“No time to clean the machine now,” he said, “But ’twont matter, I reckon. Now catch, and catch clean—don’t dirty the machine any more than it is already. There aren’t many machines left in my world that work anymore.”

He threw the gun across the space between them. In his anxiety, Eddie almost did drop it. Then he had it safely tucked into his waistband.

The gunslinger got out of the wheelchair, almost fell when it slid backward under his pushing hands, then tottered to the door. He grasped its knob; in his hand it turned easily. Eddie could not see the scene the door opened upon, but he heard the muffled sound of traffic.

Roland looked back at Eddie, his blue bullshooter’s eyes gleaming out of a face which was ghastly pale.

16

Detta watched all of this from her hiding place with hungrily gleaming eyes.

17

“Remember, Eddie,” he said in a hoarse voice, and then stepped forward. His body collapsed at the edge of the doorway, as if it had struck a stone wall instead of empty space.

Eddie felt an almost insatiable urge to go to the doorway, to look through and see where—and to what when—it led. Instead he turned and scanned the hills again, his hand on the gun-butt.

I’m going to tell you one last time.

Suddenly, scanning the empty brown hills, Eddie was scared.

Be on your guard.

Nothing up there was moving.

Nothing he could see, at least.

He sensed her all the same.

Not Odetta; the gunslinger was right about that.

It was Detta he sensed.

He swallowed and heard a click in his throat.

On your guard.

Yes. But never in his life had he felt such a deadly need for sleep. It would take him soon enough; if he didn’t give in willingly, sleep would rape him.

And while he slept, Detta would come.

Detta.

Eddie fought the weariness, looked at the unmoving hills with eyes which felt swollen and heavy, and wondered how long it might be before Roland came back with the third—The Pusher, whoever he or she was.

“Odetta?” he called without much hope.

Only silence answered, and for Eddie the time of waiting began.

THE PUSHER

CHAPTER 1

Bitter Medicine

1

When the gunslinger entered Eddie, Eddie had experienced a moment of nausea and he had had a sense of being watched (this Roland hadn’t felt; Eddie had told him later). He’d had, in other words, some vague sense of the gunslinger’s presence. With Detta, Roland had been forced to come forward immediately, like it or not. She hadn’t just sensed him; in a queer way it seemed that she had been waiting for him—him or another, more frequent, visitor. Either way, she had been totally aware of his presence from the first moment he had been in her.

Jack Mort didn’t feel a thing.

He was too intent on the boy.

He had been watching the boy for the last two weeks.

Today he was going to push him.