Gestured, but did not point. Couldn’t point. Eddie realized why the man had a swatch of dirty shirting wrapped around his right hand: some of his fingers were gone.
“Get it,” he said. “Cut through the tape. Try not to cut yourself. It’s easy to do. You’ll have to be careful, but you’ll have to move fast just the same. There isn’t much time.”
“I know that,” Eddie said, and knelt on the sand. None of this was real. That was it, that was the answer. As Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie would have put it, Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life’s a fiction and the world’s a lie, so put on some Creedence and let’s get high.
None of it was real, it was all just an extraordinarily vivid nodder, so the best thing was just to ride low and go with the flow.
It sure was a vivid nodder. He was reaching for the zipper—or maybe it would be a Velcro strip—on the man’s “purse” when he saw it was held together by a crisscross pattern of rawhide thongs, some of which had broken and been carefully reknotted—reknotted small enough so they would still slide through the grommetted eyelets.
Eddie pulled the drag-knot at the top, spread the bag’s opening, and found the knife beneath a slightly damp package that was the piece of shirting tied around the bullets. Just the handle was enough to take his breath away . . . it was the true mellow gray-white of pure silver, engraved with a complex series of patterns that caught the eye, drew it—
Pain exploded in his ear, roared across his head, and momentarily puffed a red cloud across his vision. He fell clumsily over the open purse, struck the sand, and looked up at the pale man in the cut-down boots. This was no nodder. The blue eyes blazing from that dying face were the eyes of all truth.
“Admire it later, prisoner,” the gunslinger said. “For now just use it.”
He could feel his ear throbbing, swelling.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“Cut the tape,” the gunslinger said grimly. “If they break into yon privy while you’re still over here, I’ve got a feeling you’re going to be here for a very long time. And with a corpse for company before long.”
Eddie pulled the knife out of the scabbard. Not old; more than old, more than ancient. The blade, honed almost to the point of invisibility, seemed to be all age caught in metal.
“Yeah, it looks sharp,” he said, and his voice wasn’t steady.
16
The last passengers were filing out into the jetway. One of them, a lady of some seventy summers with that exquisite look of confusion which only first-time fliers with too many years or too little English seem capable of wearing, stopped to show Jane Dorning her tickets. “How will I ever find my plane to Montreal?” she asked. “And what about my bags? Do they do my Customs here or there?”
“There will be a gate agent at the top of the jetway who can give you all the information you need, ma’am,” Jane said.
“Well, I don’t see why you can’t give me the information I need,” the old woman said. “That jetway thing is still full of people.”
“Move on, please, madam,” Captain McDonald said. “We have a problem.”
“Well, pardon me for living,” the old woman said huffily, “I guess I just fell off the hearse!”
And strode past them, nose tilted like the nose of a dog scenting a fire still some distance away, tote-bag clutched in one hand, ticket-folder （with so many boarding-pass stubs sticking out of it that one might have been tempted to believe the lady had come most of the way around the globe, changing planes at every stop along the way） in the other.
“There’s a lady who may never fly Delta’s big jets again,” Susy murmured.