Thankee, sai.
Sleep-talk? Or a muddled lapse into some other language?
She would watch, Jane decided.
And she would not forget.
10
Now, the gunslinger thought. Now we'll see, won't we?
He had been able to come from his world into this body through the door on the beach. What he needed to find out was whether or not he could carry things back. Oh, not himself, he was confident that he could return through the door and reenter his own poisoned, sickening body at any time he should desire. But other things? Physical things? Here, for instance, in front of him, was food: something the woman in the uniform had called a tooter-fish sandwich. The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was, but he knew a popkin when he saw it, although this one looked curiously uncooked.
His body needed to eat, and his body would need to drink, but more than either, his body needed some sort of medicine. It would die from the lobstrosity's bite without it. There might be such medicine in this world; in a world where carriages rode through the air far above where even the strongest eagle could fly, anything seemed possible. But it would not matter how much powerful medicine there was here if he could carry nothing physical through the door.
You could live in this body, gunslinger, the voice of the man in black whispered deep inside his head. Leave that piece of breathing meat over there for the lobster-things. It's only a husk, anyway.
He would not do that. For one thing it would be the most murderous sort of thievery, because he would not be content to be just a passenger for long, looking out of this man's eyes like a traveller looking out of a coach window at the passing scenery.
For another, he was Roland. If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland. He would die crawling toward the Tower, if that was what was required.
Then the odd harsh practicality that lived beside the romantic in his nature like a tiger with a roe reasserted itself. There was no need to think of dying with the experiment not yet made.
He picked up the popkin. It had been cut in two halves. He held one in each hand. He opened the prisoner's eyes and looked out of them. No one was looking at him (although, in the galley, Jane Dorning was thinking about him, and very hard).
Roland turned toward the door and went through, holding the popkin-halves in his hands.
11
First he heard the grinding roar of an incoming wave; next he heard the argument of many sea-birds arising from the closest rocks as he struggled to a sitting position (cowardly buggers were creeping up, he thought, and they would have been taking pecks out of me soon enough, still breathing or no―they're nothing but vultures with a coat of paint); then he became aware that one popkin half―the one in his right hand―had tumbled onto the hard gray sand because he had been holding it with a whole hand when he came through the door and now was―or had been―holding it in a hand which had suffered a forty per cent reduction.
He picked it up clumsily, pinching it between his thumb and ring finger, brushed as much of the sand from it as he could, and took a tentative bite. A moment later he was wolfing it, not noticing the few bits of sand which ground between his teeth. Seconds later he turned his attention to the other half. It was gone in three bites.
The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was―only that it was delicious. That seemed enough.
12
In the plane, no one saw the tuna sandwich disappear. No one saw Eddie Dean's hands grasp the two halves of it tightly enough to make deep thumb-indentations in the white bread.
No one saw the sandwich fade to transparency, then disappear, leaving only a few crumbs.
About twenty seconds after this had happened, Jane Dorning snuffed her cigarette and crossed the head of the cabin. She got her book from her totebag, but what she really wanted was another look at 3A.
He appeared to be deeply asleep ... but the sandwich was gone.
Jesus, Jane thought. He didn't eat it; he swallowed it whole. And now he's asleep again? Are you kidding?
Whatever was tickling at her about 3A, Mr. Now-They're-Hazel-Now-They're-Blue, kept right on tickling. Something about him was not right.
Something.
CHAPTER 3 CONTACT AND LANDING
1
Eddie was awakened by an announcement from the copilot that they should be landing at Kennedy International, where the visibility was unlimited, the winds out of the west at ten miles an hour, and the temperature a jolly seventy degrees, in forty-five minutes or so. He told them that, if he didn't get another chance, he wanted to thank them one and all for choosing Detta.
He looked around and saw people checking their duty declaration cards and their proofs of citizenship―coming in from Nassau your driver's license and a credit card with a stateside bank listed on it was supposed to be enough, but most still carried passports―and Eddie felt a steel wire start to tighten inside him. He still couldn't believe he had gone to sleep, and so soundly.
He got up and went to the restroom. The bags of coke under his arms felt as if they were resting easily and firmly, fitting as nicely to the contours of his sides as they had in the hotel room where a soft-spoken American named William Wilson had strapped them on. Following the strapping operation, the man whose name Poe had made famous ( Wilson had only looked blankly at Eddie when Eddie made some allusion to this) handed over the shirt. Just an ordinary paisley shirt, a little faded, the sort of thing any frat-boy might wear back on the plane following a short pre-exams holiday ... except this one was specially tailored to hide unsightly bulges.
''You check everything once before you set down just to be sure," Wilson said, "but you're gonna be fine."
Eddie didn't know if he was going to be fine or not, but he had another reason for wanting to use the John before the FASTEN SEATBELTS light came on. In spite of all temptation―and most of last night it hadn't been temptation but raging need―he had managed to hold onto the last little bit of what the sallow thing had had the temerity to call China White.
Clearing customs from Nassau wasn't like clearing customs from Haiti or Quincon or Bogota , but there were still people watching. Trained people. He needed any and every edge he could get. If he could go in there a little cooled out, just a little, it might be the one thing that put him over the top.
He snorted the powder, flushed the little twist of paper it had been in down the John, then washed his hands.
Of course, if you make it, you'll never know, will you? he thought. No. He wouldn't. And wouldn't care.
On his way back to his seat he saw the stewardess who had brought him the drink he hadn't finished. She smiled at him. He smiled back, sat down, buckled his seat-belt, took out the flight magazine, turned the pages, and looked at pictures and words. Neither made any impression on them. That steel wire continued to tighten around his gut, and when the FASTEN SEATBELTS light did come on, it took a double turn and cinched tight.
The heroin had hit―he had the sniffles to prove it―but he sure couldn't feel it.
One thing he did feel shortly before landing was another of those unsettling periods of blankness ... short, but most definitely there.
The 727 banked over the water of Long Island Sound and started in.
2
Jane Dorning had been in the business class galley, helping Peter and Anne stow the last of the after-meal drinks glasses when the guy who looked like a college kid went into the first class bathroom.
He was returning to his seat when she brushed aside the curtain between business and first, and she quickened her step without even thinking about it, catching him with her smile, making him look up and smile back.
His eyes were hazel again.
All right, all right. He went into the John and took them out before his nap; he went into the John and put them in again afterwards. For Christ's sake, Janey! You're being a goose!
She wasn't, though. It was nothing she could put her finger on, but she was not being a goose.
He's too pale.
So what? Thousands of people are too pale, including your own mother since her gall bladder went to hell.
He had very arresting blue eyes―maybe not as cute as the hazel contacts―but certainly arresting. So why the bother and expense?
Because he likes designer eyes. Isn't that enough?
No.
Shortly before FASTEN SEATBELTS and final cross-check, she did something she had never done before; she did it with that tough old battle-axe of an instructor in mind. She filled a Thermos bottle with hot coffee and put on the red plastic top without first pushing the stopper into the bottle's throat. She screwed the top on only until she felt it catch the first thread.
Susy Douglas was making the final approach announcement, telling the geese to extinguish their cigarettes, telling them they would have to stow what they had taken out, telling them a Detta gate agent would meet the flight, telling them to check and make sure they had their duty-declaration cards and proofs of citizenship, telling them it would now be necessary to pick up all cups, glasses and speaker sets.
I'm surprised we don't have to check to make sure they're dry, Jane thought distractedly. She felt her own steel wire wrapping itself around her guts, cinching them tight.
"Get my side," Jane said as Susy hung up the mike.
Susy glanced at the Thermos, then at Jane's face. "Jane? Are you sick? You look as white as a―"
"I'm not sick. Get my side. I'll explain when you get back." Jane glanced briefly at the jump-seats beside the left-hand exit door. "I want to ride shotgun."
"Jane―"
"Get my side."
"All right," Susy said. "All right, Jane. No problem."
Jane Dorning sat down in the jump-seat closest to the aisle. She held the Thermos in her hands and made no move to fasten the web-harness. She wanted to keep the Thermos in complete control, and that meant both hands.
Susy thinks I've flipped out.
Jane hoped she had.
IfCaptain McDonald lands hard, I'm going to have blisters all over my hands.
She would risk it.
The plane was dropping. The man in 3A, the man with the two-tone eyes and the pale face, suddenly leaned down and pulled his travelling bag from under the seat.
This is it, Jane thought. This is where he brings out the grenade or the automatic weapon or whatever the hell he's got.
And the moment she saw it, the very moment, she was going to flip the red top off the Thermos in her slightly trembling hands, and there was going to be one very surprised Friend of Allah rolling around on the aisle floor of Detta Flight 901 while his skin boiled on his face.
3A unzipped the bag.
Jane got ready.