We’ll be able to go faster if I use the siren.
Fine. Turn it on. Those flashing lights, too.
For the first time since he had seized control of him, Roland pulled back a little and allowed Mort to take over. When Mort’s head turned to inspect the dashboard of Delevan’s and O’Mearah’s blue-and-white, Roland watched it turn but did not initiate the action. But if he had been a physical being instead of only his own disembodied ka, he would have been standing on the balls of his feet, ready to leap forward and take control again at the slightest sign of mutiny.
There was none, though. This man had killed and maimed God knew how many innocent people, but he had no intention of losing one of his own precious eyes. He flicked switches, pulled a lever, and suddenly they were in motion. The siren whined and the gunslinger saw red pulses of light kicking off the front of the carriage.
Drive fast, the gunslinger commanded grimly.
9
In spite of lights and siren and Jack Mort beating steadily on the horn, it took them twenty minutes to reach Greenwich Village in rush-hour traffic. In the gunslinger’s world Eddie Dean’s hopes were crumbling like dykes in a downpour. Soon they would collapse altogether.
The sea had eaten half the sun.
Well, Jack Mort said, we’re here. He was telling the truth （there was no way he could lie） although to Roland everything here looked just as it had everywhere else: a choke of buildings, people, and carriages. The carriages choked not only the streets but the air itself—with their endless clamor and their noxious fumes. It came, he supposed, from whatever fuel it was they burned. It was a wonder these people could live at all, or the women give birth to children that were not monsters, like the Slow Mutants under the mountains.
Now where do we go? Mort was asking.
This would be the hard part. The gunslinger got ready—as ready as he could, at any rate.
Turn off the siren and the lights. Stop by the sidewalk.
Mort pulled the cruiser up beside a fire hydrant.
There are underground railways in this city, the gunslinger said. I want you to take me to a station where these trains stop to let passengers on and off.
Which one? Mort asked. The thought was tinged with the mental color of panic. Mort could hide nothing from Roland, and Roland nothing from Mort—not, at least, for very long.
Some years ago—I don’t know how many—you pushed a young woman in front of a train in one of those underground stations. That’s the one I want you to take me to.
There ensued a short, violent struggle. The gunslinger won, but it was a surprisingly hard go. In his way, Jack Mort was as divided as Odetta. He was not a schizophrenic as she was; he knew well enough what he did from time to time. But he kept his secret self—the part of him that was The Pusher—as carefully locked away as an embezzler might lock away his secret skim.
Take me there, you bastard, the gunslinger repeated. He slowly raised the thumb toward Mort’s right eye again. It was less than half an inch away and still moving when he gave in.
Mort’s right hand moved the lever by the wheel again and they rolled toward the Christopher Street station where that fabled A-train had cut off the legs of a woman named Odetta Holmes some three years before.
10
“Well looky there,” foot patrolman Andrew Staunton said to his partner, Norris Weaver, as Delevan’s and O’Mearah’s blue-and-white came to a stop halfway down the block. There were no parking spaces, and the driver made no effort to find one. He simply double-parked and let the clog of traffic behind him inch its laborious way through the loophole remaining, like a trickle of blood trying to serve a heart hopelessly clogged with cholesterol.
Weaver checked the numbers on the side by the right front headlight. 744. Yes, that was the number they’d gotten from dispatch, all right.