So they came crunching over the sidewalk glass, and when the gunslinger with the scatter-rifle pulled open the glassless door and charged in, the gunslinger rose, his hands laced together in a single fist, and brought it down on the nape of Officer Carl Delevan’s neck.
While testifying before the investigating committee, Delevan would claim he remembered nothing at all after kneeling down in Clements’ and seeing the perp’s wallet under the counter. The committee members thought such amnesia was, under the circumstances, pretty damned convenient, and Delevan was lucky to get off with a sixty-day suspension without pay. Roland, however, would have believed, and, under different circumstances （if the fool hadn’t discharged a scatter-rifle into a store which might have been full of innocent people, for instance）， even sympathized. When you got your skull busted twice in half an hour, a few scrambled brains were to be expected.
As Delevan went down, suddenly as boneless as a sack of oats, Roland took the scatter-rifle from his relaxing hands.
“Hold it!” O’Mearah screamed, his voice a mixture of anger and dismay. He was starting to raise Fat Johnny’s Magnum, but it was as Roland had suspected: the gunslingers of this world were pitifully slow. He could have shot O’Mearah three times, but there was no need. He simply swung the scatter-gun in a strong, climbing arc. There was a flat smack as the stock connected with O’Mearah’s left cheek, the sound of a baseball bat connecting with a real steamer of a pitch. All at once O’Mearah’s entire face from the cheek on down moved two inches to the right. It would take three operations and four steel pegs to put him together again. He stood there for a moment, unbelieving, and then his eyes rolled up the whites. His knees unhinged and he collapsed.
Roland stood in the doorway, oblivious to the approaching sirens. He broke the scatter-rifle, then worked the pump action, ejecting all the fat red cartridges onto Delevan’s body. That done, he dropped the gun itself onto Delevan.
“You’re a dangerous fool who should be sent west,” he told the unconscious man. “You have forgotten the face of your father.”
He stepped over the body and walked to the gunslingers’ carriage, which was still idling. He climbed in the door on the far side and slid behind the driving wheel.
8
Can you drive this carriage? he asked the screaming, gibbering thing that was Jack Mort.
He got no coherent answer; Mort just went on screaming. The gunslinger recognized this as hysteria, but one which was not entirely genuine. Jack Mort was having hysterics on purpose, as a way of avoiding any conversation with this weird kidnapper.
Listen, the gunslinger told him. I only have time to say this—and everything else—once. My time has grown very short. If you don’t answer my question, I am going to put your right thumb into your right eye. I’ll jam it in as far as it will go, and then I’ll pull your eyeball right out of your head and wipe it on the seat of this carriage like a booger. I can get along with one eye just fine. And, after all, it isn’t as if it were mine.
He could no more have lied to Mort than Mort could have lied to him; the nature of their relationship was cold and reluctant on both their parts, yet it was much more intimate than the most passionate act of sexual intercourse would have been. This was, after all, not a joining of bodies but the ultimate meeting of minds.
He meant exactly what he said.
And Mort knew it.
The hysterics stopped abruptly. I can drive it, Mort said. It was the first sensible communication Roland had gotten from Mort since he had arrived inside the man’s head.
Then do it.
Where do you want me to go?
Do you know a place called “The Village”？
Yes.
Go there.
Where in the Village?
For now, just drive.