“Cash or ch—”

“Cash, it’s always cash, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s fine, Miss Walker.”

“I’m so glad you approve, dear.”

There was a little grimace on the salesgirl’s face—Eddie just caught it as she turned away. Maybe it was something as simple as being talked to that way by a woman the salesgirl considered an “uppity nigger” (again it was more his experience in movie theaters than any knowledge of history or even life on the streets as he had lived it that caused this thought, because this was like watching a movie either set or made in the ’60s, something like that one with Sidney Steiger and Rod Poitier, In the Heat of the Night), but it could also be something even simpler: Roland’s Lady of Shadows was, black or white, one rude bitch.

And it didn’t really matter, did it? None of it made a damned bit of difference. He cared about one thing and one thing only and that was getting the fuck out.

That was New York, he could almost smell New York.

And New York meant smack.

He could almost smell that, too.

Except there was a hitch, wasn’t there?

One big motherfucker of a hitch.

8

Roland watched Eddie carefully, and although he could have killed him six times over at almost any time he wanted, he had elected to remain still and silent and let Eddie work the situation out for himself. Eddie was a lot of things, and a lot of them were not nice (as a fellow who had consciously let a child drop to his death, the gunslinger knew the difference between nice and not quite well), but one thing Eddie wasn’t was stupid.

He was a smart kid.

He would figure it out.

So he did.

He looked back at Roland, smiled without showing his teeth, twirled the gunslinger’s revolver once on his finger, clumsily, burlesquing a show-shooter’s fancy coda, and then he held it out to Roland, butt first.

“This thing might as well be a piece of shit for all the good it can do me, isn’t that right?”

You can talk bright when you want to, Roland thought. Why do you so often choose to talk stupid, Eddie? Is it because you think that’s the way they talked in the place where your brother went with his guns?

“Isn’t that right?” Eddie repeated.

Roland nodded.

“If I had plugged you, what would have happened to that door?”

“I don’t know. I suppose the only way to find out would be to try it and see.”

“Well, what do you think would happen?”

“I think it would disappear.”

Eddie nodded. That was what he thought, too. Poof! Gone like magic! Now ya see it, my friends, now ya don’t. It was really no different than what would happen if the projectionist in a movie-theater were to draw a six-shooter and plug the projector, was it?

If you shot the projector, the movie stopped.

Eddie didn’t want the picture to stop.