Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [45]
“Tell me what it said.”
Eddie bit his lip. He didn’t feel as scared about this as he had about carving the key which had ultimately allowed them to rescue Jake and pull him through to this side, but it was close. Because, like the key, this was important. If he forgot something, worlds might crash.
“Man, I can’t remember it all, not word for word—”
Roland made an impatient gesture. “If I need that, I’ll hypnotize you and get it word for word.”
“Do you think it matters?” Susannah asked.
“I think it all matters,” Roland said.
“What if hypnosis doesn’t work on me?” Eddie asked. “What if I’m not, like, a good subject?”
“Leave that to me,” Roland said.
“Nineteen,” Jake said abruptly. They all turned toward him. He was looking at the letters he and Eddie had drawn in the dirt beside the dead campfire. “Claudia y Inez Bachman. Nineteen letters.”
Three
Roland considered for a moment, then let it pass. If the number nineteen was somehow part of this, its meaning would declare itself in time. For now there were other matters.
“The paper,” he said. “Let’s stay with that for now. Tell me everything about it you can remember.”
“Well, it was a legal agreement, with the seal at the bottom and everything.” Eddie paused, struck by a fairly basic question. Roland probably got this part of it—he’d been a kind of law enforcement officer, after all—but it wouldn’t hurt to be sure. “You know about lawyers, don’t you?”
Roland spoke in his driest tone. “You forget that I came from Gilead, Eddie. The most inner of the Inner Baronies. We had more merchants and farmers and manufactors than lawyers, I think, but the count would have been close.”
Susannah laughed. “You make me think of a scene from Shakespeare, Roland. Two characters—might have been Falstaff and Prince Hal, I’m not sure—are talkin about what they’re gonna do when they win the war and take over. And one of em says, ‘First we’ll kill all the lawyers.’ ”
“It would be a fairish way to start,” Roland said, and Eddie found his thoughtful tone rather chilling. Then the gunslinger turned to him again. “Go on. If you can add anything, Jake, please do. And relax, both of you, for your fathers’ sakes. For now I only want a sketch.”
Eddie supposed he’d known that, but hearing Roland say it made him feel better. “All right. It was a Memorandum of Agreement. That was right at the top, in big letters. At the bottom it said Agreed to, and there were two signatures. One was Calvin Tower. The other was Richard someone. Do you remember, Jake?”
“Sayre,” Jake said. “Richard Patrick Sayre.” He paused briefly, lips moving, then nodded. “Nineteen letters.”
“And what did it say, this agreement?” Roland asked.
“Not all that much, if you want to know the truth,” Eddie said. “Or that’s what it seemed like to me, anyway. Basically it said that Tower owned a vacant lot on the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Second Avenue—”
“The vacant lot,” Jake said. “The one with the rose in it.”
“Yeah, that one. Anyway, Tower signed this agreement on July 15th, 1976. Sombra Corporation gave him a hundred grand. What he gave them, so far as I could tell, was a promise not to sell the lot to anyone but Sombra for the next year, to take care of it—pay the taxes and such—and then to give Sombra first right of purchase, assuming he hasn’t sold it to them by then, anyway. Which he hadn’t when we were there, but the agreement still had a month and a half to run.”
“Mr. Tower said the hundred thousand was all spent,” Jake put in.
“Was there anything in the agreement about this Sombra Corporation having a topping privilege?” Susannah asked.
Eddie and Jake thought it over, exchanged a glance, then shook their heads.
“Sure?” Susannah asked.
“Not quite, but pretty sure,” Eddie said. “You think it matters?”
“I don’t know,” Susannah said. “The kind of agreement you’re talking about…well, without