“I think I will,” the gunslinger said.

“I’ll shoot you!” Eddie screamed.

“Ka,” the gunslinger replied stolidly, and turned to the door. He was reaching for the knob, but his heart was waiting: waiting to see if he would live or die.

Ka.

THE LADY OF SHADOWS

CHAPTER 1

Detta and Odetta

Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the perfect schizophrenic—if there was such a person—would be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life.

Adler should have met Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes.

1

“—last gunslinger,” Andrew said.

He had been talking for quite awhile, but Andrew always talked and Odetta usually just let it flow over her mind the way you let warm water flow over your hair and face in the shower. But this did more than catch her attention; it snagged it, as if on a thorn.

“I beg pardon?”

“Oh, it was just some column in the paper,” Andrew said. “I dunno who wrote it. I didn’t notice. One of those political fellas. Prob’ly you’d know, Miz Holmes. I loved him, and I cried the night he was elected—”

She smiled, touched in spite of herself. Andrew said his ceaseless chatter was something he couldn’t stop, wasn’t responsible for, that it was just the Irish in him coming out, and most of it was nothing—cluckings and chirrupings about relatives and friends she would never meet, half-baked political opinions, weird scientific commentary gleaned from any number of weird sources (among other things, Andrew was a firm believer in flying saucers, which he called you-foes)—but this touched her because she had also cried the night he was elected.

“But I didn’t cry when that son of a bitch—pardon my French, Miz Holmes—when that son of a bitch Oswald shot him, and I hadn’t cried since, and it’s been—what, two months?”

Three months and two days, she thought.

“Something like that, I guess.”

Andrew nodded. “Then I read this column—in The Daily News, it mighta been—yesterday, about how Johnson’s probably gonna do a pretty good job, but it won’t be the same. The guy said America had seen the passage of the world’s last gunslinger.”

“I don’t think John Kennedy was that at all,” Odetta said, and if her voice was sharper than the one Andrew was accustomed to hearing (which it must have been, because she saw his eyes give a startled blink in the rear-view mirror, a blink that was more like a wince), it was because she felt herself touched by this, too. It was absurd, but it was also a fact. There was something about that phrase—America has seen the passage of the world’s last gunslinger—that rang deeply in her mind. It was ugly, it was untrue—John Kennedy had been a peacemaker, not a leather-slapping Billy the Kid type, that was more in the Goldwater line—but it had also for some reason given her goosebumps.