The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (30 page)

“Sai Depape,” he said, taking a step forward and speaking in a low, respectful tone. “I’m very sorry about that. I’ll be happy to buy your drinks for the rest of the evening if we can just forget this regrettable—”

Depape’s movement was a blur almost too fast to see, but that wasn’t what amazed the people who were in the Rest that night; they would have expected a man running with Jonas to be fast. What amazed them was the fact that
he never looked around to set his target
. He located Stanley by his voice alone.

Depape drew his gun and swept it to the right in a rising arc. It struck Stanley Ruiz dead in the mouth, mashing his lips and shattering three of his teeth. Blood splashed the backbar mirror; several high-flying drops decorated the tip of The Romp’s lefthand nose. Stanley screamed, clapped his
hands to his face, and staggered back against the shelf behind him. In the silence, the chattery clink of the bottles was very loud.

Down the bar, Reynolds cracked another clam and watched, fascinated. Good as a play, it was.

Depape turned his attention back to the kneeling boy. “Clean my boots,” he said.

A look of muddled relief came onto Sheemie’s face. Clean his boots! Yes! You bet! Right away! He pulled the rag he always kept in his back pocket. It wasn’t even dirty yet. Not very, at least.

“No,” Depape said patiently. Sheemie looked up at him, gaping and puzzled. “Put that nasty clout back where it come from—I don’t even want to look at it.”

Sheemie tucked it into his back pocket again.

“Lick em,” Depape said in that same patient voice. “That’s what I want. You lick my boots until they’re dry again, and so clean you can see your stupid rabbit’s face in em.”

Sheemie hesitated, as if still not sure what was required of him. Or perhaps he was only processing the information.

“I’d do it, boy,” Barkie Callahan said from what he hoped was a safe place behind Sheb’s piano. “If you want to see the sun come up, I’d surely do it.”

Depape had already decided the mush-brain wasn’t going to see another sunrise, not in
this
world, but kept quiet. He had never had his boots licked. He wanted to see what it felt like. If it was nice—kind of sexy-like—he could maybe try Her Nibs out on it.

“Does I have to?” Sheemie’s eyes were filling with tears. “Can’t just I-sorry and polish em real good?”

“
Lick,
you feeble-minded donkey,” Depape said.

Sheemie’s hair fell across his forehead. His tongue poked tentatively out between his lips, and as he bent his head toward Depape’s boots, the first of his tears fell.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it,” a voice said. It was shocking in the silence—not because it was sudden, and certainly not because it was angry. It was shocking because it was amused. “I simply can’t allow that. Nope. I would if I could, but I can’t. Unsanitary, you see. Who knows what disease might be spread in such fashion? The mind quails! Ab-so-lutely
cuh-wails
!”

Standing just inside the batwing doors was the purveyor of this idiotic and potentially fatal screed: a young man of
middling height, his flat-crowned hat pushed back to reveal a tumbled comma of brown hair. Except
young man
didn’t really cover him, Depape realized;
young man
was drawing it heavy. He was only a kid. Around his neck, gods knew why, he wore a bird’s skull like an enormous comical pendant. It was hung on a chain that ran through the eyeholes. And in his hands was not a gun (
where would an unwhiskered dribble like him get a gun in the first place?
Depape wondered) but a goddam slingshot. Depape burst out laughing.

The kid laughed as well, nodding as if he understood how ridiculous the whole thing looked, how ridiculous the whole thing
was
. His laughter was infectious; Pettie, still up on her stool, tittered herself before clapping her hands over her mouth.

“This is no place for a boy such as you,” Depape said. His revolver, an old five-shooter, was still out; it lay in his fist on the bar, with Stanley Ruiz’s blood dripping off the gunsight. Depape, without raising it from the ironwood, waggled it slightly. “Boys who come to places like this learn bad habits, kid. Dying is apt to be one of them. So I give you this one chance. Get out of here.”

“Thank you, sir, I appreciate my one chance,” the boy said. He spoke with great and winning sincerity . . . but didn’t move. Still he stood just inside the batwing doors, with the wide elastic strap of his sling pulled back. Depape couldn’t quite make out what was in the cup, but it glittered in the gaslight. A metal ball of some sort.

“Well, then?” Depape snarled. This was getting old, and fast.

“I know I’m being a pain in the neck, sir—not to mention an ache in the ass and a milky drip from the tip of a sore dick—but if it’s all the same to you, my dear friend, I’d like to give my chance to the young fellow on his knees before you. Let him apologize, let him polish your boots with his clout until you are entirely satisfied, and let him go on living his life.”

There was an unfocused murmur of approval at this from the area where the card-players were watching. Depape didn’t like the sound of it at all, and he made a sudden decision. The boy would die as well, executed for the crime of impertinence. The swabby who had spilled the bucket of dregs on him was clearly retarded. Yon brat had not even that excuse. He just thought he was funny.

From the corner of his eye, Depape saw Reynolds moving to flank the boy, smooth as oiled silk. Depape appreciated the thought, but didn’t believe he’d need much help with the slingshot specialist.

“Boy, I think you’ve made a mistake,” he said in a kindly voice. “I really believe—” The cup of the slingshot dipped a little . . . or Depape fancied it did. He made his move.

They talked about it in Hambry for years to come; three decades after the fall of Gilead and the end of the Affiliation, they were still talking. By that time there were better than five hundred old gaffers (and a few old gammers) claiming that they were drinking a beer in the Rest that night, and saw it all.

Depape was young, and had the speed of a snake. Nevertheless, he never came close to getting a shot off at Cuthbert Allgood. There was a
thip-TWANG!
as the elastic was released, a steel gleam that drew itself across the saloon’s smoky air like a line on a slateboard, and then Depape screamed. His revolver tumbled to the floor, and a foot spun 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.”

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 past the full. No one there, not in the street, not on the far side, where Hambry’s mercantile store stood. The mercantile had a porch, but there was nothing on it save for a line of carved totems illustrating Guardians of the Beam: Bear, Turtle, Fish, Eagle, Lion, Bat, and Wolf. Seven of twelve, bright as marble in the moonlight, and no doubt great favorites of the kiddies. No men over there, though. Good. Lovely.

Jonas peered hard into the thread of alley between the mercantile and the butcher’s, glimpsed a shadow behind a tumble of cast-off boxes, tensed, then relaxed as he saw a cat’s shining green eyes. He nodded and turned to the business at hand, pushing back the lefthand batwing and stepping into the Travellers’ Rest. Alain heard the squeak of a hinge, but Jonas’s gun was at his temple before he could even begin to turn.

“Sonny, unless you’re a barber, I think you’d better put that pigsticker down. You don’t get a second warning.”

“No,” Alain said.

Jonas, who had expected nothing but compliance and had been prepared for nothing else, was thunderstruck.
“What?”

“You heard me,” Alain said. “I said no.”

After making their manners and excusing themselves from Seafront, Roland had left his friends to their own amusements—they would finish up at the Travellers’ Rest, he supposed, but wouldn’t stay long or get into much trouble when they had no money for cards and could drink nothing more exciting than cold tea. He had ridden into town another way, tethered his mount at a public post in the lower of the two town squares (Rusher had offered a single puzzled nicker at this treatment, but no more), and had since been tramping the empty, sleeping streets with his hat yanked low over his eyes and his hands clasped into an aching knot at the small of his back.

His mind was full of questions—things were wrong here, very wrong. At first he’d thought that was just his imagination, the childish part of him finding make-believe troubles and storybook intrigue because he had been removed from the heart of the real action. But after his talk with “Rennie” Renfrew, he knew better. There were questions, outright mysteries, and the most hellish thing of all was that he couldn’t concentrate on them, let alone go any distance toward making sense of them. Every time he tried, Susan Delgado’s face intruded . . . her face, or the sweep of her hair, or even the pretty, fearless way her silk-slippered feet had followed his boots in the dance, never lagging or hesitating. Again and again he heard the last thing he had said to her, speaking in the stilted, priggish voice of a boy preacher. He would have given almost anything to take back both the tone and the words themselves. She’d be on Thorin’s pillow come Reaptide, and kindle him a child before the first snow flew, perhaps a male heir, and what of it? Rich men, famous men, and well-blooded men had taken gilly-girls since the beginning of time; Arthur Eld had had better than forty himself, according to the tales. So, really, what was it to him?

I think I’ve gone and fallen in love with her. That’s what it is to me.

A dismaying idea, but not a dismissable one; he knew the landscape of his own heart too well. He loved her, very likely it was so, but part of him also hated her, and held to the shocking thought he’d had at dinner: that he could have shot Susan Delgado through the heart if he’d come armed. Some of this was jealousy, but not all; perhaps not even the greater
part. He had made some indefinable but powerful connection between Olive Thorin—her sad but game little smile from the foot of the table—and his own mother. Hadn’t some of that same woeful, rueful look been in his mother’s eyes on the day when he had come upon her and his father’s advisor? Marten in an open-throated shirt, Gabrielle Deschain in a sacque that had slipped off one shoulder, the whole room reeking of what they had been up to that hot morning?