Now where do we go? Mort was asking.

This would be the hard part. The gunslinger got ready—as ready as he could, at any rate.

Turn off the siren and the lights. Stop by the sidewalk.

Mort pulled the cruiser up beside a fire hydrant.

There are underground railways in this city, the gunslinger said. I want you to take me to a station where these trains stop to let passengers on and off.

Which one? Mort asked. The thought was tinged with the mental color of panic. Mort could hide nothing from Roland, and Roland nothing from Mort—not, at least, for very long.

Some years ago—I don’t know how many—you pushed a young woman in front of a train in one of those underground stations. That’s the one I want you to take me to.

There ensued a short, violent struggle. The gunslinger won, but it was a surprisingly hard go. In his way, Jack Mort was as divided as Odetta. He was not a schizophrenic as she was; he knew well enough what he did from time to time. But he kept his secret self—the part of him that was The Pusher—as carefully locked away as an embezzler might lock away his secret skim.

Take me there, you bastard, the gunslinger repeated. He slowly raised the thumb toward Mort’s right eye again. It was less than half an inch away and still moving when he gave in.

Mort’s right hand moved the lever by the wheel again and they rolled toward the Christopher Street station where that fabled A-train had cut off the legs of a woman named Odetta Holmes some three years before.

10

“Well looky there,” foot patrolman Andrew Staunton said to his partner, Norris Weaver, as Delevan’s and O’Mearah’s blue-and-white came to a stop halfway down the block. There were no parking spaces, and the driver made no effort to find one. He simply double-parked and let the clog of traffic behind him inch its laborious way through the loophole remaining, like a trickle of blood trying to serve a heart hopelessly clogged with cholesterol.

Weaver checked the numbers on the side by the right front headlight. 744. Yes, that was the number they’d gotten from dispatch, all right.

The flashers were on and everything looked kosher—until the door opened and the driver stepped out. He was wearing a blue suit, all right, but not the kind that came with gold buttons and silver badge. His shoes weren’t police issue either, unless Staunton and Weaver had missed a memo notifying officers that duty footwear would henceforth come from Gucci. That didn’t seem likely. What seemed likely was that this was the creep who had hijacked the cops uptown. He got out oblivious to the honkings and cries of protest from the drivers trying to get by him.

“Goddam,” Andy Staunton breathed.

Approach with extreme caution, the dispatcher had said. This man is armed and extremely dangerous. Dispatchers usually sounded like the most bored human beings on earth—for all Andy Staunton knew, they were—and so the almost awed emphasis this one put on the word extremely had stuck to his consciousness like a burr.