“Who?”

“Never mind.”

The sallow thing sat down. Eddie sat by the motel room desk with the little pile of white powder nearby (the D-Con or whatever it had been had long since gone down the john). On TV the Braves were getting shellacked by the Mets, courtesy of WTBS and the big satellite dish on the Aquinas Hotel’s roof. Eddie felt a faint sensation of calm which seemed to come from the back of his mind . . . except where it was really coming from, he knew from what he had read in the medical journals, was from the bunch of living wires at the base of his spine, that place where heroin addiction takes place by causing an unnatural thickening of the nerve stem.

Want to take a quick cure? he had asked Henry once. Break your spine, Henry. Your legs stop working, and so does your cock, but you stop needing the needle right away.

Henry hadn’t thought it was funny.

In truth, Eddie hadn’t thought it was that funny either. When the only fast way you could get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves, you were dealing with one heavy monkey. That was no capuchin, no cute little organ grinder’s mascot; that was a big mean old baboon.

Eddie began to sniffle.

“Okay,” he said at last. “It’ll do. You can vacate the premises, scuzz.”

The sallow thing got up. “I have friends,” he said. “They could come in here and do things to you. You’d beg to tell me where that key is.”

“Not me, champ,” Eddie said. “Not this kid.” And smiled. He didn’t know how the smile looked, but it must not have looked all that cheery because the sallow thing vacated the premises, vacated them fast, vacated them without looking back.

When Eddie Dean was sure he was gone, he cooked.

Fixed.

Slept.

8

As he was sleeping now.

The gunslinger, somehow inside this man’s mind (a man whose name he still did not know; the lowling the prisoner thought of as “the sallow thing” had not known it, and so had never spoken it), watched this as he had once watched plays as a child, before the world had moved on . . . or so he thought he watched, because plays were all he had ever seen. If he had ever seen a moving picture, he would have thought of that first. The things he did not actually see he had been able to pluck from the prisoner’s mind because the associations were close. It was odd about the name, though. He knew the name of the prisoner’s brother, but not the name of the man himself. But of course names were secret things, full of power.

And neither of the things that mattered was the man’s name. One was the weakness of the addiction. The other was the steel buried inside that weakness, like a good gun sinking in quicksand.