The drawing of the three - Stephen King [162]
Fat Johnny turned away without a word, but not before O’Mearah had seen the tears welling in his eyes and the wet patch on his pants. He felt no pity.
“Where is he?” Carl Delevan asked in a furry, buzzing voice.
“He left,” Fat Johnny said dully. “That’s all I know. He left. I thought he was gonna kill me.”
Delevan was getting slowly to his feet. He felt tacky wetness on the side of his face and looked at his fingers. Blood. Fuck. He groped for his gun and kept groping, groping and hoping, long after his fingers had assured him his gun and holster were gone. O’Mearah merely had a headache; Delevan felt as if someone had used the inside of his head as a nuclear weapons testing site.
“Guy took my gun,” he said to O’Mearah. His voice was so slurry the words were almost impossible to make out.
“Join the club.”
“He still here?” Delevan took a step toward O’Mearah, tilted to the left as if he were on the deck of a ship in a heavy sea, and then managed to right himself.
“No.”
“How long?” Delevan looked at Fat Johnny, who didn’t answer, perhaps because Fat Johnny, whose back was turned, thought Delevan was still talking to his partner. Delevan, not a man noted for even temper and restrained behavior under the best of circumstances, roared at the man, even though it made his head feel like it was going to crack into a thousand pieces: “I asked you a question, you fat shit! How long has that motherfucker been gone?”
“Five minutes, maybe,” Fat Johnny said dully. “Took his shells and your guns.” He paused. “Paid for the shells. I couldn’t believe it.”
Five minutes, Delevan thought. The guy had come in a cab. Sitting in their cruiser and drinking coffee, they had seen him get out of it. It was getting close to rush-hour. Cabs were hard to get at this time of day. Maybe—
“Come on,” he said to George O’Mearah. “We still got a chance to collar him. We’ll want a gun from this slut here—”
O’Mearah displayed the Magnum. At first Delevan saw two of them, then the image slowly came together.
“Good.” Delevan was coming around, not all at once but getting there, like a prize-fighter who has taken a damned hard one on the chin. “You keep it. I’ll use the shotgun under the dash.” He started for the door, and this time he did more than reel; he staggered and had to claw the wall to keep his feet.
“You gonna be all right?” O’Mearah asked.
“If we catch him,” Delevan said.
They left. Fat Johnny was not as glad about their departure as he had been about that of the spook in the blue suit, but almost. Almost.
2
Delevan and O’Mearah didn’t even have to discuss which direction the perp might have taken when he left the gunshop. All they had to do was listen to the radio dispatcher.
“Code 19,” she said over and over again. Robbery in progress, shots fired. “Code 19, Code 19. Location is 395 West 49th, Katz’s Drugs, perpetrator tall, sandy-haired, blue suit—”
Shots fired, Delevan thought, his head aching worse than ever. I wonder if they were fired with George’s gun or mine? Or both? If that shitbag killed someone, we’re fucked. Unless we get him.
“Blast off,” he said curtly to O’Mearah, who didn’t need to be told twice. He understood the situation as well as Delevan did. He flipped on the lights and the siren and screamed out into traffic. It was knotting up already, rush-hour starting, and so O’Mearah ran the cruiser with two wheels in the gutter and two on the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians like quail. He clipped the rear fender of a produce truck sliding onto Forty-Ninth. Ahead he could see twinkling glass on the sidewalk. They could both hear the strident bray of the alarm. Pedestrians were sheltering in doorways and behind piles of garbage, but residents of the overhead apartments were staring out eagerly, as if this was a particularly good TV show, or a movie you didn’t have to pay to see.
The block was devoid of automobile traffic; cabs and commuters alike had scatted.
“I just