She raised her head. Looked at the shape chalked on the barn wall. Still her hands lay between her breasts. Then she cried out shrilly, as Margaret Eisenhart had cried out in the yard of the Rocking B, and Roland felt his hard-beating heart rise. In that moment he had a clear and beautiful memory of David, his hawk, folding his wings in a blue summer sky and dropping at his prey like a stone with eyes.

“Riza!”

Her hands dropped and became a blur. Only Roland, Eddie, and Jake were able to mark how they crossed at the waist, the right hand seizing a dish from the left pouch, the left hand seizing one from the right. Sai Eisenhart had thrown from the shoulder, sacrificing time in order to gain force and accuracy. Susannah’s arms crossed below her ribcage and just above the arms of her wheelchair, the dishes finishing their cocking arc at about the height of her shoulderblades. Then they flew, crisscrossing in midair a moment before thudding into the side of the barn.

Susannah’s arms finished straight out before her; for a moment she looked like an impresario who has just introduced the featured act. Then they dropped and crossed, seizing two more dishes. She flung them, dipped again, and flung the third set. The first two were still quivering when the last two bit into the side of the barn, one high and one low.

For a moment there was utter silence in the Jaffordses’ yard. Not even a bird called. The eight plates ran in a perfectly straight line from the throat of the chalked figure to what would have been its upper midsection. They were all two and a half to three inches apart, descending like buttons on a shirt. And she had thrown all eight in no more than three seconds.

“Do’ee mean to use the dish against the Wolves?” Bucky Javier asked in a queerly breathless voice. “Is that it?”

“Nothing’s been decided,” Roland said stolidly.

In a barely audible voice that held both shock and wonder, Deelie Estrada said: “But if that’d been a man, hear me, he’d be cutlets.”

It was Gran-pere who had the final word, as perhaps gran-peres should: “Yer- bugger!”

Six

On their way back out to the main road (Andy walked at a distance ahead of them, carrying the folded wheelchair and playing something bagpipey through his sound system), Susannah said musingly: “I may give up the gun altogether, Roland, and just concentrate on the dish. There’s an elemental satisfaction to giving that scream and then throwing.”

“You reminded me of my hawk,” Roland admitted.

Susannah’s teeth flashed white in a grin. “I felt like a hawk. Riza! O- Riza! Just saying the word puts me in a throwing mood.”

Seven

To Jake’s mind this brought some obscure memory of Gasher (“Yer old pal, Gasher,” as the gentleman himself had been wont to say), and he shivered.