back in a hurricane of shot. A glass case containing time-pieces disintegrated. Most of the watches inside also disintegrated. The pieces flew backwards in a sparkling cloud.
They can’t know if there are still innocent people in here or not, he thought. They can’t know and yet they used a scatter-rifle just the same!
It was unforgivable. He felt anger and suppressed it. They were gunslingers. Better to believe their brains had been addled by the head-knocking they’d taken than to believe they’d done such a thing knowingly, without a care for whom they might hurt or kill.
They would expect him to either run or shoot.
Instead, he crept forward, keeping low. He lacerated both hands and knees on shards of broken glass. The pain brought Jack Mort back to consciousness. He was glad Mort was back. He would need him. As for Mort’s hands and knees, he didn’t care. He could stand the pain easily, and the wounds were being inflicted on the body of a monster who deserved no better.
He reached the area just under what remained of the plate-glass window. He was to the right of the door. He crouched there, body coiled. He holstered the gun which had been in his right hand.
He would not need it.
6
“What are you doing, Carl?” O’Mearah screamed. In his head he suddenly saw a Daily News headline: COP KILLS 4 IN WEST SIDE DRUG STORE SNAFU.
Delevan ignored him and pumped a fresh shell into the shotgun. “Let’s go get this shit.”
7
It happened exactly as the gunslinger had hoped it would.
Furious at being effortlessly fooled and disarmed by a man who probably looked to them no more dangerous than any of the other lambs on the streets of this seemingly endless city, still groggy from the head-knocking, they rushed in with the idiot who had fired the scatter-rifle in the lead. They ran slightly bent-over, like soldiers charging an enemy position, but that was the only concession they made to the idea that their adversary might still be inside. In their minds, he was already out the back and fleeing down an alley.
So they came crunching over the sidewalk glass, and when the gunslinger with the scatter-rifle pulled open the glassless door and charged in, the gunslinger rose, his hands laced together in a single fist, and brought it down on the nape of Officer Carl Delevan’s neck.
While testifying before the investigating committee, Delevan would claim he remembered nothing at all after kneeling down in Clements’ and seeing the perp’s wallet under the counter. The committee members thought such amnesia was, under the circumstances, pretty damned convenient, and Delevan was lucky to get off with a sixty-day suspension without pay. Roland, however, would have believed, and, under different circumstances (if the fool hadn’t discharged a scatter-rifle into a store which might have been full of innocent people, for instance), even sympathized. When you got your skull busted twice in half an hour, a few scrambled brains were to be expected.
As Delevan went down, suddenly as boneless as a sack of oats, Roland took the scatter-rifle from his relaxing hands.
“Hold it!” O’Mearah screamed, his voice a mixture of anger and dismay. He was starting to raise Fat Johnny’s Magnum, but it was as Roland had suspected: the gunslingers of this world were pitifully slow. He could have shot O’Mearah three times, but there was no need. He simply swung the scatter-gun in a strong, climbing arc. There was a flat smack as the stock connected with O’Mearah’s left cheek, the sound of a baseball bat connecting with a real steamer of a pitch. All at once O’Mearah’s entire face from the cheek on down moved two inches to the right. It would take three operations and four steel pegs to put him together again. He stood there for a moment, unbelieving, and then his eyes rolled up the whites. His knees unhinged and he collapsed.
Roland stood in the doorway, oblivious to the approaching sirens. He broke the scatter-rifle, then worked the pump action, ejecting all the fat red cartridges onto Delevan’s body. That done, he dropped the gun itself onto Delevan.
“You’re a dangerous fool who should be sent west,” he told the unconscious man. “You have forgotten the face of your father.”
He stepped over the body and walked to the gunslingers’ carriage, which was still idling. He climbed in the door on the far side and slid behind the driving wheel.
8
Can you drive this carriage? he asked the screaming, gibbering thing that was Jack Mort.
He