you close enough to grab you, and time’s grown too short to argue. All I can do is go and hope for the best. I’m going to tell you one last time before I do go, and hear me, Eddie: Be on your guard.”
Then Roland did something that made Eddie ashamed of all his doubts (although no less solidly set in his own decision): he flicked open the cylinder of the revolver with a practiced flick of his wrist, dumped all the loads, and replaced them with fresh loads from the loops closest to the buckles. He snapped the cylinder back into place with another flick of his wrist.
“No time to clean the machine now,” he said, “But ’twont matter, I reckon. Now catch, and catch clean—don’t dirty the machine any more than it is already. There aren’t many machines left in my world that work anymore.”
He threw the gun across the space between them. In his anxiety, Eddie almost did drop it. Then he had it safely tucked into his waistband.
The gunslinger got out of the wheelchair, almost fell when it slid backward under his pushing hands, then tottered to the door. He grasped its knob; in his hand it turned easily. Eddie could not see the scene the door opened upon, but he heard the muffled sound of traffic.
Roland looked back at Eddie, his blue bullshooter’s eyes gleaming out of a face which was ghastly pale.
16
Detta watched all of this from her hiding place with hungrily gleaming eyes.
17
“Remember, Eddie,” he said in a hoarse voice, and then stepped forward. His body collapsed at the edge of the doorway, as if it had struck a stone wall instead of empty space.
Eddie felt an almost insatiable urge to go to the doorway, to look through and see where—and to what when—it led. Instead he turned and scanned the hills again, his hand on the gun-butt.
I’m going to tell you one last time.
Suddenly, scanning the empty brown hills, Eddie was scared.
Be on your guard.
Nothing up there was moving.
Nothing he could see, at least.
He sensed her all the same.
Not Odetta; the gunslinger was right about that.
It was Detta he sensed.
He swallowed and heard a click in his throat.
On your guard.
Yes. But never in his life had he felt such a deadly need for sleep. It would take him soon enough; if he didn’t give in willingly, sleep would rape him.
And while he slept, Detta would come.
Detta.
Eddie fought the weariness, looked at the unmoving hills with eyes which felt swollen and heavy, and wondered how long it might be before Roland came back with the third—The Pusher, whoever he or she was.
“Odetta?” he called without much hope.
Only silence answered, and for Eddie the time of waiting began.
THE
PUSHER
CHAPTER 1
Bitter Medicine
1
When the gunslinger entered Eddie, Eddie had experienced a moment of nausea and he had had a sense of being watched (this Roland hadn’t felt; Eddie had told him later). He’d had, in other words, some vague sense of the gunslinger’s presence. With Detta, Roland had been forced to come forward immediately, like it or not. She hadn’t just sensed him; in a queer way it seemed that she had been waiting for him—him or another, more frequent, visitor. Either way, she had been totally aware of his presence from the first moment he had been in her.
Jack Mort didn’t feel a thing.
He was too intent on the boy.
He had been watching the boy for the last two weeks.
Today he was going to push him.
2
Even with the back to the eyes from which the gunslinger now looked, Roland recognized the boy. It was the boy he had met at the way station in the desert, the boy he had rescued from the Oracle in the Mountains, the boy whose life he had sacrificed when the choice between saving him or finally catching up with the man in black finally came; the boy who had said Go then—there are other worlds than these before plunging into the abyss. And sure enough, the boy had been right.
The boy was Jake.
He was holding a plain brown paper bag in one hand and a blue canvas bag by its drawstring top in the other. From the angles poking against the sides of the canvas, the gunslinger thought it must contain books.
Traffic flooded the street the boy was waiting to cross—a street in the same city from which he had taken the Prisoner and the Lady, he realized, but for the moment none of that mattered. Nothing mattered but what