Hell, I’m dead anyway, he thought, watching as the guy from the storage room worked the Remington’s jack, pumping in fresh cartridges, then laying it over his forearm. He was grinning. His teeth were very yellow—Eddie didn’t think they had been acquainted with a toothbrush in quite some time.

Christ, I’m going to get killed by some fuckhead with yellow teeth and I don’t even know his name, Eddie thought dimly. At least I put one in Balazar. At least I did that much. He wondered if Roland had another shot. He couldn’t remember.

“I got him!” Tricks Postino yelled cheerfully. “Gimme a clear field, Dario!” And before the man named Dario could give him a clear field or anything else, Tricks opened up with The Wonderful Rambo Machine. The heavy thunder of machine-gun fire filled Balazar’s office. The first result of this barrage was to save Eddie Dean’s life. Dario had drawn a bead on him with the sawed-off, but before he could pull its double triggers, Tricks cut him in half.

“Stop it, you idiot!” Balazar screamed.

But Tricks either didn’t hear, couldn’t stop, or wouldn’t stop. Lips pulled back from his teeth so that his spit-shining teeth were bared in a huge shark’s grin, he raked the room from one end to the other, blowing two of the wall panels to dust, turning framed photographs into clouds of flying glass fragments, hammering the bathroom door off its hinges. The frosted glass of Balazar’s shower stall exploded. The March of Dimes trophy Balazar had gotten the year before bonged like a bell as a slug drove through it.

In the movies, people actually kill other people with hand-held rapid-fire weapons. In real life, this rarely happens. If it does, it happens with the first four or five slugs fired (as the unfortunate Dario could have testified, if he had ever been capable of testifying to anything again). After the first four or five, two things happen to a man—even a powerful one—trying to control such a weapon. The muzzle begins to rise, and the shooter himself begins to turn either right or left, depending on which unfortunate shoulder he has decided to bludgeon with the weapon’s recoil. In short, only a moron or a movie star would attempt the use of such a gun; it was like trying to shoot someone with a pneumatic drill.

For a moment Eddie was incapable of any action more constructive than staring at this perfect marvel of idiocy. Then he saw other men crowding through the door behind Tricks, and raised Roland’s revolver.

“Got him!” Tricks was screaming with the joyous hysteria of a man who has seen too many movies to be able to distinguish between what the script in his head says should be happening and what really is. “Got him! I got him! I g—”

Eddie pulled the trigger and vaporized Tricks from the eyebrows up. Judging from the man’s behavior, that was not a great deal.

Jesus Christ, when these things do shoot, they really blow holes in things, he thought.