I can live with that, Callahan thought. And die with it.

“She left something but it’s gone!” Jake said in a distressed, almost-crying voice. “Someone must have found it … or maybe the guitar-player saw her drop it and took it … this fucking city! Everyone steals everything! Ah, shit!”

“Let it go.”

Jake turned his pale, tired, frightened face up to Callahan’s. “She left us something and we need it! Don’t you understand how thin our chances are?”

“Yes. If you want to back off, Jake, now would be the time.”

The boy shook his head with no doubt nor the slightest hesitation, and Callahan was fiercely proud of him. “Let’s go, Pere,” he said.

SEVENTEEN

On the corner of Lex and Sixty-first they stopped again. Jake pointed across the street. Callahan saw the green awning and nodded. It was imprinted with a cartoon porker that was grinning blissfully in spite of having been roasted a bright and smoking red. THE DIXIE PIG was written on the awning’s overhang. Parked in a row in front of it were five long black limousines with their accent lights glowing a slightly blurred yellow in the dark. Callahan realized for the first time that a mist was creeping down the Avenue.

“Here,” Jake said, and handed him the Ruger. The boy rummaged in his pockets and came up with two big handfuls of cartridges. They gleamed dully in the pervasive orange glow of the streetlamps. “Put em all in your breast pocket, Pere. Easier to get at that way, all right?”

Callahan nodded.

“Ever shot a gun before?”

“No,” Callahan said. “Have you ever fired one of those plates?”

Jake’s lips parted in a grin. “Benny Slightman and I snuck a bunch of the practice dishes out to the riverbank and had a match one night. He wasn’t much good, but …”

“Let me guess. You were.”

Jake shrugged, then nodded. He had no words to express how fine the plates had felt in his hands, how savagely right. But perhaps that was natural. Susannah had also taken quickly and naturally to throwing the Oriza. That Pere Callahan had seen for himself.

“All right, what’s our plan?” Callahan asked. Now that he had decided to go through it all the way to the end, he was more than willing to give leadership over to the boy. Jake was, after all, the gunslinger.

The boy shook his head. “There is none,” he said, “not really. I go in first. You right behind me. Once we’re through the door, we spread apart. Ten feet between us any time we have ten feet to give, Pere—do you understand? So that no matter how many there are or how close they are, no one of them can get both of us at the same time.”

This was Roland’s teaching, and Callahan recognized it as such. He nodded.

“I’ll be able to follow her by touch, and Oy will be able to by scent,” Jake said. “Move with us. Shoot whatever asks to be shot, and without hesitation, do you understand?”