"I said I love it!" she screamed.
She faked an orgasm shortly after that, tossing her hips wildly, crying out. He came seconds later (she had shared Lloyd's bed for four days now, and had his rhythms timed almost perfectly), and as she felt his se**n beginning to run down her thigh, she happened to glance over at the night table.
Black stone.
Red flaw.
It seemed to be staring at her.
She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.
It sees me, she thought with hopeless horror in that defenseless moment before rationality reasserted itself. More: it sees THROUGH me.
Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on.
"Glad I wasn't that Bobby Terry," he said. "No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart's head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two .45 slugs into his face. At close range. I guess he deserved what he got, but I'm glad I wasn't there."
"What happened to him?"
"Sweetbuns, don't ask."
"How did he know? The big guy?"
"He was there."
She felt a chill.
"Just happened to be there?"
"Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there's trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to LA with..."
"What did he do?"
For a long time she didn't think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-be-forgotten words of her kid sister) King Shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeling she had pushed too far until Lloyd said in a funny, squeezed voice:
"He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run... we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash - he ain't all the way together himself, you know - was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric's pacing back and forth like he's addressing a jury and like it was already proved he was going to get his own way. And he says - real soft - 'Eric.' Like that. And Eric looked at him. I didn't see nothing. But Eric just looked at him for a long time. Maybe five minutes. His eyes just got bigger and bigger... and then he started to drool... and then he started to giggle... and he giggled right along with Eric, and that scared me. When Flagg laughs, you get scared. But Eric just kept right on giggling, and then he said, 'When you go back, drop him off in the Mojave.' And that's what we did. And for all I know, Eric's wandering around out there right now. He looked at Eric for five minutes and drove him out of his mind."
He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. Then he slung an arm around her. "Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?"
"I don't know... how's it going out at Indian Springs?"
Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. "Good. Real good. We're going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he's a f**king genius. About some things he's not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he's incredible."
She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the others - Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man - saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed burn tissue, and she remembered something peculiar that had happened two nights ago. Hank Rawson had been talking. He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and finished what he was saying before lighting the cigarette and shaking out the match. Dayna saw the way that Trashcan Man's eyes homed in on the match flame, the way his breathing seemed to stop. It was as if his whole being had focused on the tiny flame. It was like watching a starving man contemplate a nine-course dinner. Then Hank shook out the match and dropped the blackened stub into an ashtray. The moment had ended.