“But—”
“Even if they had managed to set us up somehow, we have so many people in their organization we could drill fifteen holes in their case in three days. We’d know who, when, and how.”
Balazar looked back at Eddie.
“Eddie,” he said, “you have fifteen seconds to stop bullshitting. Then I’m going to have ’Cimi Dretto step in here and hurt you. Then, after he hurts you for awhile, he will leave, and from a room close by you will hear him hurting your brother.”
Eddie stiffened.
Easy, the gunslinger murmured, and thought, All you have to do to hurt him is to say his brother’s name. It’s like poking an open sore with a stick.
“I’m going to walk into your bathroom,” Eddie said. He pointed at a door in the far left corner of the room, a door so unobtrusive it could almost have been one of the wall panels. “I’m going in by myself. Then I’m going to walk back out with a pound of your cocaine. Half the shipment. You test it. Then you bring Henry in here where I can look at him. When I see him, see he’s okay, you are going to give him our goods and he’s going to ride home with one of your gentlemen. While he does, me and . . .” Roland, he almost said, “。 . . me and the rest of the guys we both know you got here can watch you build that thing. When Henry’s home and safe—which means no one standing there with a gun in his ear—he’s going to call and say a certain word. This is something we worked out before I left. Just in case.”
The gunslinger checked Eddie’s mind to see if this was true or bluff. It was true, or at least Eddie thought it was. Roland saw Eddie really believed his brother Henry would die before saying that word in falsity. The gunslinger was not so sure.
“You must think I still believe in Santa Claus,” Balazar said.
“I know you don’t.”
“Claudio. Search him. Jack, you go in my bathroom and search it. Everything.”
“Is there any place in there I wouldn’t know about?” Andolini asked.
Balazar paused for a long moment, considering Andolini carefully with his dark brown eyes. “There is a small panel on the back wall of the medicine cabinet,” he said. “I keep a few personal things in there. It is not big enough to hide a pound of dope in, but maybe you better check it.”
Jack left, and as he entered the little privy, the gunslinger saw a flash of the same frozen white light that had illuminated the privy of the air-carriage. Then the door shut.
Balazar’s eyes flicked back to Eddie.
“Why do you want to tell such crazy lies?” he asked, almost sorrowfully. “I thought you were smart.”
“Look in my face,” Eddie said quietly, “and tell me that I am lying.”
Balazar did as Eddie asked. He looked for a long time. Then he turned away, hands stuffed in his pockets so deeply that the crack of his peasant’s ass showed a little. His posture was one of sorrow—sorrow over an erring son—but before he turned Roland had seen an expression on Balazar’s face that had not been sorrow. What Balazar had seen in Eddie’s face had left him not sorrowful but profoundly disturbed.
“Strip,” Claudio said, and now he was holding his gun on Eddie.
Eddie started to take his clothes off.
5
I don’t like this, Balazar thought as he waited for Jack Andolini to come back out of the bathroom. He was scared, suddenly sweating not just under his arms or in his crotch, places where he sweated even when it was the dead of winter and colder than a well-digger’s belt-buckle, but all over. Eddie had gone off looking like a junkie—a smart junkie but still a junkie, someone who could be led anywhere by the skag fishhook in his balls—and had come back looking like . . . like what? Like he’d grown in some way, changed.