The drawing of the three - Stephen King [66]
Roland saw the other man duck back and then he was crawling through the splinters of wood and glass that littered the floor. He dropped his revolver back into its holster. The idea of reloading again with two of his right fingers missing was a joke.
Eddie was doing well. The gunslinger measured just how well by the fact that he was fighting naked. That was hard for a man. Sometimes impossible.
The gunslinger grabbed one of the automatic pistols Claudio Andolini had dropped.
“What are the rest of you guys waiting for?” Balazar screamed. “Jesus! Eat these guys!”
Big George Biondi and the other man from the supply room charged in through the door. The man from the supply room was bawling something in Italian.
Roland crawled to the corner of the desk. Eddie rose, aiming toward the door and the charging men. He knows Balazar’s there, waiting, but he thinks he’s the only one of us with a gun now, Roland thought. Here is another one ready to die for you, Roland. What great wrong did you ever do that you should inspire such terrible loyalty in so many?
Balazar rose, not seeing the gunslinger was now on his flank. Balazar was thinking of only one thing: finally putting an end to the goddam junkie who had brought this ruin down on his head.
“No,” the gunslinger said, and Balazar looked around at him, surprise stamped on his features.
“Fuck y—” Balazar began, bringing the Magnum around. The gunslinger shot him four times with Claudio’s automatic. It was a cheap little thing, not much better than a toy, and touching it made his hand feel dirty, but it was perhaps fitting to kill a despicable man with a despicable weapon.
Enrico Balazar died with an expression of terminal surprise on what remained of his face.
“Hi, George!” Eddie said, and pulled the trigger of the gunslinger’s revolver. That satisfying crash came again. No duds in this baby, Eddie thought crazily. I guess I must have gotten the good one. George got off one shot before Eddie’s bullet drove him back into the screaming man, bowling him over like a ninepin, but it went wild. An irrational but utterly persuasive feeling had come over him: a feeling that Roland’s gun held some magical, talismanic power of protection. As long as he held it, he couldn’t be hurt.
Silence fell then, a silence in which Eddie could hear only the man under Big George moaning (when George landed on Rudy Vechhio, which was this unfortunate fellow’s name, he had fractured three of Vechhio’s ribs) and the high ringing in his own ears. He wondered if he would ever hear right again. The shooting spree which now seemed to be over made the loudest rock concert Eddie had ever been to sound like a radio playing two blocks over by comparison.
Balazar’s office was no longer recognizable as a room of any kind. Its previous function had ceased to matter. Eddie looked around with the wide, wondering eyes of a very young man seeing something like this for the first time, but Roland knew the look, and the look was always the same. Whether it was an open field of battle where thousands had died by cannon, rifle, sword, and halberd or a small room where five or six had shot each other, it was the same place, always the same place in the end: another deadhouse, stinking of gunpowder and raw meat.
The wall between the bathroom and the office was gone except for a few struts. Broken glass twinkled everywhere. Ceiling panels that had been shredded by Tricks Postino’s gaudy but useless M-16 fireworks display hung down like pieces of peeled skin.
Eddie coughed dryly. Now he could hear other sounds—a babble of excited conversation, shouted voices outside the bar, and, in the distance, the warble of sirens.
“How many?” the gunslinger asked Eddie. “Can we have gotten all of them?”
“Yes, I think—”
“I got something for you, Eddie,” Kevin Blake said from the hallway. “I thought you might want it, like for a souvenir, you know?” What Balazar had not been able to do to the younger Dean brother Kevin had done to the elder. He lobbed Henry Dean’s