’Mearah himself might take a popgun from a kid.
Instead of finishing, he got the key and unlocked the cuffs. He spotted the .357 Magnum which Roland had kicked into the corner and picked it up. It wouldn’t fit in his holster, so he stuffed it in his belt.
“Hey, that’s mine!” Fat Johnny bleated.
“Yeah? You want it back?” O’Mearah had to speak slowly. His head really ached. At that moment all he wanted to do was find Mr. Gold-Rimmed Specs and nail him to a handy wall. With dull nails. “I hear they like fat guys like you up in Attica, Johnny. They got a saying: ‘The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin.’ You sure you want it back?”
Fat Johnny turned away without a word, but not before O’Mearah had seen the tears welling in his eyes and the wet patch on his pants. He felt no pity.
“Where is he?” Carl Delevan asked in a furry, buzzing voice.
“He left,” Fat Johnny said dully. “That’s all I know. He left. I thought he was gonna kill me.”
Delevan was getting slowly to his feet. He felt tacky wetness on the side of his face and looked at his fingers. Blood. Fuck. He groped for his gun and kept groping, groping and hoping, long after his fingers had assured him his gun and holster were gone. O’Mearah merely had a headache; Delevan felt as if someone had used the inside of his head as a nuclear weapons testing site.