When he came out, there was no limo, of course. The driver would have had his instructions: if the mule isn’t out of the terminal fifteen minutes or so after the rest of the passengers have come out, drive away fast. The limo driver would know better than to use the car’s telephone, which was actually a radio that could easily be monitored. Balazar would call people, find out Eddie had struck trouble, and get ready for trouble of his own. Balazar might have recognized Eddie’s steel, but that didn’t change the fact that Eddie was a junkie. A junkie could not be relied upon to be a stand-up guy.

This meant there was a possibility that the pizza truck just might pull up in the lane next to the taxi, someone just might stick an automatic weapon out of the pizza truck’s window, and then the back of the cab would become something that looked like a bloody cheese-grater. Eddie would have been more worried about that if they held him for four hours instead of two, and seriously worried if it had been six hours instead of four. But only two . . . he thought Balazar would trust him to have hung on to his lip at least that long. He would want to know about his goods.

The real reason Eddie kept looking back was the door.

It fascinated him.

As the Customs agents had half-carried, half-dragged him down the stairs to Kennedy’s administration section, he had looked back over his shoulder and there it had been, improbable but indubitably, inarguably real, floating along at a distance of about three feet. He could see the waves rolling steadily in, crashing on the sand; he saw that the day over there was beginning to darken.

The door was like one of those trick pictures with a hidden image in them, it seemed; you couldn’t see that hidden part for the life of you at first, but once you had, you couldn’t unsee it, no matter how hard you tried.

It had disappeared on the two occasions when the gunslinger went back without him, and that had been scary—Eddie had felt like a child whose nightlight has burned out. The first time had been during the customs interrogation.

I have to go, Roland’s voice had cut cleanly through whatever question they were currently throwing at him. I’ll only be a few moments. Don’t be afraid.

Why? Eddie asked. Why do you have to go?

“What’s wrong?” one of the Customs guys had asked him. “All of a sudden you look scared.”

All of a sudden he had felt scared, but of nothing this yo-yo would understand.

He looked over his shoulder, and the Customs men had also turned. They saw nothing but a blank white wall covered with white panels drilled with holes to damp sound; Eddie saw the door, its usual three feet away (now it was embedded in the room’s wall, an escape hatch none of his interrogators could see). He saw more. He saw things coming out of the waves, things that looked like refugees from a horror movie where the effects are just a little more special than you want them to be, special enough so everything looks real. They looked like a hideous cross-breeding of prawn, lobster, and spider. They were making some weird sound.