voice. "You know that."
Roland nodded, but without looking at him. He appeared be staring down at his own broken and dusty boots, and the dirty floor of the passenger-side footwell. Those downcast eyes, that gaze which would not turn to him who'd come almost to idolize Roland of Gilead, sort of broke Eddie Dean's heart. Yet he pressed on. If there had ever been room for mistakes, it was gone now. This was the endgame.
"I'd go to her this minute if I thought it was the right thing to do. Roland, this second! But we have to finish our business in this world. Because this world is one-way. Once we leave today,
July 9th, 1977, we can never come here again. We-"
"Eddie, we've been through all of this." Still not looking at him.
"Yes, but do you understand it? Only one bullet to shoot, one
"Riza to throw. That's why we came to Bridgton in the first place! God knows I wanted to go to Turtleback Lane as soon as John Cullum told us about it, but I thought we had to see the writer, and talk to him. And I was right, wasn't I?" Almost pleading now. "Wasn't I?"
Roland looked at him at last, and Eddie was glad. This was hard enough, wretched enough, without having to bear the turned-away, downcast gaze of his dinh.
"And it may not matter if we stay a little longer. If we concentrate on those two women lying together on those two beds,
Roland-if we concentrate on Suze and Mia as we last saw them-then it's possible we can cut into their history at that point. Isn't it?"
After a long, considering moment during which Eddie wasn t conscious of drawing a single breath, the gunslinger nodded. Such could not happen if on Turtleback Lane they ound what the gunslinger had come to think of as an "old-ones or" because such doors were dedicated, and always came out e same place. But were they to find a magic door somewhere aong Turtleback Lane in Lovell, one that had been left behind en the Prim receded, then yes, they might be able to cut in where they wanted. But such doors could be tricky, too; this they had found out for themselves in the Cave of Voices, when the door there had sent Jake and Callahan to New York instead of Roland and Eddie, thereby scattering all their plans into the Land of Nineteen.
"What else must we do?" Roland said. There was no anger in his voice, but to Eddie he sounded both tired and unsure.
"Whatever it is, it's gonna be hard. That much I guarantee you."
Eddie took the bill of sale and gazed at it as grimly as any Hamlet in the history of drama had ever stared upon the skull of poor Yorick. Then he looked back at Roland. "This gives us title to the vacant lot with the rose in it. We need to get it to Moses Carver of Holmes Dental Industries. And where is he? We don't know."
"For that matter, Eddie, we don't even know if he's still alive."
Eddie voiced a wild laugh. "You say true, I say thankya!
Why don't I turn us around, Roland? I'll drive us back to Stephen King's house. We can cadge twenty or thirty bucks off him-because, brother, I don't know if you noticed, but we don't have a crying dime between the two of us-but more important, we can get him to write us a really good hardboiled private eye, someone who looks like Bogart and kicks ass like Clint Eastwood. Let him track down this guy Carver for us!"
He shook his head as if to clear it. The hum of the voices sounded sweetly in his ears, the perfect antidote to the ugly todash chimes.
"I mean, my wife is in bad trouble somewhere up the line, for all I know she's being eaten alive by vampires or vampire bugs, and here I sit beside a country road with a guy whose most basic skill is shooting people, trying to work out how I'm going to start a fucking corporation!"
"Slow down," Roland said. Now that he was resigned to staying in this world a little longer, he seemed calm enough.
"Tell me what it is you feel we need to do before we can shake the dirt of this where and when from our heels for good."
So Eddie did.
THREE
Roland had heard a good deal of it before, but hadn't fully understood what a difficult position they were in. They owned