Stephen King - Song of Susannah

“I resent that!” Tower cried. “I happen to know that my bookshop has been burned flat, and through an oversight it’s uninsured! I’m ruined, and it’s all your fault! I want you out of here!”

“You defaulted on the insurance when you needed cash to buy that Hopalong Cassidy collection from the Clarence Mulford estate last year,” Aaron Deepneau said mildly. ’You told me that insurance lapse was only temporary, but-”

“It was!” Tower said. He sounded both injured and surprised, as if he had never expected betrayal from this quarter. Probably he hadn’t. “It was only temporary, goddammit!”

“-but to blame this young man,” Deepneau went on in that same composed but regretful voice, “seems most unfair.”

“I want you out of here!” Tower snarled at Eddie. ’You and your friend, as well! I have no wish to do business with you! If you ever thought I did, it was a… a misapprehension! ” He seized upon this last word as though upon a prize, and nearly shouted it out.

Eddie clasped his hands more tightly yet. He had never been more aware of the gun he was wearing; it had gained a kind of balefully lively weight. He reeked with sweat; he could smell it. And now drops of blood began to ooze out from between his palms and fall to the floor. He could feel his teeth beginning to sink into his tongue. Well, it was certainly a way to forget the pain in one’s leg. Eddie decided to give the tongue in question another brief conditional parole.

“What I remember most clearly about my visit to you-”

“You have some books that belong to me,” Tower said. “I want them back. I insist on-”

“Shut up, Cal,” Deepneau said.

“ What? ” Tower did not sound wounded now; he sounded shocked. Almost breathless.

“Stop squirming. You’ve earned this scolding, and you know it. If you’re lucky, a scolding is all it will be. So shut up and for once in your life take it like a man.”

“Hear him very well,” Roland said in a tone of dry approval.

“What I remember most clearly,” Eddie pushed on, “is how horrified you were by what I told Jack-about how I and my friends would fill Grand Army Plaza with corpses if he didn’t lay off. Some of them women and children. You didn’t like that, but do you know what, Cal? Jack Andolini’s here, right now, in East Stoneham.”

“You lie! ” Tower said. He drew in breath as he said it, turning the words into an inhaled scream.

“God,” Eddie replied, “if only I did. I saw two innocent women die, Cal. In the general store, this was. Andolini set an ambush, and if you were a praying man-I suppose you’re not, unless there’s some first edition you feel in danger of losing, but if you were-you might want to get down on your knees and pray to the god of selfish, obsessed, greedy, uncaring dishonest bookstore owners that it was a woman named Mia who told Balazar’s dinh where we were probably going to end up, her, not you. Because if they followed you, Calvin, those two women’s blood is on your hands! ”

His voice was rising steadily, and although Eddie was still looking steadfastly down, his whole body had begun to tremble. He could feel his eyes bulging in their sockets and the cords of strain standing out on his neck. He could feel his balls drawn all the way up, as small and as hard as peach-pits. Most of all he could feel the desire to spring across the room, as effortless as a ballet dancer, and bury his hands in Calvin Tower’s fat white throat. He was waiting for Roland to intervene- hoping for Roland to intervene-but the gunslinger did not, and Eddie’s voice continued to rise toward the inevitable scream of fury.

“One of those women went right down but the other… she stayed up for a couple of seconds. A bullet took off the top of her head. I think it was a machine-gun bullet, and for the couple of seconds she stayed on her feet, she looked like a volcano. Only she was blowing blood instead of lava. Well, but it was probably Mia who ratted. I’ve got a feeling about that. It’s not entirely logical, but luckily for you, it’s strong. Mia using what Susannah knew and protecting her chap.”

“Mia? Young man-Mr. Dean-I know no-”

“Shut up!” Eddie cried. “Shut up, you rat! You lying, reneging weasel! You greedy, grasping, piggy excuse for a man! Why didn’t you take out a few billboards? Hi, I’m cal tower! I’m staying on the rocket road in east stoneham! Why don’t you come see me and my friend, aaron! Bring guns!”

Slowly, Eddie looked up. Tears of rage were rolling down his face. Tower had backed up against the wall to one side of the door, his eyes huge and moist in his round face. Sweat stood out on his brow. He held his bag of freshly acquired books against his chest like a shield.

Eddie looked at him steadily. Blood dripped from between his tightly clasped hands; the spot of blood on the arm of his shirt had begun to spread again; now a trickle of blood ran from the left side of his mouth, as well. And he supposed he understood Roland’s silence. This was Eddie Dean’s job. Because he knew Tower inside as well as out, didn’t he? Knew him very well. Once upon a time not so long ago hadn’t he himself thought everything in the world but heroin pale and unimportant? Hadn’t he believed everything in the world that wasn’t heroin up for barter or sale? Had he not come to a point when he would literally have pimped his own mother in order to get the next fix? Wasn’t that why he was so angry?

“That lot on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street was never yours,” Eddie said. “Not your father’s, or his father’s, all the way back to Stefan Toren. You were only custodians, the same way I’m custodian of the gun I wear.”

“I deny that!”

“Do you?” Aaron asked. “How strange. I’ve heard you speak of that piece of land in almost those exact words-”

“ Aaron, shut up! ”

“-many times,” Deepneau finished calmly.

There was a pop. Eddie jumped, sending a fresh throb of pain up his leg from the hole in his shin. It was a match. Roland was lighting another cigarette. The filter lay on the oilcloth covering the table with two others. They looked like little pills.

“Here is what you said to me,” Eddie said, and all at once he was calm. The rage was out of him, like poison drawn from a snakebite. Roland had let him do that much, and despite his bleeding tongue and bleeding palms, he was grateful.

“Anything I said… I was under stress… I was afraid you might kill me yourself!”

“You said you had an envelope from March of 1846. You said there was a sheet of paper in the envelope, and a name written on the paper. You said-”

“ I deny- ”

“You said that if I could tell you the name written on that piece of paper, you’d sell me the lot. For one dollar. And with the understanding that you’d be getting a great deal more-millions-between now and… 1985, let’s say.”

Tower barked a laugh. “Why not offer me the Brooklyn Bridge while you’re at it?”

“You made a promise. And now your father watches you attempt to break it.”

Calvin Tower shrieked: “ I DENY EVERY WORD YOU SAY! ”

“Deny and be damned,” Eddie said. “And now I’m going to tell you something, Cal, something I know from my own beat-up but still beating heart. You’re eating a bitter meal. You don’t know that because someone told you it was sweet and your own tastebuds are numb.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about! You’re crazy!”

“No,” Aaron said. “He’s not. You’re the one who’s crazy if you don’t listen to him. I think… I think he’s giving you a chance to redeem the purpose of your life.”