You think so, huh? Well, I’m one up on you there, my friend. I know he’s dangerous. Very fucking dangerous.

He looked at Balazar again, and dropped him a little wink. “That’s why you’re the one who’s gotta be concerned with the Feds now, not me. If they turn up with a search warrant, you could suddenly find yourself fucked without even opening your legs, Mr. Balazar.”

Balazar had picked up two cards. His hands suddenly shook and he put them aside. It was minute, but Roland saw it and Eddie saw it, too. An expression of uncertainty—even momentary fear, perhaps—appeared and then disappeared on his face.

“Watch your mouth with me, Eddie. Watch how you express yourself, and please remember that my time and my tolerance for nonsense are both short.”

Jack Andolini looked alarmed.

“He made a deal with them, Mr. Balazar! This little shit turned over the coke and they planted it while they were pretending to question him!”

“No one has been in here,” Balazar said. “No one could get close, Jack, and you know it. Beepers go when a pigeon farts on the roof.”

“But—”

“Even if they had managed to set us up somehow, we have so many people in their organization we could drill fifteen holes in their case in three days. We’d know who, when, and how.”

Balazar looked back at Eddie.

“Eddie,” he said, “you have fifteen seconds to stop bullshitting. Then I’m going to have ’Cimi Dretto step in here and hurt you. Then, after he hurts you for awhile, he will leave, and from a room close by you will hear him hurting your brother.”

Eddie stiffened.

Easy, the gunslinger murmured, and thought, All you have to do to hurt him is to say his brother’s name. It’s like poking an open sore with a stick.

“I’m going to walk into your bathroom,” Eddie said. He pointed at a door in the far left corner of the room, a door so unobtrusive it could almost have been one of the wall panels. “I’m going in by myself. Then I’m going to walk back out with a pound of your cocaine. Half the shipment. You test it. Then you bring Henry in here where I can look at him. When I see him, see he’s okay, you are going to give him our goods and he’s going to ride home with one of your gentlemen. While he does, me and . . .” Roland, he almost said, “. . . me and the rest of the guys we both know you got here can watch you build that thing. When Henry’s home and safe—which means no one standing there with a gun in his ear—he’s going to call and say a certain word. This is something we worked out before I left. Just in case.”

The gunslinger checked Eddie’s mind to see if this was true or bluff. It was true, or at least Eddie thought it was. Roland saw Eddie really believed his brother Henry would die before saying that word in falsity. The gunslinger was not so sure.