Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,119

quite wonderful,” Cuthbert said cheerily . . . although there was now a beat of nerves under his prattle. Not fear, perhaps not even nervous-ness, just nerves. The good kind, more likely than not, Jonas thought sourly. He had underestimated these boys at meat; if nothing else was clear, that was. “You shoot Richard, and Richard cuts Mr. Cloak’s throat just as Mr. Cloak shoots me; my poor dying fingers release my sling’s elastic and put a steel ball in what passes for Mr. Spectacles’s brain. You’ll walk away, at least, and I suppose that will be a great comfort to your dead friends.”

“Call it a draw,” Alain said to the man with the gun at his temple. “We all stand back and walk away.”

“No, sonny,” Jonas said. His voice was patient, and he didn’t think his anger showed, but it was rising. Gods, to be outfaced like this, even temporarily! “No one does like that to the Big Coffin Hunters. This is your last chance to—”

Something hard and cold and very much to the point pressed against the back of Jonas’s shirt, dead center between the shoulderblades. He knew what it was and who held it at once, understood the game was lost, but couldn’t understand how such a ludicrous, maddening turn of events could have happened.

“Holster the gun,” the voice behind the sharp tip of metal said. It was empty, somehow—not just calm, but emotionless. “Do it now, or this goes in your heart. No more talk. Talking’s done. Do it or die.”

Jonas heard two things in that voice: youth and truth. He holstered his gun.

“You with the black hair. Take your gun out of my friend’s ear and put it back in your holster. Now.”

Clay Reynolds didn’t have to be invited twice, and he uttered a long, shaky sigh when Alain took the blade off his throat and stood back. Cuthbert did not look around, only stood with the elastic of his slingshot pulled and his elbow cocked.

“You at the bar,” Roland said. “Holster up.”

Depape did so, grimacing with pain as he bumped his hurt finger against his gunbelt. Only when this gun was put away did Cuthbert relax his hold on his sling and drop the ball from the cup into the palm of his hand.

The cause of all this had been forgotten as the effects played themselves out. Now Sheemie got to his feet and pelted across the room. His cheeks were wet with tears. He grasped one of Cuthbert’s hands, kissed it several times (loud smacking noises that would have been comic under other circumstances), and held the hand to his cheek for a moment. Then he dodged past Reynolds, pushed open the righthand batwing, and flew right into the arms of a sleepy-eyed and still half-drunk Sheriff. Avery had been fetched by Sheb from the jailhouse, where the Sheriff o’ Barony had been sleeping off the Mayor’s ceremonial dinner in one of his own cells.

8

“This is a nice mess, isn’t it?”

Avery speaking. No one answering. He hadn’t expected they would, not if they knew what was good for them.

The office area of the jail was too small to hold three men, three strapping not-quite-men, and one extra-large Sheriff comfortably, so Avery had herded them into the nearby Town Gathering Hall, which echoed to the soft flutter of the pigeons in the rafters and the steady beat-beat-beat of the grandfather clock behind the podium.

It was a plain room, but an inspired choice all the same. It was where the townsfolk and Barony landowners had come for hundreds of years to make their decisions, pass their laws, and occasionally send some especially troublesome person west. There was a feeling of seriousness in its moon-glimmered darkness, and Roland thought even the old man, Jonas, felt a little of it. Certainly it invested Sheriff Herk Avery with an authority he might not otherwise have been able to project.

The room was filled with what were in that place and time called “bareback benches”—oaken pews with no cushions for either butt or back. There were sixty in all, thirty on each side of a wide center aisle. Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds sat on the front bench to the left of the aisle. Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain sat across from them on the right. Reynolds and Depape looked sullen and embarrassed; Jonas looked remote and composed. Will Dearborn’s little crew was quiet. Roland had given Cuthbert a look which he hoped the boy could read: One smart remark and I’ll