TWELVE

Roland knew what he was doing, had done it before, and the bullet hadn’t gone deep. The whole thing was over in ninety seconds, but it was the longest minute and a half in Eddie’s life. At last Roland tapped the pliers on one of Eddie’s closed hands. When Eddie managed to unroll his fingers, the gunslinger dropped a flattened slug into it. “Souvenir,” he said. “Stopped right on the bone. That was the scraping that you heard.”

Eddie looked at the mashed piece of lead, then flicked it across the linoleum floor like a marble. “Don’t want it,” he said, and wiped his brow.

Tower, ever the collector, picked up the cast-off slug. Deepneau, meanwhile, was examining the toothmarks in his belt with silent fascination.

“Cal,” Eddie said, getting up on his elbows. “You had a book in your case—”

“I want those books back,” Tower said immediately. “You better be taking care of them, young man.”

“I’m sure they’re in great condition,” Eddie said, telling himself once more to bite his tongue if he had to. Or grab Aaron’s belt and bite that again, if your tongue won’t do.

“They better be, young man; now they’re all I have left.”

“Yes, along with the forty or so in your various safe deposit boxes,” Aaron Deepneau said, completely ignoring the vile look his friend shot him. “The signed Ulysses is probably the best, but there are several gorgeous Shakespeare folios, a complete set of signed Faulkners—”

“Aaron, would you please be quiet?”

“—and a Huckleberry Finn that you could turn into a Mercedes-Benz sedan any day of the week,” Deepneau finished.

“In any case, one of them was a book called ’Salem’s Lot,” Eddie said. “By a man named—”

“Stephen King,” Tower finished. He gave the slug a final look, then put it on the kitchen table next to the sugarbowl. “I’ve been told he lives close to here. I’ve picked up two copies of Lot and also three copies of his first novel, Carrie. I was hoping to take a trip to Bridgton and get them signed. I suppose now that won’t happen.”

“I don’t understand what makes it so valuable,” Eddie said, and then: “Ouch, Roland, that hurts!”

Roland was checking the makeshift bandage around the wound in Eddie’s leg. “Be still,” he said.

Tower paid no attention to this. Eddie had turned him once more in the direction of his favorite subject, his obsession, his darling. What Eddie supposed Gollum in the Tolkien books would have called “his precious.”

“Do you remember what I told you when we were discussing The Hogan, Mr. Dean? Or The Dogan, if you prefer? I said that the value of a rare book—like that of a rare coin or a rare stamp—is created in different ways. Sometimes it’s just an autograph—”

“Your copy of ’Salem’s Lot isn’t signed.”

“No, because this particular author is very young and not very well known. He may amount to something one day, or he may not.” Tower shrugged, almost as if to say that was up to ka. “But this particular book … well, the first edition was only seventy-five hundred copies, and almost all of them sold in New England.”