He turned to the gate agent at the mouth of the hatch, who was watching them closely. He must have sensed some sort of problem, because he had unholstered his walkie-talkie and was holding it in his hand.

“Tell him I want customs agents up here,” McDonald said quietly to the navigator. “Three or four. Armed. Now.”

The navigator made his way through the line of passengers, excusing himself with an easy grin, and spoke quietly to the gate agent, who raised his walkie-talkie to his mouth and spoke quietly into it.

McDonald—who had never put anything stronger than aspirin into his system in his entire life and that only rarely—turned to Deere. His lips were pressed into a thin white line like a scar.

“As soon as the last of the passengers are off, we’re breaking that shithouse door open,” he said. “I don’t care if Customs is here or not. Do you understand?”

“Roger,” Deere said, and watched the tail of the line make its way into first class.

15

“Get my knife,” the gunslinger said. “It’s in my purse.”

He gestured toward a cracked leather bag lying on the sand. It looked more like a big packsack than a purse, the kind of thing you expected to see hippies carrying as they made their way along the Appalachian trail, getting high on nature (and maybe a bomber joint every now and then), except this looked like the real thing, not just a prop for some airhead’s self-image; something that had done years and years of hard—maybe desperate—travelling.

Gestured, but did not point. Couldn’t point. Eddie realized why the man had a swatch of dirty shirting wrapped around his right hand: some of his fingers were gone.

“Get it,” he said. “Cut through the tape. Try not to cut yourself. It’s easy to do. You’ll have to be careful, but you’ll have to move fast just the same. There isn’t much time.”

“I know that,” Eddie said, and knelt on the sand. None of this was real. That was it, that was the answer. As Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie would have put it, Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life’s a fiction and the world’s a lie, so put on some Creedence and let’s get high.

None of it was real, it was all just an extraordinarily vivid nodder, so the best thing was just to ride low and go with the flow.

It sure was a vivid nodder. He was reaching for the zipper—or maybe it would be a velcro strip—on the man’s “purse” when he saw it was held together by a crisscross pattern of rawhide thongs, some of which had broken and been carefully reknotted—reknotted small enough so they would still slide through the grommetted eyelets.

Eddie pulled the drag-knot at the top, spread the bag’s opening, and found the knife beneath a slightly damp package that was the piece of shirting tied around the bullets. Just the handle was enough to take his breath away . . . it was the true mellow gray-white of pure silver, engraved with a complex series of patterns that caught the eye, drew it—