by Stephen King
He was glad Mort had fainted. As long as the man’s unconsciousness hadn’t affected Roland’s access to the man’s knowledge and memories—and it hadn’t—he was glad to have him out of the way.
The yellow cars were public conveyences called Tack-Sees or Cabs or Hax. The tribes which drove them, the Mortcypedia told him, were two: Spix and Mockies. To make one stop, you held your hand up like a pupil in a classroom.
Roland did this, and after several Tack-Sees which were obviously empty save for their drivers had gone by him, he saw that these had signs which read Off-Duty. Since these were Great Letters, the gunslinger didn’t need Mort’s help. He waited, then put his hand up again. This time the Tack-See pulled over. The gunslinger got into the back seat. He smelled old smoke, old sweat, old perfume. It smelled like a coach in his own world.
“Where to, my friend?” the driver asked—Roland had no idea if he was of the Spix or Mockies tribe, and had no intention of asking. It might be impolite in this world.
“I’m not sure,” Roland said.
“This ain’t no encounter group, my friend. Time is money.”
Tell him to put his flag down, the Mortcypedia told him.
“Put your flag down,” Roland said.
“That ain’t rolling nothing but time,” the driver replied.
Tell him you’ll tip him five bux, the Mortcypedia advised.
“I’ll tip you five bucks,” Roland said.
“Let’s see it,” the cabbie replied. “Money talks, bullshit walks.”
Ask him if he wants his money or if he wants to go fuck himself, the Mortcypedia advised instantly.
“Do you want the money, or do you want to go fuck yourself?” Roland asked in a cold, dead voice.
The cabbie’s eyes glanced apprehensively into the rearview mirror for just a moment, and he said no more.
Roland consulted Jack Mort’s accumulated store of knowledge more fully this time. The cabbie glanced up again, quickly, during the fifteen seconds his fare spent simply sitting there with his head slightly lowered and his left hand spread across his brow, as if he had an Excedrin Headache. The cabbie had decided to tell the guy to get out or he’d yell for a cop when the fare looked up and said mildly, “I’d like you to take me to Seventh Avenue and Forty-Ninth street. For this trip I will pay you ten dollars over the fare on your taxi meter, no matter what your tribe.”
A weirdo, the driver (a WASP from Vermont trying to break into showbiz) thought, but maybe a rich weirdo. He dropped the cab into gear. “We’re there, buddy,” he said, and pulling into traffic he added mentally, And the sooner the better.
4
Improvise. That was the word.
The gunslinger saw the blue-and-white parked down the block when he got out, and read Police as Posse without checking Mort’s store of knowledge. Two gunslingers inside, drinking something—coffee, maybe—from white paper glasses. Gunslingers, yes—but they looked fat and lax.
He reached into Jack Mort’s wallet (except it was much too small to be a real wallet; a real wallet was almost as big as a purse and could carry all of a man’s things, if he wasn’t travelling too heavy) and gave the driver a bill with the number 20 on it. The cabbie drove away fast. It was easily the biggest tip he’d make that day, but the guy was so freaky he felt he had earned every cent of it.
The gunslinger looked at the sign over the shop.
CLEMENTS GUNS AND SPORTING GOODS, it said. AMMO, FISHING TACKLE, OFFICIAL FACSIMILES.
He didn’t understand all of the words, but one look in the window was all it took for him to see Mort had brought him to the right place. There were wristbands on display, badges of rank . . . and guns. Rifles, mostly, but pistols as well. They were chained, but that didn’t matter.
He would know what he needed when—if—he saw it.
Roland consulted Jack Mort’s mind—a mind exactly sly enough to suit his purposes—for more than a minute.
5
One of the cops in the blue-and-white elbowed the other. “Now that,” he said, “is a serious comparison shopper.”
His partner laughed. “Oh God,” he said in an effeminate voice as the man in the business suit and gold-rimmed glasses finished his study of the merchandise on display and went inside. “I think he jutht dethided on the lavender handcuffths.”
The first cop choked on a mouthful of lukewarm coffee and sprayed it back into the styrofoam cup in a gust of laughter.
6
A clerk came over almost at once and asked if he could be of help.
“I wonder,” the man in the conservative blue suit replied, “if you have a paper . . .” He paused, appeared to think deeply, and then looked up. “A chart, I mean, which shows pictures of revolver ammunition.”
“You mean a caliber chart?” the clerk asked.
The customer paused, then said, “Yes. My brother has a revolver. I have fired it, but it’s been a good many years. I think I will know the bullets if I see them.”
“Well, you may think so,” the clerk replied, “but it can be hard to tell. Was it a .22? A .38? Or maybe—”
“If you have a chart, I’ll know,” Roland said.
“Just a sec.” The clerk looked at the man in the blue suit doubtfully for a moment, then shrugged. Fuck, the customer was always right, even when he was wrong . . . if he had the dough to pay, that was. Money talked, bullshit walked. “I got a Shooter’s Bible. Maybe that’s what you ought to look at.”
“Yes.” He smiled. Shooter’s Bible. It was a noble name for a book.
The man rummaged under the counter and brought out a well-thumbed volume as thick as any book the gunslinger had ever seen in his life—and yet this man seemed to handle it as if it were no more valuable than a handful of stones.
He opened it on the counter and turned it around. “Take a look. Although if it’s been years, you’re shootin’ in the dark.” He looked surprised, then smiled. “Pardon my pun.”
Roland didn’t hear. He was bent over the book, studying pictures which seemed almost as real as the things they represented, marvellous pictures the Mortcypedia identified as Fottergraffs.
He turned the pages slowly. No . . . no . . . no . . .
He had almost lost hope when he saw it. He looked up at the clerk with such blazing excitement that the clerk felt a little afraid.
“There!” he said. “There! Right there!”
The photograph he was tapping was one of a Winchester .45 pistol shell. It was not exactly the same as his own shells, because it hadn’t been hand-thrown or hand-loaded, but he could see without even consulting the figures (which would have meant almost nothing to him anyway) that it would chamber and fire from his guns.
“Well, all right, I guess you found it,” the clerk said, “but don’t cream your jeans, fella. I mean, they’re just bullets.”
“You have them?”
“Sure. How many boxes do you want?”
“How many in a box?”
“Fifty.” The clerk began to look at the gunslinger with real suspicion. If the guy was planning to buy shells, he must know he’d have to show a Permit to Carry photo-I.D. No P.C., no ammo, not for handguns; it was the law in the borough of Manhattan. And if this dude had a handgun permit, how come he didn’t know how many shells came in a standard box of ammo?
“Fifty!” Now the guy was staring at him with slack-jawed surprise. He was off the wall, all right.
The clerk edged a bit to his left, a bit nearer the cash register . . . and, not so coincidentally, a bit nearer to his own gun, a .357 Mag which he kept fully loaded in a spring clip under the counter.
“Fifty!” the gunslinger repeated. He had expected five, ten, perhaps as many as a dozen, but this . . . this . . .
How much money do you have? he asked the Mortcypedia. The Mortcypedia didn’t know, not exactly, but thought there was at least sixty bux in his wallet.
“And how much does a box cost?” It would be more than sixty dollars, he supposed, but the man might be pe
rsuaded to sell him part of a box, or—
“Seventeen-fifty,” the clerk said. “But, mister—”
Jack Mort was an accountant, and this time there was no waiting; translation and answer came simultaneously.
“Three,” the gunslinger said. “Three boxes.” He tapped the Fotergraff of the shells with one finger. One hundred and fifty rounds! Ye gods! What a mad storehouse of riches this world was!
The clerk wasn’t moving.
“You don’t have that many,” the gunslinger said. He felt no real surprise. It had been too good to be true. A dream.
“Oh, I got Winchester .45s. I got .45s up the kazoo.” The clerk took another step to the left, a step closer to the cash register and the gun. If the guy was a nut, something the clerk expected to find out for sure any second now, he was soon going to be a nut with an extremely large hole in his midsection. “I got .45 ammo up the old ying-yang. What I want to know, mister, is if you got the card.”
“Card?”
“A handgun permit with a photo. I can’t sell you handgun ammo unless you can show me one. If you want to buy ammo without a P.C., you’re gonna hafta go up to Westchester.”
The gunslinger stared at the man blankly. This was all gabble to him. He understood none of it. His Mortcypedia had some vague notion of what the man meant, but Mort’s ideas were too vague to be trusted in this case. Mort had never owned a gun in his life. He did his nasty work in other ways.
The man sidled another step to the left without taking his eyes from his customer’s face and the gunslinger thought: He’s got a gun. He expects me to make trouble . . . or maybe he wants me to make trouble. Wants an excuse to shoot me.
Improvise.
He remembered the gunslingers sitting in their blue and white carriage down the street. Gunslingers, yes, peacekeepers, men charged with keeping the world from moving on. But these had looked—at least on a passing glance—to be nearly as soft and unobservant as everyone else in this world of lotus-eaters; just two men in uniforms and caps, slouched down in the seats of their carriage, drinking coffee. He might have misjudged. He hoped for all their sakes—that he had not.
“Oh! I understand,” the gunslinger said, and drew an apologetic smile on Jack Mort’s face. “I’m sorry. I guess I haven’t kept track of how much the world has moved on—changed—since I last owned a gun.”
“No harm done,” the clerk said, relaxing minutely. Maybe the guy was all right. Or maybe he was pulling a gag.
“I wonder if I could look at that cleaning kit?” Roland pointed to a shelf behind the clerk.
“Sure.” The clerk turned to get it, and when he did, the gunslinger removed the wallet from Mort’s inside jacket pocket. He did this with the flickering speed of a fast draw. The clerk’s back was to him for less than four seconds, but when he turned back to Mort, the wallet was on the floor.
“It’s a beaut,” the clerk said, smiling, having decided the guy was okay after all. Hell, he knew how lousy you felt when you made a horse’s ass of yourself. He had done it in the Marines enough times. “And you don’t need a goddam permit to buy a cleaning kit, either. Ain’t freedom wonderful?”
“Yes,” the gunslinger said seriously, and pretended to look closely at the cleaning kit, although a single glance was enough to show him that it was a shoddy thing in a shoddy box. While he looked, he carefully pushed Mort’s wallet under the counter with his foot.
After a moment he pushed the kit back with a passable show of regret. “I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.”
“All right,” the clerk said, losing interest abruptly. Since the guy wasn’t crazy and was obviously a looker, not a buyer, their relationship was at an end. Bullshit walks. “Anything else?” His mouth asked while his eyes told blue-suit to get out.
“No, thank you.” The gunslinger walked out with a look back. Mort’s wallet was deep under the counter. Roland had set out his own honeypot.
7
Officers Carl Delevan and George O’Mearah had finished their coffee and were about to move on when the man in the blue suit came out of Clements’—which both cops believed to be a powderhorn (police slang for a legal gunshop which sometimes sells guns to independent stick-up men with proven credentials and which does business, sometimes in bulk, to the Mafia), and approached their squad car.
He leaned down and looked in the passenger side window at O’Mearah. O’Mearah expected the guy to sound like a fruit—probably as fruity as his routine about the lavender handcuffths had suggested, but a pouf all the same. Guns aside, Clements’ did a lively trade in handcuffs. These were legal in Manhattan, and most of the people buying them weren’t amateur Houdinis (the cops didn’t like it, but when had what the cops thought on any given subject ever changed things?). The buyers were homos with a little taste for s & m. But the man didn’t sound like a fag at all. His voice was flat and expressionless, polite but somehow dead.
“The tradesman in there took my wallet,” he said.
“Who?” O’Mearah straightened up fast. They had been itching to bust Justin Clements for a year and a half. If it could be done, maybe the two of them could finally swap these bluesuits for detectives’ badges. Probably just a pipe-dream—this was too good to be true—but just the same . . .
“The tradesman. The—” A brief pause. “The clerk.”
O’Mearah and Carl Delevan exchanged a glance.
“Black hair?” Delevan asked. “On the stocky side?”
Again there was the briefest pause. “Yes. His eyes were brown. Small scar under one of them.”
There was something about the guy . . . O’Mearah couldn’t put his finger on it then, but remembered later on, when there weren’t so many other things to think about. The chief of which, of course, was the simple fact that the gold detective’s badge didn’t matter; it turned out that just holding onto the jobs they had would be a pure brassy-ass miracle.
But years later there was a brief moment of epiphany when O’Mearah took his two sons to the Museum of Science in Boston. They had a machine there—a computer—that played tic-tac-toe, and unless you put your X in the middle square on your first move, the machine fucked you over every time. But there was always a pause as it checked its memory for all possible gambits. He and his boys had been fascinated. But there was something spooky about it . . . and then he remembered Blue-Suit. He remembered because Blue-Suit had had that some fucking habit. Talking to him had been like talking to a robot.
Delevan had no such feeling, but nine years later, when he took his own son (then eighteen and about to start college) to the movies one night, Delevan would rise unexpectedly to his feet about thirty minutes into the feature and scream, “It’s him! That’s HIM! That’s the guy in the fucking blue suit! The guy who was at Cle—”
Somebody would shout Down in front! but needn’t have bothered; Delevan, seventy pounds overweight and a heavy smoker, would be struck by a fatal heart attack before the complainer even got to the second word. The man in the blue suit who approached their cruiser that day and told them about his stolen wallet didn’t look like the star of the movie, but the dead delivery of words had been the same; so had been the somehow relentless yet graceful way he moved.
The movie, of course, had been The Terminator.
8
The cops exchanged a glance. The man Blue-Suit was talking about wasn’t Clements, but almost as good: “Fat Johnny” Holden, Clements’ brother-in-law. But to have done something as totally dumb-ass as simply stealing a guy’s wallet would be—
—would be right up that gink’s alley, O’Mearah’s mind finished, and he had to put a hand to his mouth to cover a momentary little grin.
“Maybe you better tell us exactly what happened,” Delevan said. “You can start with your name.”
Again, the man’s response struck O’Mearah as a little wrong, a little off-beat. In this city, where it sometimes seemed that seventy per cent of the population believed Go fuck yourself was American for Have a nice day, he would
have expected the guy to say something like, Hey, that S.O.B. took my wallet! Are you going to get it back for me or are we going to stand out here playing Twenty Questions?
But there was the nicely cut suit, the manicured fingernails. A guy maybe used to dealing with bureaucratic bullshit. In truth, George O’Mearah didn’t care much. The thought of busting Fat Johnny Holden and using him as a lever on Arnold Clements made O’Mearah’s mouth water. For one dizzy moment he even allowed himself to imagine using Holden to get Clements and Clements to get one of the really big guys—that wop Balazar, for instance, or maybe Ginelli. That wouldn’t be too tacky. Not too tacky at all.
“My name is Jack Mort,” the man said.
Delevan had taken a butt-warped pad from his back pocket. “Address?”
That slight pause. Like the machine, O’Mearah thought again. A moment of silence, then an almost audible click.
“409 Park Avenue South.”
Delevan jotted it down.
“Social Security number?”
After another slight pause, Mort recited it.
“Want you to understand I gotta ask you these questions for identification purposes. If the guy did take your wallet, it’s nice if I can say you told me certain stuff before I take it into my possession. You understand.”
“Yes.” Now there was the slightest hint of impatience in the man’s voice. It made O’Mearah feel a little better about him somehow. “Just don’t drag it out any more than you have to. Time passes, and—”
