Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,116

it away from him across the sawdust (no one would claim that foot while the Big Coffin Hunters were still in Hambry; hundreds claimed it after they were gone). Still screaming—he could not bear pain—Depape raised his bleeding hand and looked at it with agonized, unbelieving eyes. Actually, he had been lucky. Cuthbert’s ball had smashed the tip of the second finger and torn off the nail. Lower, and Depape would have been able to blow smoke-rings through his own palm.

Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded the cup of his slingshot and drawn the elastic back again. “Now,” he said, “if I have your attention, good sir—”

“I can’t speak for his,” Reynolds said from behind him, “but you got mine, partner. I don’t know if you’re good with that thing or just shitass lucky, but either way, you’re done with it now. Relax the draw on it and put it down. That table in front of you’s the place I want to see it.”

“I’ve been blindsided,” Cuthbert said sadly. “Betrayed once more by my own callow youth.”

“I don’t know nothing about your callow youth, brother, but you’ve been blindsided, all right,” Reynolds agreed. He stood behind and slightly to the left of Cuthbert, and now he moved his gun forward until the boy could feel the muzzle against the back of his head. Reynolds thumbed the hammer. In the pool of silence which the Travellers’ Rest had become, the sound was very loud. “Now put that twanger down.”

“I think, good sir, that I must offer my regrets and decline.”

“What?”

“You see, I’ve got my trusty sling aimed at your pleasant friend’s head—” Cuthbert began, and when Depape shifted uneasily against the bar, Cuthbert’s voice rose in a whipcrack that did not sound callow in the least. “Stand still! Move again and you’re a dead man!”

Depape subsided, holding his bloody hand against his pine-tacky shirt. For the first time he looked frightened, and for the first time that night—for the first time since hooking up with Jonas, in fact—Reynolds felt mastery of a situation on the verge of slipping away . . . except how could it be? How could it be when he’d been able to circle around this smart-talking squint and get the drop on him? This should be over.

Lowering his voice to its former conversational—not to say playful—pitch, Cuthbert said: “If you shoot me, the ball flies and your friend dies, too.”

“I don’t believe that,” Reynolds said, but he didn’t like what he heard in his own voice. It sounded like doubt. “No man could make a shot like that.”

“Why don’t we let your friend decide?” Cuthbert raised his voice in a good-humored hail. “Hi-ho, there, Mr. Spectacles! Would you like your pal to shoot me?”

“No!” Depape’s cry was shrill, verging on panic. “No, Clay! Don’t shoot!”

“So it’s a standoff,” Reynolds said, bemused. And then bemusement changed to horror as he felt the blade of a very large knife slip against his throat. It pressed the tender skin just over his adam’s apple.

“No, it’s not,” Alain said softly. “Put the gun down, my friend, or I’ll cut your throat.”

4

Standing outside the batwing doors, having arrived by simple good fortune in time for this Pinch and Jilly show, Jonas watched with amazement, contempt, and something close to horror. First one of the Affiliation brats gets the drop on Depape, and when Reynolds covers that one, the big kid with the round face and the plowboy’s shoulders puts a knife to Reynolds’s throat. Neither of the brats a day over fifteen, and neither with a gun. Marvelous. He would have thought it better than a travelling circus, if not for the problems that would follow if this were not put right. What sort of work could they do in Hambry if it got around that the boogeymen were afraid of the children, instead of vice-versa?

There’s time to stop this before there’s killing, mayhap. If you want to. Do you?

Jonas decided he did; that they could walk out winners if they played it just right. He also decided the Affiliation brats would not, unless they were very lucky indeed, be leaving Mejis Barony alive.

Where’s the other one? Dearborn?

A good question. An important question. Embarrassment would become outright humiliation if he found himself trumped in the same fashion as Roy and Clay.

Dearborn wasn’t in the bar, and that was sure. Jonas turned on his heels, scanning the South High Street in both directions. It was almost day-bright under a Kissing Moon only two nights