When the thing was done, sai Tower reverted—looked at Eddie and cried in a cracked voice that was almost a shriek, “There! I’m a pauper! Give me my dollar! I’m promised a dollar! I feel a need to take a shit coming on and I need something to wipe my ass with!”

Then he put his hands over his face. He sat like that for several seconds, while Roland folded the signed paper (Deepneau had witnessed both signatures) and put it in his pocket.

When Tower lowered his hands again, his eyes were dry and his face was composed. There even seemed to be a touch of color in his formerly ashy cheeks. “I think I actually do feel a little better,” he said. He turned to Aaron. “Do you suppose these two cockuhs might be right?”

“I think it’s a real possibility,” Aaron said, smiling.

Eddie, meanwhile, had thought of a way to find out for sure if it really was these two men who would save Callahan from the Hitler Brothers—or almost for sure. One of them had said …

“Listen,” he said. “There’s a certain phrase, Yiddish, I think. Gai cocknif en yom. Do you know what it means? Either of you?”

Deepneau threw back his head and laughed. “Yeah, it’s Yiddish, all right. My Ma used to say it all the time when she was mad at us. It means go shit in the ocean.”

Eddie nodded at Roland. In the next couple of years, one of these men—probably Tower—would buy a ring with the words Ex Libris carved into it. Maybe—how crazy was this—because Eddie Dean himself had put the idea into Cal Tower’s head. And Tower—selfish, acquisitive, miserly, book-greedy Calvin Tower—would save Father Callahan’s life while that ring was on his finger. He was going to be shit-scared (Deepneau, too), but he was going to do it. And—

At that point Eddie happened to look at the pen with which Tower had signed the bill of sale, a perfectly ordinary Bic Clic, and the enormous truth of what had just happened struck home. They owned it. They owned the vacant lot. They, not the Sombra Corporation. They owned the rose!

He felt as if he’d just taken a hard shot to the head. The rose belonged to the Tet Corporation, which was the firm of Deschain, Dean, Dean, Chambers & Oy. It was now their responsibility, for better or for worse. This round they had won. Which did not change the fact that he had a bullet in his leg.

“Roland,” he said, “there’s something you have to do for me.”

TEN

Five minutes later Eddie lay on the cabin’s linoleum floor in his ridiculous knee-length Calla Bryn Sturgis underbritches. In one hand he held a leather belt which had spent its previous life holding up various pairs of Aaron Deepneau’s pants. Beside him was a basin filled with a dark brown fluid.

The hole in his leg was about three inches below his knee and a little bit to the right of the shinbone. The flesh around it had risen up in a hard little cone. This miniature volcano’s caldera was currently plugged with a shiny red-purple clot of blood. Two folded towels had been laid beneath Eddie’s calf.