Eddie, who didn’t know he had any intention of speaking—anything to say—heard himself saying something nevertheless. “Are you a ghost?”
“Not yet,” the man with the guns croaked. “The devil-weed. Cocaine. Whatever you call it. Take off your shirt.”
“Your arms—” Eddie had seen them. The arms of the man who looked like the extravagant sort of gunslinger one would only see in a spaghetti western were glowing with lines of bright, baleful red. Eddie knew well enough what lines like that meant. They meant blood-poisoning. They meant the devil was doing more than breathing up your ass; he was already crawling up the sewers that led to your pump.
“Never mind my fucking arms!” the pallid apparition told him.
“Take off your shirt and get rid of it!”
He heard waves; he heard the lonely hoot of a wind that knew no obstruction; he saw this mad dying man and nothing else but desolation; yet from behind him he heard the murmuring voices of deplaning passengers and a steady muffled pounding.
“Mr. Dean!” That voice, he thought, is in another world. Not really doubting it; just trying to pound it through his head the way you’d pound a nail through a thick piece of mahogany. “You’ll really have to—”
“You can leave it, pick it up later,” the gunslinger croaked. “Gods, don’t you understand I have to talk here? It hurts! And there is no time, you idiot!”
There were men Eddie would have killed for using such a word . . . but he had an idea that he might have a job killing this man, even though the man looked like killing might do him good.
Yet he sensed the truth in those blue eyes; all questions were canceled in their mad glare.
Eddie began to unbutton his shirt. His first impulse was to simply tear it off, like Clark Kent while Lois Lane was tied to a railroad track or something, but that was no good in real life; sooner or later you had to explain those missing buttons. So he slipped them through the loops while the pounding behind him went on.
He yanked the shirt out of his jeans, pulled it off, and dropped it, revealing the strapping tape across his chest. He looked like a man in the last stages of recovery from badly fractured ribs.
He snapped a glance behind him and saw an open door . . . its bottom jamb had dragged a fan shape in the gray grit of the beach when someone—the dying man, presumably—had opened it. Through the doorway he saw the first-class head, the basin, the mirror . . . and in it his own desperate face, black hair spilled across his brow and over his hazel eyes. In the background he saw the gunslinger, the beach, and soaring seabirds that screeched and squabbled over God knew what.
He pawed at the tape, wondering how to start, how to find a loose end, and a dazed sort of hopelessness settled over him. This was the way a deer or a rabbit must feel when it got halfway across a country road and turned its head only to be fixated by the oncoming glare of headlights.
It had taken William Wilson, the man whose name Poe had made famous, twenty minutes to strap him up. They would have the door to the first-class bathroom open in five, seven at most.
“I can’t get this shit off,” he told the swaying man in front of him. “I don’t know who you are or where I am, but I’m telling you there’s too much tape and too little time.”
14
Deere, the co-pilot, suggested Captain McDonald ought to lay off pounding on the door when McDonald, in his frustration at 3A’s lack of response, began to do so.
“Where’s he going to go?” Deere asked. “What’s he going to do? Flush himself down the john? He’s too big.”
“But if he’s carrying—” McDonald began.
Deere, who had himself used cocaine on more than a few occasions, said: “If he’s carrying, he’s carrying heavy. He can’t get rid of it.”