“Never mind all that. How many doses?”

“Oh. Uh—” The flustered aide looked at the bottle and almost dropped it. “Two hundred.”

Roland felt much as he had when he discovered how much ammunition could be purchased in this world for a trivial sum. There had been nine sample bottles of Keflex in the secret compartment of Enrico Balazar’s medicine cabinet, thirty-six doses in all, and he had felt well again. If he couldn’t kill the infection with two hundred doses, it couldn’t be killed.

“Give it to me,” the man in the blue suit said.

The aide handed it over.

The gunslinger pushed back the sleeve of his jacket, revealing Jack Mort’s Rolex. “I have no money, but this may serve as adequate compensation. I hope so, anyway.”

He turned, nodded toward the guard, who was still sitting on the floor by his overturned stool and staring at the gunslinger with wide eyes, and then walked out.

Simple as that.

For five seconds there was no sound in the drugstore but the bray of the alarm, which was loud enough to blank out even the babble of the people on the street.

“God in heaven, Mr. Katz, what do we do now?” the aide whispered.

Katz picked up the watch and hefted it.

Gold. Solid gold.

He couldn’t believe it.

He had to believe it.

Some madman walked in off the street, shot a gun out of his guard’s hand and a knife out of another’s, all in order to obtain the most unlikely drug he could think of.

Keflex.

Maybe sixty dollars’ worth of Keflex.

For which he had paid with a $6500 Rolex watch.

“Do?” Katz asked. “Do? The first thing you do is put that wristwatch under the counter. You never saw it.” He looked at Ralph. “Neither did you.”

“No sir,” Ralph agreed immediately. “As long as I get my share when you sell it, I never saw that watch at all.”

“They’ll shoot him like a dog in the street,” Katz said with unmistakable satisfaction.

“Keflex! And the guy didn’t even seem to have the sniffles,” the aide said wonderingly.

CHAPTER 4

The Drawing

1

As the sun’s bottom arc first touched the Western Sea in Roland’s world, striking bright golden fire across the water to where Eddie lay trussed like a turkey, Officers O’Mearah and Delevan were coming groggily back to consciousness in the world from which Eddie had been taken.

“Let me out of these cuffs, would ya?” Fat Johnny asked in a humble voice.

“Where is he?” O’Mearah asked thickly, and groped for his holster. Gone. Holster, belt, bullets, gun. Gun.

Oh, shit.

He began thinking of the questions that might be asked by the shits in the Department of Internal Affairs, guys who had learned all they knew about the streets from Jack Webb on Dragnet, and the monetary value of his lost gun suddenly became about as important to him as the population of Ireland or the principal mineral deposits of Peru. He looked at Carl and saw Carl had also been stripped of his weapon.