Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [326]
“Mayhap it’d be better to let her alone awhile, if it’s Mia,” Roland said.
“Are you crazy? Did fighting the Wolves loosen your screws?”
“If we let her alone, she may finish her business and be gone.” Even as he spoke the words, Roland doubted them.
“Yeah,” Eddie said, studying him with burning eyes, “she’ll finish her business, all right. First piece, have the kid. Second piece, kill my wife.”
“That would be suicide.”
“But she might do it. We have to go after her.”
Surrender was an art Roland practiced rarely but with some skill on the few occasions in his life when it had been necessary. He took another look at Eddie Dean’s pale, set face and practiced it now. “All right,” he said, “but we’ll have to be careful. She’ll fight to keep from being taken. She’ll kill, if it comes to that. You before any of us, mayhap.”
“I know,” Eddie said. His face was bleak. He looked up the path, but a quarter of a mile up, it hooked around to the south side of the bluff and out of sight. The path zigged back to their side just below the mouth of the cave. That stretch of the climb was deserted, but what did that prove? She could be anywhere. It crossed Eddie’s mind that she might not even be up there at all, that the crashed chair might have been as much a red herring as the children’s possessions Roland had had scattered along the arroyo path.
I won’t believe that. There’s a million ratholes in this part of the Calla, and if I believe that she could be in any of them…
Callahan and Jake had caught up and stood there looking at Eddie.
“Come on,” he said. “I don’t care who she is, Roland. If four able-bodied men can’t catch one no-legs lady, we ought to turn in our guns and call it a day.”
Jake smiled wanly. “I’m touched. You just called me a man.”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Sunshine. Come on.”
Three
Eddie and Susannah spoke and thought of each other as man and wife, but he hadn’t exactly been able to take a cab over to Cartier’s and buy her a diamond and a wedding band. He’d once had a pretty nice high school class ring, but that he’d lost in the sand at Coney Island during the summer he turned seventeen, the summer of Mary Jean Sobieski. Yet on their journeyings from the Western Sea, Eddie had rediscovered his talent as a wood-carver (“wittle baby-ass whittler,” the great sage and eminent junkie would have said), and Eddie had carved his beloved a beautiful ring of willowgreen, light as foam but strong. This Susannah had worn between her breasts, hung on a length of rawhide.
They found it at the foot of the path, still on its rawhide loop. Eddie picked it up, looked at it grimly for a moment, then slipped it over his own head, inside his own shirt.
“Look,” Jake said.
They turned to a place just off the path. Here, in a patch of scant grass, was a track. Not human, not animal. Three wheels in a configuration that made Eddie think of a child’s tricycle. What the hell?
“Come on,” he said, and wondered how many times he’d said it since realizing she was gone. He also wondered how long they’d keep following him if he kept on saying it. Not that it mattered. He’d go on until he had her again, or until he was dead. Simple as that. What frightened him most was the baby…what she called the chap. Suppose it turned on her? And he had an idea it might do just that.
“Eddie,” Roland said.
Eddie looked over his shoulder and gave him Roland’s own impatient twirl of the hand: let’s go.
Roland pointed at the track, instead. “This was some sort of motor.”
“Did you hear one?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t know that.”
“But I do,” Roland said. “Someone sent her a ride. Or some thing.”
“You can’t know that, goddam you!”
“Andy could have left a ride for her,” Jake said. “If someone told him to.”
“Who would have told him to do a thing like that?” Eddie rasped.
Finli, Jake thought. Finli o’ Tego, whoever he is. Or maybe Walter. But he said nothing. Eddie was upset enough already.
Roland said, “She’s gotten away. Prepare yourself for it.”
“Go fuck yourself!” Eddie snarled, and turned to the path leading upward. “Come