"Truck!" the shopkeeper managed. "International Harvester pickup! It's outside in the lot!" He reached under his apron so suddenly that Roland came within an ace of shooting him. The shopkeeper-mercifully-didn't seem to notice. All of the store's customers were now lying prone, including the woman who'd been at the counter. Roland could smell the meat she had been in the process of trading for, and his stomach rumbled. He was tired, hungry, overloaded with grief, and there were too many things to think about, too many by far. His mind couldn't keep up. Jake would have said he needed to "take a time-out," but he didn't see any time-outs in their immediate future.
The shopkeeper was holding out a set of keys. His fingers were trembling, and the keys jingled. The late-afternoon sun slanting in the windows struck them and bounced complicated reflections into the gunslinger's eyes. First the man in the white apron had plunged a hand out of sight without asking permission (and not slowly); now this, holding up a bunch of reflective metal objects as if to blind his adversary. It was as if he were trying to get killed. But it had been that way on the day of the ambush, too, hadn't it? The storekeeper (quicker on his feet then, and without that widower's hump in his back) had followed him and Eddie from place to place like a cat who won't stop getting under your feet, seemingly oblivious to the bullets flying all around them (just as he'd seemed oblivious of the one that grooved the side of his head). At one point, Roland remembered, he had talked about his son, almost like a man in a barbershop making conversation while he waits his turn to sit under the scissors. A ka-mai, then, and such were often safe from harm. At least until ka tired of their antics and swatted them out of the world.
"Take the truck, take it and go!" the shopkeeper was telling him. "It's yours! I'm giving it to you! Really!"
"If you don't stop flashing those damned keys in my eyes, sai, what I'll take is your breath," Roland said. There was another clock behind the counter. He had already noticed that this world was full of clocks, as if the people who lived here thought that by having so many they could cage time. Ten minutes of four, which meant they'd been America-side for nine minutes already. Time was racing, racing. Somewhere nearby Stephen King was almost certainly on his afternoon walk, and in desperate danger, although he didn't know it. Or had it happened already? They-Roland, anyway-had always assumed that the writer's death would hit them hard, like another Beamquake, but maybe not. Maybe the impact of his death would be more gradual.
"How far from here to Turtleback Lane?" Roland rapped at the storekeeper.
The elderly sai only stared, eyes huge and liquid with terror.
Never in his life had Roland felt more like shooting a man...
or at least pistol-whipping him. He looked as foolish as a goat with its foot stuck in a crevice.
Then the woman lying in front of the meat-counter spoke.
She was looking up at Roland and Jake, her hands clasped together at the small of her back. "That's in Lovell, mister. It's about five miles from here."
One look in her eyes-large and brown, fearful but not panicky-and Roland decided this was the one he wanted, not the storekeeper. Unless, that was-
He turned to Jake. "Can you drive the shopkeeper's truck five miles?"
Roland saw the boy wanting to say yes, then realizing he couldn't afford to risk ultimate failure by trying to do a thing he-city boy that he was-had never done in his life.
"No," Jake said. "I don't think so. What about you?"
Roland had watched Eddie drive John Cullum's car. It didn't look that hard... but there was his hip to consider.
Rosa had told him diat dry twist moved fast-like a fire driven by strong winds, she'd said-and now he knew what she'd meant. On the trail into Calla Bryn Sturgis, the pain in his hip had been no more than an occasional twinge. Now it was as if the socket had been injected with red-hot lead, then wrapped in strands of barbed wire. The pain radiated all the way down his leg to the right ankle. He'd watched how Eddie manipulated the pedals, going back and forth between the one that made the car speed up and the one that made it slow down, always using the right foot. Which meant the ball of the right hip was always lolling in its socket.
He didn't think he could do that. Not with any degree of safety.
"I think not," he said. He took the keys from the shopkeeper, then looked at the woman lying in front of the meatcounter.
"Stand up, sai," he said.
Mrs. Tassenbaum did as she was told, and when she was on her feet, Roland gave her the keys. I keep meeting useful people in here, he thought. If this one's as good as Cullum turned out to be, we might still be all right.
"You're going to drive my young friend and me to Lovell,"
Roland said.
"To Turtleback Lane," she said.
"You say true, I say thankya."
"Are you going to kill me after you get to where you want to go?"
"Not unless you dawdle," Roland said.
She considered this, then nodded. "Then I won't. Let's go."
"Good luck, Mrs. Tassenbaum," the shopkeeper told her faintly as she started for the door.
"If I don't come back," she said, "you just remember one thing: it was my husband who invented the Internet-him and his friends, partly at CalTech and partly in their own garages. Not Albert Gore."