“But legally it’s yours, right?” Eddie asked. Roland could see that he was still proceeding with some caution. Hadn’t quite got over that crack—How would you know?—just yet. And the look that had gone with it. “I mean, he can’t stop you from taking it, can he?”

“No, honey,” she said. “My dad and Pop Mose made me a trust fund, but it went moot in 1959, when I turned twenty-five.” She turned her eyes—dark eyes of amazing beauty and expression—upon him. “There. You don’t need to devil me about my age anymore, do you? If you can subtract, you can figure it out for yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Eddie said. “Time is a face on the water.”

Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere—perhaps in a glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here—a rustie had just walked over his grave.

Six

“Has to be cash,” Jake said in a dry, businesslike tone.

“Huh?” Eddie looked away from Susannah with an effort.

“Cash,” Jake repeated. “No one’d honor a check, even a cashier’s check, that was thirteen years old. Especially not one for millions of dollars.”

“How do you know stuff like that, sug?” Susannah asked.

Jake shrugged. Like it or not (usually he didn’t), he was Elmer Chambers’s son. Elmer Chambers wasn’t one of the world’s good guys—Roland would never call him part of the White—but he had been a master of what network execs called “the kill.” A Big Coffin Hunter in TV Land, Jake thought. Maybe that was a little unfair, but saying that Elmer Chambers knew how to play the angles was definitely not unfair. And yeah, he was Jake, son of Elmer. He hadn’t forgotten the face of his father, although he had times when he wished that wasn’t so.

“Cash, by all means cash,” Eddie said, breaking the silence. “A deal like this has to be cash. If there’s a check, we cash it in 1964, not 1977. Stick it in a gym-bag—did they have gym-bags in 1964, Suze? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. We stick it in a bag and take it to 1977. Doesn’t have to be the same day Jake bought Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum, but it ought to be close.”

“And it can’t be after July fifteenth of ’77,” Jake put in.

“God, no,” Eddie agreed. “We’d be all too likely to find Balazar’d persuaded Tower to sell, and there we’d be, bag of cash in one hand, thumbs up our asses, and big grins on our faces to pass the time of day.”