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"I think if you go and this is bad shit, I&039;ll be gone tomorrow Then you&039;ll be in deep shit"

The sallow thing turned sulky It sat in the roole easy chair while Eddie opened the envelope and spilled out a small quantity of brown stuff It looked evil He looked at the sallow thing

"I kno it looks, it looks like shit, but that&039;s just the cut," the sallow thing said "It&039;s fine"

Eddie tore a sheet of paper from the notepad on the desk and separated a sered it and then rubbed it on the roof of his mouth A second later he spat into the wastebasket

"You want to die? Is that it? You got a death-wish?"

"That&039;s all there is" The sallow thing looked more sulky than ever

"I have a reservation out tomorrow," Eddie said This was a lie, but he didn&039;t believe the sallow thing had the resources to check it "TWA I did it on my own, just in case the contact happened to be a fuck-up like you I don&039;t mind It&039;ll be a relief, actually I wasn&039;t cut out for this sort of work"

The sallow thing sat and cogitated Eddie sat and concentrated on not , hipping and bopping, shucking and jiving, scratching his scratches and cracking his crackers He even felt his eyes wanting to slide back to the pile of broder, although he kneas poison He had fixed at ten that one by since then But if he did any of those things, the situation would change The sallow thing was doingto calculate the depth of hi," it said at last

"Why don&039;t you try?" Eddie said "But con on the door, and anybody that knocks after I do that, I call the desk and say souy"

"You are a fuck," the sallow thing said in its impeccable British accent

"No," Eddie said, "a fuck is what you expected I cas crossed You want to be here before eleven with soreat, just so I can use�Dor you will be one dead scuzz"

7

The sallow thing was back long before eleven; he was back by nine-thirty Eddie guessed the other stuff had been in his car all along

A little more powder this time Not white, but at least a dull ivory color, which was ht Actually better than all right Pretty good He rolled a bill and snorted

"Well, then, until Sunday," the sallow thing said briskly, getting to its feet

"Wait," Eddie said, as if he were the one with the gun In a way he was The gun was Balazar E shot in New York &039;s wonderful world of drugs

"Wait?" the sallow thing turned and looked at Eddie as if he believed Eddie must be insane "For what?"

"Well, I was actually thinking of you," Eddie said "If I get really sick from what I just put into my body, it&039;s off If I die, of course it&039;s off I was just thinking that, if I only get a little sick, I ive you another chance You know, like that story about how soets three wishes"

"It will not make you sick That&039;s China White"

"If that&039;s China White," Eddie said, "I&039;ht Gooden"

"Who?"

"Neversat down Eddie sat by the motel room desk with the little pile of white powder nearby (the D-Con or whatever it had been had long since gone down the John) On TV the Braves were getting shellacked by the Mets, courtesy of WTBS and the big satellite dish on the Aquinas Hotel&039;s roof Eddie felt a faint sensation of calm which seemed to come fro from, he knew from what he had read in thewires at the base of his spine, that place where heroin addiction takes place by causing an unnatural thickening of the nerve stern

Want to take a quick cure? he had asked Henry once Break your spine, Henry Your legs stop working, and so does your cock, but you stop needing the needle right away

Henry hadn&039;t thought it was funny

In truth, Eddie hadn&039;t thought it was that funny either When the only fast way you could get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves, you were dealing with one heavy rinder&039;s an to sniffle

"Okay," he said at last "It&039;ll do You can vacate the preot up "I have friends,&039;&039; he said "They could co to tell me where that key is"

"Not me, champ," Eddie said "Not this kid" And smiled He didn&039;t kno the smile looked, but itvacated the pre back

When Eddie Dean was sure he was gone, he cooked

Fixed

Slept

8

As he was sleeping now

The gunslinger, somehow inside this man&039;sthe prisoner thought of as "the sallow thing&039;&039; had not known it, and so had never spoken it), watched this as he had once watched plays as a child, before the world had ht he watched, because plays were all he had ever seen If he had ever seen a s he did not actually see he had been able to pluck from the prisoner&039;s mind because the associations were close It was odd about the nah He knew the name of the prisoner&039;s brother, but not the nas, full of power

And neither of the things that mattered was the man&039;s name One was the weakness of the addiction The other was the steel buried inside that weakness, like a good gun sinking in quicksand

This ly of Cuthbert

Sounslinger, not sleeping, did, and caain

9

Great, Jane thought He tellsup for him because he&039;s a little bit cute, and then he falls asleep on uy of about twenty, tall, wearing clean, slightly faded bluejeans and a paisley shirt�Dopened his eyes a little and smiled at her

"Thankee sai," he said�Dor so it sounded Aln Sleep-talk, that&039;s all, Jane thought

"You&039;re welcome" She sain and the sandould still be there, uneaten, when it was time for the actual ht you to expect, wasn&039;t it?

She went back to the galley to catch a smoke

She struck the arette, and there it stopped, unnoticed, because that wasn&039;t all they taught you to expect

I thought he was a little bit cute Mostly because of his eyes His hazel eyes

But when the o, they hadn&039;t been hazel; they had been blue Not sweet-sexy blue like Paul News They�D

"Ow!"

The ers She shook it out

"Jane?" Paula asked "You all right?"

"Fine Daydrea"

She lit another ht She had only taken a single drag when the perfectly reasonable explanation occurred to her He wore contacts Of course The kind that changed the color of your eyes He had gone into the bathrooh for her to worry about hi airsick�Dhe had that pallid complexion, the look of aout his contact lenses so he could nap more comfortably Perfectly reasonable

You , a voice from her own not-so-distant past spoke suddenly So just a little bit wrong

Colored contact lenses

Jane Dorning personally knew over two dozen people ore contacts Most of the about it, but she thought ers didn&039;t like to see flight personnel wearing glasses�Dit made them nervous

Of all those people, she knew maybe four who had color-contacts Ordinary contact lenses were expensive; colored ones cost the earth All of the people of Jane&039;s acquaintance who cared to lay out that sort of money omen, all of them extremely vain

So what? Guys can be vain, too Why not? He&039;s good-looking

No He wasn&039;t Cute, maybe, but that was as far as it went, and with the pallid complexion he only made it to cute by the skin of his teeth So why the color-contacts?

Airline passengers are often afraid of flying

In a world where hijacking and drug-s had become facts of life, airline personnel are often afraid of passengers

The voice that had initiated these thoughts had been that of an instructor at flight school, a tough old battle-axe who looked as if she could have flown the nore your suspicions If you forget every thing else you&039;ve learned about coping with potential or actual terrorists, renore your suspicions In so the debriefing that they didn&039;t have any idea until the guy pulled out a grenade and said hang a left forCubaor everyone on the aircraft is going to join the jet-streaet two or three different people�Dht attendants, which you wo So wo, but they did nothing Did they get fired for that? Christ, no! You can&039;t put a guy in restraints because you don&039;t like the way he scratches his pi and then forgot

The old battle-axe had raised one blunt finger Jane Dorning, along with her fellow classmates, had listened raptly as she said, If you feel that little tickle, don&039;t do anything but that includes not forgetting Because there&039;s always that one little chance that you just ets started so like an unscheduled twelve-day layover on the tarmac of some shitpot Arab country

Just colored contacts, but

Thankee, sai

Sleep-talk? Or a e?

She would watch, Jane decided

And she would not forget

10

Now, the gunslinger thought Noe&039;ll see, won&039;t we?

He had been able to coh the door on the beach What he needed to find out hether or not he could carry things back Oh, not hih the door and reenter his own poisoned, sickening body at any tis? Here, for instance, in front of hi the wounslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was, but he knew a popkin when he saw it, although this one looked curiously uncooked

His body needed to eat, and his body would need to drink, but more than either, his body needed some sort of medicine It would die froht be such h the air far above where even the strongest eagle could fly, anything seemed possible But it would not matter how much powerfulphysical through the door

You could live in this body, gunslinger, the voice of the man in black whispered deep inside his head Leave that piece of breathing s It&039;s only a husk, anyway

He would not do that For one thing it would be the most murderous sort of thievery, because he would not be content to be just a passenger for long, looking out of thisout of a coachat the passing scenery

For another, he was Roland If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland He would die crawling toward the Tower, if that as required

Then the odd harsh practicality that lived beside the roer with a roe reasserted itself There was no need to think of dying with the experiment not yet made

He picked up the popkin It had been cut in two halves He held one in each hand He opened the prisoner&039;s eyes and looked out of thealley, Jane Dorning was thinking about him, and very hard)

Roland turned toward the door and went through, holding the popkin-halves in his hands

11

First he heard the grinding roar of an incou fro position (cowardly buggers were creeping up, he thought, and they would have been taking pecks out ofbut vultures with a coat of paint); then he becaht hand�Dhad tu it with a whole hand when he ca it in a hand which had suffered a forty per cent reduction

He picked it up cluer, brushed as much of the sand from it as he could, and took a tentative bite Athe few bits of sand which ground between his teeth Seconds later he turned his attention to the other half It was gone in three bites

The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was�Donly that it was delicious That seeh

12

In the plane, no one saw the tuna sandwich disappear No one saw Eddie Dean&039;s hands grasp the two halves of it tightly enough to make deep thumb-indentations in the white bread

No one saw the sandwich fade to transparency, then disappear, leaving only a few crumbs

About twenty seconds after this had happened, Jane Dorning snuffed her cigarette and crossed the head of the cabin She got her book fro, but what she really wanted was another look at 3A

He appeared to be deeply asleepbut the sandas gone

Jesus, Jane thought He didn&039;t eat it; he sed it whole And now he&039;s asleep again? Are you kidding?

Whatever was tickling at her about 3A, Mr Now-They&039;re-Hazel-Now-They&039;re-Blue, kept right on tickling So