by Stephen King
His own eyes looked back at him.
There were no alien voices in his head.
No feeling of being watched.
You had a momentary fugue, Eddie, the great sage and eminent junkie advised him. A not uncommon phenomenon in one who is going cool turkey.
Eddie glanced at his watch. An hour and a half to New York. The plane was scheduled to land at 4:05 EDT, but it was really going to be high noon. Showdown time.
He went back to his seat. His drink was on the divider. He took two sips and the stew came back to ask him if she could do anything else for him. He opened his mouth to say no . . . and then there was another of those odd blank moments.
5
“I’d like something to eat, please,” the gunslinger said through Eddie Dean’s mouth.
“We’ll be serving a hot snack in—”
“I’m really starving, though,” the gunslinger said with perfect truthfulness. “Anything at all, even a popkin—”
“Popkin?” the army woman frowned at him, and the gunslinger suddenly looked into the prisoner’s mind. Sandwich . . . the word was as distant as the murmur in a conch shell.
“A sandwich, even,” the gunslinger said.
The army woman looked doubtful. “Well . . . I have some tuna fish . . .”
“That would be fine,” the gunslinger said, although he had never heard of tooter fish in his life. Beggars could not be choosers.
“You do look a little pale,” the army woman said. “I thought maybe it was air-sickness.”
“Pure hunger.”
She gave him a professional smile. “I’ll see what I can rustle up.”
Russel? the gunslinger thought dazedly. In his own world to russel was a slang verb meaning to take a woman by force. Never mind. Food would come. He had no idea if he could carry it back through the doorway to the body which needed it so badly, but one thing at a time, one thing at a time.
Russel, he thought, and Eddie Dean’s head shook, as if in disbelief.
Then the gunslinger retreated again.
6
Nerves, the great oracle and eminent junkie assured him. Just nerves. All part of the cool turkey experience, little brother.
But if nerves was what it was, how come he felt this odd sleepiness stealing over him—odd because he should have been itchy, ditsy, feeling that urge to squirm and scratch that came before the actual shakes; even if he had not been in Henry’s “cool turkey” state, there was the fact that he was about to attempt bringing two pounds of coke through U.S. Customs, a felony punishable by not less than ten years in federal prison, and he seemed to suddenly be having blackouts as well.
Still, that feeling of sleepiness.
He sipped at his drink again, then let his eyes slip shut.
Why’d you black out?
I didn’t, or she’d be running for all the emergency gear they carry.
Blanked out, then. It’s no good either way. You never blanked out like that before in your life. Nodded out, yeah, but never blanked out.
Something odd about his right hand, too. It seemed to throb vaguely, as if he had pounded it with a hammer.
He flexed it without opening his eyes. No ache. No throb. No blue bombardier’s eyes. As for the blank-outs, they were just a combination of going cool turkey and a good case of what the great oracle and eminent et cetera would no doubt call the smuggler’s blues.
But I’m going to sleep, just the same, he thought. How ’bout that?
Henry’s face drifted by him like an untethered balloon. Don’t worry, Henry was saying. You’ll be all right, little brother. You fly down there to Nassau, check in at the Aquinas, there’ll be a man come by Friday night. One of the good guys. He’ll fix you, leave you enough stuff to take you through the weekend. Sunday night he brings the coke and you give him the key to the safe deposit box. Monday morning you do the routine just like Balazar said. This guy will play; he knows how it’s supposed to go. Monday noon you fly out, and with a face as honest as yours, you’ll breeze through Customs and we’ll be eating steak in Sparks before the sun goes down. It’s gonna be a breeze, little brother, nothing but a cool breeze.
But it had been sort of a warm breeze after all.
The trouble with him and Henry was they were like Charlie Brown and Lucy. The only difference was once in awhile Henry would hold onto the football so Eddie could kick it—not often, but once in awhile. Eddie had even thought, while in one of his heroin dazes, that he ought to write Charles Schultz a letter. Dear Mr. Schultz, he would say. You’re missing a bet by ALWAYS having Lucy pull the football up at the last second. She ought to hold it down there once in awhile. Nothing Charlie Brown could ever predict, you understand. Sometimes she’d maybe hold it down for him to kick three, even four times in a row, then nothing for a month, then once, and then nothing for three or four days, and then, you know, you get the idea. That would REALLY fuck the kid up, wouldn’t it?
Eddie knew it would really fuck the kid up.
From experience he knew it.
One of the good guys, Henry had said, but the guy who showed up had been a sallow-skinned thing with a British accent, a hairline moustache that looked like something out of a 1940’s film noire, and yellow teeth that all leaned inward, like the teeth of a very old animal trap.
“You have the key, Senor?” he asked, except in that British public school accent it came out sounding like what you called your last year of high school.
“The key’s safe,” Eddie said, “if that’s what you mean.”
“Then give it to me.”
“That’s not the way it goes. You’re supposed to have something to take me through the weekend. Sunday night you’re supposed to bring me something. I give you the key. Monday you go into town and use it to get something else. I don’t know what, ’cause that’s not my business.”
Suddenly there was a small flat blue automatic in the sallow-skinned thing’s hand. “Why don’t you just give it to me, Senor? I will save time and effort; you will save your life.”
There was deep steel in Eddie Dean, junkie or no junkie. Henry knew it; more important, Balazar knew it. That was why he had been sent. Most of them thought he had gone because he was hooked through the bag and back again. He knew it, Henry knew it, Balazar, too. But only he and Henry knew he would have gone even if he was as straight as a stake. For Henry. Balazar hadn’t got quite that far in his figuring, but fuck Balazar.
“Why don’t you just put that thing away, you little scuzz?” Eddie asked. “Or do you maybe want Balazar to send someone down here and cut your eyes out of your head with a rusty knife?”
The sallow thing smiled. The gun was gone like magic; in its place was a small envelope. He handed it to Eddie. “Just a little joke, you know.”
“If you say so.”
“I see you Sunday night.”
He turned toward the door.
“I think you better wait.”
The sallow thing turned back, eyebrows raised. “You think I won’t go if I want to go?”
“I think if you go and this is bad shit, I’ll be gone tomorrow. Then you’ll be in deep shit.”
The sallow thing turned sulky. It sat in the room’s single easy chair while Eddie opened the envelope and spilled out a small quantity of brown stuff. It looked evil. He looked at the sallow thing.
“I know how it looks, it looks like shit, but that’s just the cut,” the sallow thing said. “It’s fine.”
Eddie tore a sheet of paper from the notepad on the desk and separated a small amount of the brown powder from the pile. He fingered it and then rubbed it on the roof of his mouth. A second later he spat into the wastebasket.
“You want to die? Is that it? You got a death-wish?”
“That’s all there is.” The sallow thing looked more sulky than ever.
“I have a reservation out tomorrow,” Eddie said. This was a lie, but he didn’t believe the sallow thing had the resources to check it. “TWA. I did it on my own, just in
case the contact happened to be a fuck-up like you. I don’t mind. It’ll be a relief, actually. I wasn’t cut out for this sort of work.”
The sallow thing sat and cogitated. Eddie sat and concentrated on not moving. He felt like moving; felt like slipping and sliding, bipping and bopping, shucking and jiving, scratching his scratches and cracking his crackers. He even felt his eyes wanting to slide back to the pile of brown powder, although he knew it was poison. He had fixed at ten that morning; the same number of hours had gone by since then. But if he did any of those things, the situation would change. The sallow thing was doing more than cogitating; it was watching him, trying to calculate the depth of him.
“I might be able to find something,” it said at last.
“Why don’t you try?” Eddie said. “But come eleven, I turn out the light and put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and anybody that knocks after I do that, I call the desk and say someone’s bothering me, send a security guy.”
“You are a fuck,” the sallow thing said in its impeccable British accent.
“No,” Eddie said, “a fuck is what you expected. I came with my legs crossed. You want to be here before eleven with something that I can use—it doesn’t have to be great, just something I can use—or you will be one dead scuzz.”
7
The sallow thing was back long before eleven; he was back by nine-thirty. Eddie guessed the other stuff had been in his car all along.
A little more powder this time. Not white, but at least a dull ivory color, which was mildly hopeful.
Eddie tasted. It seemed all right. Actually better than all right. Pretty good. He rolled a bill and snorted.
“Well, then, until Sunday,” the sallow thing said briskly, getting to its feet.
“Wait,” Eddie said, as if he were the one with the gun. In a way he was. The gun was Balazar. Emilio Balazar was a high-caliber big shot in New York’s wonderful world of drugs.
“Wait?” the sallow thing turned and looked at Eddie as if he believed Eddie must be insane. “For what?”
“Well, I was actually thinking of you,” Eddie said. “If I get really sick from what I just put into my body, it’s off. If I die, of course it’s off. I was just thinking that, if I only get a little sick, I might give you another chance. You know, like that story about how some kid rubs a lamp and gets three wishes.”
“It will not make you sick. That’s China White.”
“If that’s China White,” Eddie said, “I’m Dwight Gooden.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
The sallow thing sat down. Eddie sat by the motel room desk with the little pile of white powder nearby (the D-Con or whatever it had been had long since gone down the john). On TV the Braves were getting shellacked by the Mets, courtesy of WTBS and the big satellite dish on the Aquinas Hotel’s roof. Eddie felt a faint sensation of calm which seemed to come from the back of his mind . . . except where it was really coming from, he knew from what he had read in the medical journals, was from the bunch of living wires at the base of his spine, that place where heroin addiction takes place by causing an unnatural thickening of the nerve stem.
Want to take a quick cure? he had asked Henry once. Break your spine, Henry. Your legs stop working, and so does your cock, but you stop needing the needle right away.
Henry hadn’t thought it was funny.
In truth, Eddie hadn’t thought it was that funny either. When the only fast way you could get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves, you were dealing with one heavy monkey. That was no capuchin, no cute little organ grinder’s mascot; that was a big mean old baboon.
Eddie began to sniffle.
“Okay,” he said at last. “It’ll do. You can vacate the premises, scuzz.”
The sallow thing got up. “I have friends,” he said. “They could come in here and do things to you. You’d beg to tell me where that key is.”
“Not me, champ,” Eddie said. “Not this kid.” And smiled. He didn’t know how the smile looked, but it must not have looked all that cheery because the sallow thing vacated the premises, vacated them fast, vacated them without looking back.
When Eddie Dean was sure he was gone, he cooked.
Fixed.
Slept.
8
As he was sleeping now.
The gunslinger, somehow inside this man’s mind (a man whose name he still did not know; the lowling the prisoner thought of as “the sallow thing” had not known it, and so had never spoken it), watched this as he had once watched plays as a child, before the world had moved on . . . or so he thought he watched, because plays were all he had ever seen. If he had ever seen a moving picture, he would have thought of that first. The things he did not actually see he had been able to pluck from the prisoner’s mind because the associations were close. It was odd about the name, though. He knew the name of the prisoner’s brother, but not the name of the man himself. But of course names were secret things, full of power.
And neither of the things that mattered was the man’s name. One was the weakness of the addiction. The other was the steel buried inside that weakness, like a good gun sinking in quicksand.
This man reminded the gunslinger achingly of Cuthbert.
Someone was coming. The prisoner, sleeping, did not hear. The gunslinger, not sleeping, did, and came forward again.
9
Great, Jane thought. He tells me how hungry he is and I fix something up for him because he’s a little bit cute, and then he falls asleep on me.
Then the passenger—a guy of about twenty, tall, wearing clean, slightly faded blue jeans and a paisley shirt—opened his eyes a little and smiled at her.
“Thankee sai,” he said—or so it sounded. Almost archaic . . . or foreign. Sleep-talk, that’s all, Jane thought.
“You’re welcome.” She smiled her best stewardess smile, sure he would fall asleep again and the sandwich would still be there, uneaten, when it was time for the actual meal service.
Well, that was what they taught you to expect, wasn’t it?
She went back to the galley to catch a smoke.
She struck the match, lifted it halfway to her cigarette, and there it stopped, unnoticed, because that wasn’t all they taught you to expect.
I thought he was a little bit cute. Mostly because of his eyes. His hazel eyes.
But when the man in 3A had opened his eyes a moment ago, they hadn’t been hazel; they had been blue. Not sweet-sexy blue like Paul Newman’s eyes, either, but the color of icebergs. They—
“Ow!”
The match had reached her fingers. She shook it out.
“Jane?” Paula asked. “You all right?”
“Fine. Daydreaming.”
She lit another match and this time did the job right. She had only taken a single drag when the perfectly reasonable explanation occurred to her. He wore contacts. Of course. The kind that changed the color of your eyes. He had gone into the bathroom. He had been in there long enough for her to worry about him being airsick—he had that pallid complexion, the look of a man who is not quite well. But he had only been taking out his contact lenses so he could nap more comfortably. Perfectly reasonable.
You may feel something, a voice from her own not-so-distant past spoke suddenly. Some little tickle. You may see something just a little bit wrong.
Colored contact lenses.
Jane Dorning personally knew over two dozen people who wore contacts. Most of them worked for the airline. No one ever said anything about it, but she thought maybe one reason was they all sensed the passengers didn’t like to see flight personnel wearing glasses—it made them nervous.
Of all those people, she knew maybe four who had color-contacts. Ordinary contact lenses were expensive; colored ones cost the earth. All of the people of Jane’s acquaintance who cared to lay out that sort of money were women, all of them extremely vain.
So what? Guys can be vain, too. Why not? He’s goodloo
king.
No. He wasn’t. Cute, maybe, but that was as far as it went, and with the pallid complexion he only made it to cute by the skin of his teeth. So why the color-contacts?
Airline passengers are often afraid of flying.
In a world where hijacking and drug-smuggling had become facts of life, airline personnel are often afraid of passengers.
The voice that had initiated these thoughts had been that of an instructor at flight school, a tough old battle-axe who looked as if she could have flown the mail with Wiley Post, saying: Don’t ignore your suspicions. If you forget everything else you’ve learned about coping with potential or actual terrorists, remember this: don’t ignore your suspicions. In some cases you’ll get a crew who’ll say during the debriefing that they didn’t have any idea until the guy pulled out a grenade and said hang a left for Cuba or everyone on the aircraft is going to join the jet-stream. But in most cases you get two or three different people—mostly flight attendants, which you women will be in less than a month—who say they felt something. Some little tickle. A sense that the guy in 91C or the young woman in 5A was a little wrong. They felt something, but they did nothing. Did they get fired for that? Christ, no! You can’t put a guy in restraints because you don’t like the way he scratches his pimples. The real problem is they felt something . . . and then forgot.
The old battle-axe had raised one blunt finger. Jane Dorning, along with her fellow classmates, had listened raptly as she said, If you feel that little tickle, don’t do anything . . . but that includes not forgetting. Because there’s always that one little chance that you just might be able to stop something before it gets started . . . something like an unscheduled twelve-day layover on the tarmac of some shitpot Arab country.
Just colored contacts, but . . .
Thankee, sai.
Sleep-talk? Or a muddled lapse into some other language?
