shirt later on-one with a collar-and some decent pants, too. Those jeans are so dirty I bet they'd stand up on their own." She engaged in a brief (but furious)
interior debate, then plunged. 'You've got I'm going to say roughly two billion scars. And that's just on the part of you I can see."
Roland did not respond to this. "Do you have money?" he asked.
"I got three hundred dollars when I went back to the house to get my car, and I had thirty or forty with me. Also credit cards, but your late friend said to use cash as long as I could. Until you go on by yourself, if possible. He said there might be folks looking for you. He called them 'low men.'"
Roland nodded. Yes, there would be low men out there, and after all he and his ka-tet had done to thwart the plans of their master, they'd be twice as eager to have his head. Preferably smoking, and on the end of a stick. Also the head of sai Tassenbaum, if they found out about her.
"What else did Jake tell you?" Roland asked.
"That I must take you to New York City, if you wanted to go there. He said there's a door there that will take you to a place called Faydag."
"Was there more?"
"Yes. He said there was another place you might want to go before you used the door." She gave him a timid litde sideways glance. "Is there?"
He considered this, then nodded.
"He also spoke to the dog. It sounded as if he was giving the dog... orders? Instructions?" She looked at him doubtfully.
"Could that be?"
Roland thought it could. The woman Jake could only ask.
As for Oy... well, it might explain why the bumbler hadn't stayed by the grave, much as he might have wanted to.
For awhile they traveled in silence. The road they were on led to a much busier one, filled with cars and trucks running at high speed in many lanes. She had to stop at a tollbooth and give money to get on. The toll-taker was a robot with a basket for an arm. Roland thought he might be able to sleep, but he saw Jake's face when he closed his eyes. Then Eddie's, with the useless bandage covering his forehead. If this is what comes when I dose my eyes, he thought, what will my dreams be like?
He opened his eyes again and watched as she drove down a smooth, paved ramp, slipping into the heavy flow of traffic without a pause. He leaned over and looked up through the window on his side. There were the clouds, los dngeles, traveling above them, in the same direction. They were still on the Path of the Beam.
THIRTEEN
"Mister? Roland?"
She thought he had been dozing with his eyes open. Now he turned to her from where he sat in the passenger bucket seat with his hands in his lap, the good one folded over the mutilated one, hiding it. She thought she had never seen anyone who looked less like he belonged in a Mercedes-Benz. Or any automobile. She also thought she had never seen a man who looked so tired.
But he's not used up. I don't think he's anywhere near used up, although he may think otherwise.
"The animal... Oy?"
"Oy, yes." The bumbler looked up at the sound of his name, but didn't repeat it as he might have done only yesterday.
"Is it a dog? It isn't, exactly, is it?"
"He, not it. And no, he's not a dog."
Irene Tassenbaum opened her mouth, then closed it again.
This was difficult, because silence in company did not come naturally to her. And she was with a man she found attractive, even in his grief and exhaustion (perhaps to some degree because of those things). A dying boy had asked her to take this man to New York City, and get him to the places he needed to go once they were there. He'd said that his friend knew even less about New York than he did about money, and she believed that was true. But she also believed this man was dangerous.
She wanted to ask more questions, but what if he answered them? She understood that the less she knew, the better her chance, once he was gone, of merging into the life she'd been living at quarter to four this afternoon. To merge the way you merged onto the turnpike from a side road. That would be best.