Needful Things

1

At about the same time Alan was heading across town to arrest Hugh Priest, Henry Beaufort was standing in his driveway and looking at his Thunderbird. The note he’d found under the windshield wiper was in one hand. The damage the chickenshit bastard had done to the tires was bad, but the tires could be replaced. It was the scratch he had drawn along the car’s right-hand side that really toasted Henry’s ass.

He looked at the note again and read it aloud. “Don’t you ever cut me off and then keep my car-keys you damnfrog!”

Who had he cut off lately? Oh, all kinds of people. A night when he didn’t have to cut someone off was a rare night, indeed. But cut off and car-keys kept on the board behind the bar? Only one of those just lately.

Only one.

“You motherfucker,” The Mellow Tiger’s owner and operator said in a soft, reflective voice. “You stupid crazy motherfucking sonofabitch.”

He thought about going back inside to get his deer rifle and then thought better of it. The Tiger was just up the road, and he kept a rather special box under the bar. Inside it was a doublebarrelled Winchester shotgun sawed off at the knees. He’d kept it there ever since that numb fuck Ace Merrill had tried to rob him a few years back.

It was a highly illegal weapon, and Henry had never used it.

He thought he might just use it today.

He touched the ugly scratch Hugh had laid into the side of his T-Bird, then crumpled up the note and tossed it aside. Billy Tupper would be up at the Tiger by now, sweeping the floor and swamping out the heads. Henry would get the sawed-off, then borrow Billy’s Pontiac.

It seemed he had a little asshole-hunting to do.

Henry kicked the balled-up note into the grass. “You been taking those stupid-pills again, Hugh, but you aren’t going to be taking any more after today-I guarantee it.” He touched the scratch a final time.

He had never been so angry in his whole life. “I guaranfuckin-tee it.”

Henry set off up the road toward The Mellow Tiger, walking fast.

2

In the process of tearing apart George T. Nelson’s bedroom, Frank jewett found half an ounce of coke under the mattress of the double bed. He flushed it down the john, and as he watched it swirl away, he felt a sudden cramp in his belly. He started to unbuckle his pants, then walked back into the trashed bedroom again instead.

Frank supposed he had gone utterly crazy, but he no longer cared much. Crazy people didn’t have to think about the future. To crazy people, the future was a very low priority.

One of the few undisturbed things in George T. Nelson’s bedroom was a picture on the wall. It was a picture of an old lady. It was in an expensive gold frame, and this suggested to Frank that it was a picture of George T. Nelson’s sainted mother. The cramp struck again.

Frank removed the picture from the wall and put it on the floor. Then he unbuckled his pants, squatted carefully above it, and did what came naturally.

It was the high point of what had been, up ’til then, a very bad day.

3

Lenny Partridge, Castle Rock’s oldest resident and holder of the Boston Post Cane which Aunt Evvie Chalmers had once possessed, also drove one of Castle Rock’s oldest cars. It was a 1966 Chevrolet Bel-Air which had once been white. It was now a generic smudged no-color-call it Dirt Road Gray. It wasn’t in very good shape. The glass in the back window had been replaced by a flapping sheet of all-weather plastic some years ago, the rocker panels had rusted out so badly that Lenny could view the road through a complicated lacework of rust as he drove along, and the exhaust pipe hung down like the rotted arm of a man who had died in a dry climate. Also, the oil-seals were gone. When Lenny drove the Bel-Air, he spread great clouds of fragrant blue smoke out behind him, and the fields he passed on his daily trip into town looked as if a homicidal aviator had just dusted them with paraquat. The Chevy gobbled three (sometimes four) quarts of oil a day. This gaudy consumption did not bother Lenny in the least; he bought recycled Diamond motor oil from Sonny jackett in the five-gallon economy size, and he always made sure that Sonny deducted ten per cent… his Golden Ager discount. And because he hadn’t driven the Bel-Air at a speed greater than thirty-five miles an hour in the last ten years, it would probably hold together longer than Lenny himself.

While Henry Beaufort was starting up the road to The Mellow Tiger on the other side of the Tin Bridge, almost five miles away, Lenny was guiding his rusty Bel-Air over the top of Castle Hill.

There was a man standing in the middle of the road with his arms held up in an imperial stop gesture. The man was bare-chested and barefooted. He wore only a pair of khaki pants with the fly unzipped, and, around his neck, a moth-eaten runner of fur.

Lenny’s heart took a large wheezy leap in his scrawny chest and he slammed both of his feet, clad in a pair of slowly disintegrating high-tops, down on the brake pedal. It sank almost to the floor with an unearthly moan and the Bel-Air finally stopped less than three feet from the man in the road, whom Lenny now recognized as Hugh Priest.

Hugh had not so much as flinched. When the car stopped, he strode rapidly around to where Lenny was sitting, hands pressed against the front of his thermal undershirt, trying to catch his breath and wondering if this was the final cardiac arrest.

“Hugh!” he gasped. “Why, what in the tarnal hell are you doin?

I almost run you down! I-” Hugh opened the driver’s door and leaned in. T@e fur stole he was wearing around his neck swung forward and Lenny flinched back from it. It looked like a half-rotten fox-tail with great hunks of fur missing from the hide. It smelled bad.

Hugh seized him by the straps of his overalls and hauled him out of the car. Lenny uttered a squawk of terror and outrage.

“Sorry, oldtimer,” Hugh said in the absent voice of a man who has much greater problems than this one on his mind. “I need your car.

Mine’s a little under the weather.”

“You can’t-” But Hugh most definitely could. He tossed Lenny across the road as if the old fellow were no more than a bag of rags.

When Lenny came down, there was a clear snapping sound and his squawks turned to mournful, hooting cries of pain. He had broken one collarbone and two ribs.

Ignoring him, Hugh got behind the wheel of the Chevy, pulled the door shut, and floored the accelerator. The engine let out a scream of surprise and a blue fog of oilsmoke rolled out of the sagging tailpipe.

He was rolling down the hill at better than fifty miles an hour before Lenny Partridge could even manage to thrash his way over onto his back.

4

Andy Clutterbuck swung onto Castle Hill Road at approximately 3:35 p.m. He passed Lenny Partridge’s old oil-guzzler going the other way and didn’t give it a thought; Clut’s mind was totally occupied with Hugh Priest, and the rusty old Bel-Air was just another part of the scenery.

Clut didn’t have the slightest idea of why or how Hugh might have been involved in the deaths of Wilma and Nettle, but that was all right; he was a footsoldier and that was all. The whys and hows were someone else’s job, and this was one of those days when he was damned glad of it. He did know that Hugh was a nasty drunk whom the years had not sweetened. A man like that might do anything… especially when he was deep in his cups.

He’s probably at work, anyway, Clut thought, but as he approached the ramshackle house which Hugh called home, he unsnapped the strap on his service revolver just the same. A moment later he saw the sun twinkling off glass and chrome in Hugh’s driveway and his nerves cranked up until they were humming like telephone wires in a gale.

Hugh’s car was here, and when a man’s car was at home, the man usually was, too. It was just a fact of country life.

When Hugh had left his driveway on foot, he had turned right, away from town and toward the top of Castle Hill. If Clut had looked in that direction, he would have seen Lenny Partridge lying on the soft shoulder of the road and flopping around like a chicken taking a dusthath, but he didn’t look that way. All of Clut’s attention was focused on Hugh’s house. Lenny’s thin, birdlike cries went in one of Clut’s ears, directly across his brain without raising the slightest alarm, and out the other.

Clut drew his gun before getting out of the cruiser.

5

William Tupper was only nineteen and he was never going to be a Rhodes Scholar, but he was smart enough to be terrified by Henry’s behavior when Henry came into the Tiger at twenty minutes to four on the last real day of Castle Rock’s existence. He was also smart enough to know trying to refuse Henry the keys to his Pontiac would do no good; in his present mood, Henry (who was, under ordinary circumstances, the best boss Billy had ever had) would just knock him down and take them.

So for the first-and perhaps the only-time in his life, Billy tried guile. “Henry,” he said timidly, “you look like you could use a drink. I know I could. Why don’t you let me pour us both a short one before you go?”

Henry had disappeared behind the bar. Billy could hear him back there, rummaging around and cursing under his breath. Finally he stood up again, holding a rectangular wooden box with a small padlock on it.

He put the box on the bar and then began to pick through the ring of keys he wore at his belt.

He considered what Billy had said, began to shake his head, then reconsidered. A drink really wasn’t such a bad idea; it would settle both his hands and his nerves. He found the right key, popped the lock on the box, and laid the lock aside on the bar. “Okay,” he said. “But if we’re gonna do it, let’s do it right. Chivas. Single for you, double for me.” He pointed his finger at Billy. Billy flinchedhe was suddenly sure Henry was going to add: But you’re coming with me. “And don’t you tell your mother I let you have hard liquor in here, do you understand me?”

“Yessir,” Billy said, relieved. He went quickly to get the bottle before Henry could change his mind. “I understand you piprfect.”

6

Deke Bradford, the man who ran Castle Rock’s biggest and most expensive operation-Public Works-was utterly disgusted.

“Nope, he’s not here,” he told Alan. “Hasn’t been in all day.

But if you see him before I do, do me a favor and tell him he’s fired.”

“Why have you held onto him as long as you have, Deke?”

They were standing in the hot afternoon sunlight outside Town Garage #I. Off to the left, a Case Construction and Supply truck was backed up to a shed. Three men were offloading small but heavy wooden cases. A red diamond shape the symbol for high explosives-was stencilled on each of these. From inside the shed, Alan could hear the whisper of air conditioning. It seemed very odd to hear an air conditioner running this late in the year, but in Castle Rock, this had been an extremely odd week.

“I kept him on longer than I should,” Deke admitted, and ran his hands through his short, graying hair. “I did it because I thought there was a good man hidin somewhere inside of him.” Deke was one of those short, stocky men-fireplugs with legs-who always looked ready to take a large chomp out of someone’s ass. He was, however, one of the sweetest, kindest men Alan had ever met.

“When he wasn’t drunk or too hung over, wasn’t nobody in this town’d work harder for you than Hugh would. And there was something in his face made me think he might not be one of those men who just has to go on drinkin until the devil knocks em down.

I thought maybe with a steady job, he’d straighten up and fly right.

But this last week…

“What about this last week?”

“Man’s been going to hell in a handbasket. Looked like he was all the time on something, and I don’t necessarily mean booze. It seemed like his eyes sank way back in his head, and he was always lookin over your shoulder when you talked to him, never right at you. Also, he started talking to himself “About what?”

“I dunno. I doubt if the other guys do, either. I hate to fire a man, but I’d made up my mind on Hugh even before you pulled in here this afternoon. I’m done with him.”

“Excuse me, Deke.” Alan went back to the car, called Sheila, and told her Hugh hadn’t been at work all day.

“See if you can reach Clut, Sheila, and tell him to really watch his ass. And send John out there as backup.” He hesitated over the next part, knowing the caution had resulted in more than a few needless shootings, and then went ahead. He had to; he owed it to his officers in the field. “Clut and John are to consider Hugh armed and dangerous.

Got it?”

“Armed and dangerous, ten-four.”

“Okay. Ten-forty, Unit One out.”

He racked the microphone and walked back to Deke"Do you think he might have left town, Deke?”

“Him?” Deke cocked his head to one side and spat tobacco juice.

“Guys like him never leave town until they’ve picked up their last paycheck. Most of em never leave at all. When it comes to remembering what roads lead out of town, guys like Hugh seem to have some sort of forgetting disease.”

Something caught Deke’s eye and he turned toward the men offloading the wooden crates. “Watch what you’re doing with those, you guys! You’re s’posed to be unloadin em, not playin pepper with em!”

“That’s a lot of bang you got there,” Alan said.

“Ayuh-twenty cases. We’re gonna blow a granite jar-top over at the gravel-pit out on #5. The way it looks to me, we’ll have enough left over to blow Hugh all the way to Mars, if you want to.”

“Why did you get so much?”

“It wasn’t my idea; Buster added to my purchase order, God knows why. I can tell you one thing, though-he’s gonna shit when he sees the electrical bill for this month… unless a cold front moves in.

That air conditioner sucks up the juice something wicked, but you got to keep that stuff cool or it sweats. They all tell you this new bang don’t do it, but I believe in better safe than sorry.”

“Buster topped your order,” Alan mused.

“Yeah-by four or six cases, I can’t remember which. Wonders’ll never cease, huh?”

“I guess not. Deke, can I use your office phone?”

“Be my guest.”

Alan sat behind Deke’s desk for a full minute, sweating dark patches beneath the arms of his uniform shirt and listening to the telephone at Polly’s house ring again and again and again. At last he dropped the handset back into the cradle.

He left the office in a slow walk, head down. Deke was padlocking the door of the dynamite shack, and when he turned to Alan, his face was long and unhappy. “There was a good man somewhere inside of Hugh Priest, Alan. I swear to God there was. A lot of times that man comes out. I seen it happen before. More often than most people’d believe.

With Hugh. He shrugged.

“Huh-uh. No soap.”

Alan nodded.

“Are you okay, Alan? You look like you come over funny.”

“I’m fine,” Alan said, smiling a little. But it was the truth; he had come over funny. Polly, too. And Hugh. And Brian Rusk. It seemed as if everyone had come over funny today.

“Want a glass of water or cold tea? I got some.”

“Thanks, but I better get going.”

“All right. Let me know how it turns out.”

That was something Alan couldn’t promise to do, but he had a sickening little feeling in the pit of his stomach that Deke would be able to read all about it for himself in a day or two. Or watch it on TV.

7

Lenny Partridge’s old Chevy Bel-Air pulled into one of the slant parking spaces in front of Needful Things shortly before four, and the man of the hour got out. Hugh’s fly was still unzipped, and he was still wearing the fox-tail around his neck. He crossed the sidewalk, his bare feet slapping on the hot concrete, and opened the door. The small silver bell overhead jingled.

The only person who saw him go in was Charlie Fortin. He was standing in the doorway of the Western Auto and smoking one of his stinky home-rolled cigarettes. “Old Hugh finally flipped,” Charlie said to no one in particular.

Inside, Mr. Gaunt looked at old Hugh with a pleasant, expectant little smile… as if barefooted, bare-chested men wearing motheaten fox-tails around their necks showed up in his shop every day.

He made a small check-mark on the sheet beside the cash register.

The last check-mark.

“I’m in trouble,” Hugh said, advancing on Mr. Gaunt. His eyes rolled from side to side in their sockets like pinballs. “I’m in a real mess this time.”

“I know,” Mr. Gaunt said in his most soothing voice.

“This seemed like the right place to come. I dunno-I keep dreaming about you. I… I didn’t know where else to turn.”

“This is the right place, Hugh.”

“He cut my tires Hugh whispered. “Beaufort, the bastard who owns The Mellow Tiger. He left a note. ’You know what I’ll come after next time Hubert,’ it said. I know what that means. You bet I do.” One of Hugh’s grubby, large-fingered hands caressed the mangy fur, and an expression of adoration spread across his face.

It would have been sappy if it had not been so clearly genuine.

“My beautiful, beautiful fox-tail.”

“Perhaps you ought to take care of him,” Mr. Gaunt suggested thoughtfully, “before he can take care of you. I know that sounds a little… well… extreme… but when you consider-”

“Yes! Yes!

That’s just what I want to do!”

“I think I have just the thing,” Mr. Gaunt said. He bent down, and when he straightened up he had an automatic pistol in his left hand. He pushed it across the glass top of the case. “Fully loaded.”

Hugh picked it up. His confusion seemed to blow away like smoke as the gun’s solid weight filled his hand. He could smell gungrease, low and fragrant.

“I… I left my wallet at home,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that,” Mr. Gaunt told him.

“At Needful Things, Hugh, we insure the things we sell.” Suddenly his face hardened. His lips peeled back from his teeth and his eyes blazed. “Go get him!” he cried in a low, harsh voice. “Go get the bastard that wants to destroy what is yours! Go get him, Hugh!

Protect yourself! Protect your property!”

Hugh grinned suddenly. “Thanks, Mr. Gaunt. Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t mention it,” Mr. Gaunt said, dropping immediately back into his normal tone of voice, but the small silver bell was already jangling as Hugh went back out, stuffing the automatic into the sagging waistband of his trousers as he walked.

Mr. Gaunt went to the window and watched Hugh get behind the wheel of the tired Chevy and back it into the street. A Budweiser truck rolling slowly down Main Street blared its horn and swerved to avoid him.

“Go get him, Hugh,” Mr. Gaunt said in a low voice. Small wisps of smoke began to rise from his ears and his hair; thicker threads emerged from his nostrils and from between the square white tombstones of his teeth. “Get all of them you can. Party down, big fella.”

Mr. Gaunt threw back his head and began to laugh.

8

John LaPointe hurried toward the side door of the Sheriff’s Office, the one that gave on the Municipal Building parking lot. He was excited. Armed and dangerous. It wasn’t often that you got to assist in arresting an armed and dangerous suspect. Not in a sleepy little town like Castle Rock, anyway. He had forgotten all about his missing wallet (at least for the time being), and Sally Ratcliffe was even further from his mind.

He reached for the door just as someone opened it from the other side. All at once John was facing two hundred and twenty pounds of angry Phys Ed coach.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” Lester Pratt said in his new soft and silky voice. He held up a black leather wallet. “Lose something, you ugly two-timing gambling godless son of a bitch?”

John didn’t have the slightest idea what Lester Pratt was doing here, or how he could have found his lost wallet. He only knew that he was Clut’s designated backup and he had to get going right away.

“Whatever it is, I’ll talk to you about it later, Lester,” John said, and reached for his wallet. When Lester first pulled it back out of his reach and then brought it down hard, smacking him in the center of the face with it, John was more astounded than angry.

“Oh, I don’t want to talk,” Lester said in his new soft and silky voice. “I wouldn’t waste my time.” He dropped the wallet, grabbed John by the shoulders, picked him up, and threw him back into the Sheriff’s Office. Deputy LaPointe flew six feet through the air and landed on top of Norris Ridgewick’s desk. His butt skated across it, plowing a path through the heaped paperwork and knocking Norris’s IN/OUT basket onto the floor. John followed, landing on his back with a painful thump.

Sheila Brigham was staring through the dispatcher’s window, her mouth wide open.

John began to pick himself up. He was shaken and dazed, without the slightest clue as to what was going on here.

Lester was walking toward him in a fighting strut. His fists were held up in an old-fashioned John L. Sullivan pose that should have been comic but wasn’t. “I’m going to learn you a lesson,” Lester said in his new soft and silky voice. “I’m going to teach you what happens to Catholic fellows who steal Baptist fellows’ girls. I’m going to teach you all about it, and when I’m done, you’ll have it so right you’ll never forget it.”

Lester Pratt closed in to teaching distance.

9

Billy Tupper might not have been an intellectual, but he was a sympathetic ear, and a sympathetic ear was the best medicine for Henry Beaufort’s rage that afternoon. Henry drank his drink and told Billy what had happened… and as he talked, he felt himself calming down.

It occurred to him that if he had gotten the shotgun and)just kept rolling, he might have ended this day not behind his bar but behind those of the holding cell in the Sheriff’s Office. He loved his T-Bird a lot, but he began to realize he didn’t love it enough to go to prison for it. He could replace the tires, and the scratch down the side would eventually buff out. As for Hugh Priest, let the law take care of him.

He finished the drink and stood up.

“You still goin after him, Mr. Beaufort?” Billy asked apprehensively.

“I wouldn’t waste my time,” Henry said, and Billy breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m going to let Alan Pangborn take care of him.

Isn’t that what I pay my taxes for, Billy?”

“I guess so.” Billy looked out the window and brightened a little more. A rusty old car, a car which had once been white but was now a faded no-color-call it Dirt Road Gray-was coming up the hill toward The Mellow Tiger, spreading a thick blue fog of exhaust behind it. “Look!

It’s old Lenny! I ain’t seen him in a coon’s age!”

“Well, we still don’t open until five,” Henry said. He went behind the bar to use the telephone. The box containing the sawedoff shotgun was still on the bar. I think I was planning to use that, he mused. I think I really was. What the hell gets into peoplesome kind of poison?

Billy walked toward the door as Lenny’s old car pulled into the parking lot.

“Lester-” John LaPointe began, and that was when a fist almost as large as a Daisy canned ham-but much harder-collided with the center of his face. There was a dirty crunching sound as his nose broke in a burst of horrible pain. John’s eyes squeezed shut and brightly colored sparks of light fountained up in the darkness. He went reeling and flailing across the room, waving his arms, fighting a losing battle to stay on his feet. Blood was pouring out of his nose and over his mouth. He struck the bulletin board and knocked it off the wall.

Lester began to walk toward him again, his brow wrinkled into a beetling frown of concentration below his screaming haircut.

In the dispatcher’s office, Sheila got on the radio and began yelling for Alan.

Frank Jewett was on the verge of leaving the home of his good old “friend” George T. Nelson when he had a sudden cautionary thought.

10

This thought was that, when George T. Nelson arrived home to find his bedroom trashed, his coke flushed, and the likeness of his mother beshitted, he might come looking for his old partybuddy. Frank decided it would be nuts to leave without finishing what he had started… and if finishing what he had started meant blowing the blackmailing bastard’s oysters off, so be it. There was a gun cabinet downstairs, and the idea of doing the job with one of George T. Nelson’s own guns felt like poetic justice to Frank.

If he was unable to unlock the gun cabinet, or force the door, he would help himself to one of his old party-buddy’s steak-knives and do the job with that. He would stand behind the front door, and when George T. Nelson came in, Frank would either blow his motherfucking oysters off or grab him by the hair and cut his motherfucking throat.

The gun would probably be the safer of the two options, but the more Frank thought of the hot blood jetting from George T. Nelson’s slit neck and splashing all over his hands, the more fitting it seemed.

Et tu, Georgia. Et tu, you blackmailing fuck.

Frank’s reflections were disturbed at this point by George T.

Nelson’s parakeet, Tammy Faye, who had picked the most inauspicious moment of its small avian life to burst into song. As Frank listened, a peculiar and terribly unpleasant smile began to surface on his face. How did I miss that goddam bird the first time?

he asked himself as he strode into the kitchen.

He found the drawer with the sharp knives in it after a little exploration and spent the next fifteen minutes poking it through the bars of Tammy Faye’s cage, forcing the small bird into a fluttery, feather-shedding panic before growing bored with the game and skewering it. Then he went downstairs to see what he could do with the gun cabinet. The lock turned out to be easy, and as Frank climbed the stairs to the first floor again, he burst into an unseasonal but nonetheless cheery song: Ohh… you better not fight, you better not cry, You better not pout, I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town!

He sees you when you’re sleeping!

He knows when you’re awake!

He knows if you’ve been bad or good, So you better be good for goodness’ sake!

Frank, who had never failed to watch Lawrence Welk every Saturday night with his own beloved mother, sang the last line in a low Larry Hooper basso. Gosh, he felt good! How could he have ever believed, only an hour or so earlier, that his life was at an end?

This wasn’t the end; it was the beginning! Out with the oldespecially dear old “friends” like George T. Nelson-and in with the new!

11

Frank settled in behind the door. He was pretty well loaded for bear; there was a Winchester shotgun leaning against the wall, a Llama.32 automatic stuffed into his belt, and a Sheffington steakknife in his hand. From where he stood he could see the heap of yellow feathers that had been Tammy Faye. A small grin twitched Frank’s Mr.

Weatherbee mouth and his eyes-utterly mad eyes now-rolled ceaselessly back and forth behind his round rimless Mr. Weatherbee spectacles.

“You better be good for goodness’ sake!” he admonished under his breath. He sang this line several times as he stood there, and several more times after he had made himself more comfortable, sitting behind the door with his legs crossed, his back propped against the wall, and his weapons in his lap.

He began to feel alarmed at how sleepy he was becoming. It seemed nuts to be on the verge of dozing off when he was waiting to cut a man’s throat, but that didn’t change the fact. He thought he had read someplace (perhaps in one of his classes at the University of Maine at Farmington, a cow college from which he had graduated with absolutely no honors at all) that a severe shock to the nervous system sometimes had that very effect… and he’d suffered a severe shock, all right. It was a wonder his heart hadn’t blown like an old tire when he saw those magazines scattered all over his office.

Frank decided it would be unwise to take chances. He moved George

T. Nelson’s long, oatmeal-colored sofa away from the wall a little bit, crawled behind it, and lay down on his back with the shotgun by his left hand. His right hand, still curled around the handle of the steak-knife, lay on his chest. There. Much better.

George T. Nelson’s deep-pile carpeting was actually quite comfortable.

“You better be good for goodness’ sake,” Frank sang under his breath. He was still singing in a low, snory voice ten minutes later, when he finally dozed off.

12

“Unit One!” Sheila screamed from the radio slung under the dash as Alan crossed the Tin Bridge on his way back into town. “Come in, Unit One! Come in right now!”

Alan felt a sickening lift-drop in his stomach. Clut had run into a hornet’s nest up at Hugh Priest’s house on Castle Hill Road-he was sure of it. Why in Christ’s name hadn’t he told Clut to rendezvous with John before bracing Hugh?

You know why-because not all your attention was on your job when you were giving orders. If something’s happened to Clut because of that, you’ll have to face it and own the part of it that’s yours. But that comes later. Your job right now is to do your job.

So do it, Alan-forget about Polly and do your damned job.

He snatched the microphone off its prongs. “Unit One, come back?”

Someone’s beating John up!” she screamed. “Come quick, Alan, he’s hurting him bad!”

This information was so completely at odds with what Alan had expected that he was utterly flummoxed for a moment.

“What? Who? There?”

“Hurry up, he’s killing him!”

All at once it clicked home. It was Hugh Priest, of course. For some reason Hugh had come to the Sheriff’s Office, had arrived before John could get rolling for Castle Hill, and had started swinging. It wasjohn LaPointe, not Andy Clutterbuck, who was in danger.

Alan grabbed the dash-flash, turned it on, and stuck it on the roof. When he reached the town side of the bridge he offered the old station wagon a silent apology and floored the accelerator.

13

Clut began to suspect Hugh wasn’t home when he saw that all the tires on the man’s car were not just flat but cut to pieces. He was about to approach the house anyway when he finally heard thin cries for help.

He stood where he was for a moment, undecided, then hurried back down the driveway. This time he saw Lenny lying on the side of the road and ran, holster flapping, to where the old man lay.

“Help me!” Lenny wheezed as Clut knelt by him. “Hugh Priest’s gone crazy, tarnal fool’s busted me right to Christ up!”

“Where you hurt, Lenny?” Clut asked. He touched the old man’s shoulder. Lenny let out a shriek. it was as good an answer as any.

Clut stood up, unsure of exactly what to do next. Too many things had gotten crammed up in his mind. All he knew for sure was that he desperately did not want to fuck this up.

“Don’t move,” he said at last. “I’m going to go call Medical Assistance.”

“I ain’t got no plans to get up and do the tango, y’goddam fool,” Lenny said. He was crying and snarling with pain. He looked like an old bloodhound with a broken leg.

“Right,” Clut said. He started to run back to his cruiser, then returned to Lenny again. “He took your car, right?”

“No!” Lenny gasped, holding his hands against his broken ribs.

“He busted me up and then flew off on a magic fuckin carpet.

Sure, he took my car! Why do you think I’m layin here? Get a fuckin tan?”

“Right,” Clut repeated, and sprinted back down the road. Dimes and quarters bounced out of his pockets and spun across the macadam in bright little arcs.

He leaned in the window of his car so fast he almost knocked himself out on the door-ledge. He snagged the mike. He had to get Sheila to send help for the old. man, but that wasn’t the most important thing. Both Alan and the State Police had to know that Hugh Priest was now driving Lenny Partridge’s old Chevrolet BelAir. Clut wasn’t sure what year it was, but nobody could miss that dust-colored oil-burner.

But he could not raise Sheila in dispatch. He tried three times and there was no answer. No answer at all.

Now he could hear Lenny starting to scream again, and Clut went into Hugh’s house to call Rescue Services in Norway on the telephone.

One hell of a fine time for Sheila to have to be on the john, he thought.

14

Henry Beaufort was also trying to reach the Sheriff’s Office. He stood at the bar with the telephone pressed against his ear. It rang again and again and again. “Come on,” he said, “answer the fucking I Y?”

phone. What are you guys doing over there? Playing gin rummy Billy Tupper had gone outside. Henry heard him yell something and looked up impatiently. The yell was followed by a sudden loud bang. Henry’s first thought was that one of Lenny’s old tires had blown… and then there were two more bangs.

Billy walked back into the Tiger. He was walking very slowly.

He was holding one hand against his throat, and blood was pouring through his fingers.

“’Enry!” Billy cried in a weird, strangled Cockney voice.

“’Enry! ’En-” He reached the Rock-Ola, stood there swaying for a moment, and then everything in his body seemed to let go at once and he collapsed in a loose tumble.

A shadow fell over his feet, which were almost out the door, and then the shadow’s owner appeared. He was wearing a fox-tail around his neck and holding a pistol in one hand. Smoke drifted from its barrel.

Tiny jewels of perspiration nestled in the sparse mat of hair between his nipples. The skin under his eyes was puffy and brown. He stepped over Billy Tupper and into the dimness of The Mellow Tiger.

“Hello, Henry,” said Hugh Priest.

15

John LaPointe didn’t know why this was happening, but he knew Lester was going to kill him if he kept it up-and Lester showed no sign of even slowing down, let alone stopping. He tried to slide down the wall and out of Lester’s reach, but Lester grabbed his shirt and yanked him back up. Lester was still breathing easily. His own shirt had not even come untucked from the elastic waistband of his sweatpants.

“Here you go, Johnny-boy,” Lester said, and smashed another fist into John’s upper lip. John felt it split apart on his teeth. “Grow your goddam pussy-tickler over that.”

Blindly, John stuck out one leg behind Lester and pushed as hard as he could. Lester uttered a surprised yell and went over, but he shot both hands out as he toppled, snagged them in john’s bloodspattered shirt, and pulled the Deputy over on top of him. They began to roll across the floor, butting and punching.

Both were far too busy to see Sheila Brigham dart out of the dispatcher’s cubicle and into Alan’s office. She snatched the shotgun off the wall, cocked it, and ran back into the bullpen area, which was now a shambles. Lester was sitting on top ofjohn, industriously banging his head against the floor.

Sheila knew how to use the gun she had been target shooting since she was eight years old. Now she socked the buttplate against her shoulder and screamed: “Get away from him, John!

Give me a clearfield!”

Lester turned at the sound of her voice, his eyes glaring. He bared his teeth at Sheila like an angry bull gorilla, then went back to banging John’s head on the floor.

16

As Alan approached the Municipal Building, he saw the first unqualifiedly good thing of the day: Norris Ridgewick’s VW approaching from the other direction. Norris was in plain clothes, but Alan cared not at all about that. He could use him this afternoon.

Oh boy, how he could use him.

Then that went to hell, too.

A large red car-a Cadillac, license plate KEETON I-suddenly shot out of the narrow alley which gave access to the Municipal Building’s parking lot. Alan watched, gape-mouthed, as Buster drove his Cadillac into the side of Norris’s Beetle. The Caddy wasn’t going fast, but it was roughly four times the size of Norris’s car.

There was a crunch of crimping metal and the VW toppled over onto the passenger side with a hollow bang and a tinkle of glass.

Alan slammed on the brakes and got out of his cruiser.

Buster was getting out of his Cadillac.

Norris was struggling out through the window of his Volkswagen with a dazed expression on his face.

Buster began to stalk toward Norris, his hands closing into fists.

A frozen grin was rising on his fat round face.

Alan took one look at that grin and began to run.

17

The first shot Hugh fired shattered a bottle of Wild Turkey on the backbar. The second shattered the glass over a framed document which hung on the wall just above Henry’s head and left a round black hole in the liquor license beneath. The third tore off Henry Beaufort’s right cheek in a pink cloud of blood and vaporized flesh.

Henry shrieked, grabbed the box with the sawed-off shotgun inside, and dropped behind the bar. He knew Hugh had shot him, but he didn’t know if it was bad or not. He was only aware that the right side of his face was suddenly as hot as a furnace, and that blood, warm, wet, and sticky, was pouring down the side of his neck.

“Let’s talk about cars, Henry,” Hugh was saying as he approached the bar. “Even better than that, let’s talk about my foxtail-what do you say?”

Henry opened the box. It was lined with red velvet. He stuck his jittery, unstable hands in and pulled out the sawed-off Winchester. He started to break it, then realized there was no time.

He would just have to hope it was loaded.

He gathered his legs under him, getting ready to spring up and give Hugh what he sincerely hoped would be a big surprise.

18

Sheila realized John wasn’t going to get out from under the crazy man, who she now believed was Lester Platt or Pratt… the gym teacher at the high school, anyway. She didn’t think John could get out from under. Lester had stopped banging John’s head against the floor and had closed his big hands around John’s throat instead.

Sheila reversed the gun, locked her hands on the barrel, and cocked it back over her shoulder like Ted Williams. Then she brought it around in a hard, smooth swing.

Lester turned his head at the last moment, just in time to catch the gun’s steel-edged walnut stock between his eyes. There was a nasty crunch as the gunstock smashed a hole into Lester’s skull and turned his forebrain to jelly. It sounded as if someone had stepped very hard on a full box of popcorn. Lester Pratt was dead before he hit the floor.

Sheila Brigham looked at him and began to scream.

19

“Did you think I wouldn’t know who it was?” Buster Keeton was grunting as he dragged Norris-who was dazed but unhurt-the rest of the way out of the VW’s driver’s-side window. “Did you think I wouldn’t know, with your name right at the bottom of every goddam sheet of paper you taped up? Did you? Did you?”

He cocked one fist back to strike Norris, and Alan Pangborn slipped a handcuff around it just as neatly as you please.

“Huh!” Buster exclaimed, and wheeled ponderously around.

Inside the Municipal Building, someone started to scream.

Alan glanced in that direction, then used the cuff on the other end of the chain to pull Buster over to the open door of his own Cadillac. Buster flailed at him as he did so. Alan took several punches harmlessly on his shoulder, and snapped the free cuff around the doorhandle of the car.

He turned around and Norris was there. He had time to register the fact that Norris looked just terrible, and to dismiss it as a consequence of being rammed amidships by the Head Selectman.

“Come on,” he said to Norris. “We’ve got trouble.”

But Norris ignored him, at least for the moment. He brushed past

Alan and punched Buster Keeton squarely in the eye. Buster let out a startled squawk and fell back against the door of his car.

It was still open and his weight drove it shut, catching the tail of his sweat-soaked white shirt in the latch.

“That’s for the rat-trap, you fat shit!” Norris cried.

“I’ll get you!” Buster screamed back. “Don’t think I won’t!

I’ll get All of You People!”

“Get this,” Norris growled. He was moving in again with his fists cocked at the sides of his puffed-up pigeon chest when Alan grabbed him and hauled him back.

“Quit it!” he shouted into Norris’s face. “We’ve got trouble inside! Bad trouble!”

The scream lifted in the air again. People were gathering on the sidewalks of Lower Main Street now. Norris looked toward them, then back at Alan. His eyes had cleared, Alan saw with relief, and he looked like himself again. More or less.

“What is it, Alan? Something to do with him?” He jerked his chin toward the Cadillac. Buster was standing there, looking sullenly at them and plucking at the handcuff on his wrist with his free hand.

He seemed not to have heard the screams at all.

“No,” Alan said. “Have you got your gun?”

Norris shook his head.

Alan unsnapped the safety-strap on his holster, drew his service.38, and handed it to Norris.

“What about you, Alan?” Norris asked.

“I want my hands free. Come on, let’s go. Hugh Priest is in the office, and he’s gone crazy.”

20

Hugh Priest had gone crazy, all right-not much doubt about that but he was a good three miles from the Castle Rock Municipal Building.

“Let’s talk about-” he began, and that was when Henry Beaufort leaped up from behind the bar like a jack-in-the-box, blood soaking the right side of his shirt, the shotgun levelled.

Henry and Hugh fired at the same time. The crack of the automatic pistol was lost in the shotgun’s blurred, primal roar. Smoke and fire leaped from the truncated barrel. Hugh was lifted off his feet and driven across the room, bare heels dragging, his chest a disintegrating swamp of red muck. The gun flew out of his hand.

The ends of the fox-tail were burning.

Henry was thrown against the backbar as Hugh’s bullet punctured his right lung. Bottles tumbled and crashed all around him.

A large numbness swarmed through his chest. He dropped the shotgun and staggered toward the telephone. The air was full of crazy perfume: spilled booze and burning fox-hair. Henry tried to draw in breath, and although his chest heaved, he seemed to get no air. There was a thin, shrill sound as the hole in his chest sucked wind.

The telephone seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, but he finally got it up to his ear and pressed the button which automatically dialed the Sheriff’s Office.

Ring… ring… ring…

“What the fuck’s the matter with you people?” Henry gasped raggedly. “I’m dying up here! Answer the goddam telephone!”

But the telephone just went on ringing.

21

Norris caught up with Alan halfway down the alley and they walked side by side into the Municipal Building’s small parking lot. Norris was holding Alan’s service revolver with his finger curled around the trigger guard and the stubby barrel pointed up into the hot October sky. Sheila Brigham’s Saab was in the lot along with Unit 4, John LaPointe’s cruiser, but that was all. Alan wondered briefly where Hugh’s car was, and then the side door to the Sheriff’s Office burst open. Someone carrying the shotgun from Alan’s office in a pair of bloody hands bolted out. Norris levelled the short-barrelled.38 and slid his finger inside the trigger-guard.

Alan registered two things at once. The first was that Norris was going to shoot. The second was that the screaming person with the gun was not Hugh Priest but Sheila Brigham.

Alan Pangborn’s almost heavenly reflexes saved Sheila’s life that afternoon, but it was a very close thing. He didn’t bother trying to shout or even using his hand to deflect the pistol barrel. Neither would have stood much chance of success. He stuck out his elbow instead, then jerked it up like a man doing an enthusiastic buckand-wing at a country dance. It struck Norris’s gun-hand an instant before Norris fired, driving the barrel upward. The pistol-shot was an amplified whipcrack in the enclosed courtyard. A window in the Town Services Office on the second floor shattered.

Then Sheila dropped the shotgun she had used to brain Lester Pratt and was running toward them, screaming and weeping.

“Jesus,” Norris said in a small, shocked voice. His face was as pale as paper as he thrust the pistol, butt first, toward Alan. “I almost shot Sheila-oh dear Jesus Christ.”

“Alan!” Sheila was crying. “Thank God!”

She ran into him without slowing, almost knocking him over.

He holstered his revolver and then put his arms around her. She was trembling like an electric wire with too much current running through it. Alan suspected he was trembling pretty badly himself, and he had come close to wetting his pants. She was hysterical, blind with panic, and that was probably a blessing: he didn’t think she had the slightest idea how close she had come to taking a round.

“What’s going on in there, Sheila?” he asked. “Tell me quick.”

His ears were ringing so badly from the gunshot and the succeeding echo that he could almost swear he heard a telephone somewhere.

22

Henry Beaufort felt like a snowman melting in the sun. His legs were giving way beneath him. He crumpled slowly into a kneeling position with the ringing, unanswered phone still tolling in his ear.

His head swam with the mingled stench of booze and burning fur.

Another hot smell was mingling with these now. He suspected it was Hugh Priest.

He was vaguely aware that this wasn’t working and he ought to dial another number for help, but he didn’t think he could. He was beyond wringing another number out of the telephone-this was it. So he knelt behind the bar in a growing pool of his own blood, listening to the chimney-hoot of air from the hole in his chest, clinging desperately to consciousness. The Tiger didn’t open for an hour yet, Billy was dead, and if no one answered this telephone soon, he would also be dead when the first customers came trickling in for their various happy-hour potations.

“Please,” Henry whispered in a. screamy, breathless voice.

“Please answer the phone, someone please answer this fucking phone.”

23

Sheila Brigham began to regain some control, and Alan got the most important thing out of her right away: she had decommissioned Hugh with the butt of the shotgun. No one was going to try to shoot them when they went through the door.

He hoped.

“Come on,” he said to Norris, “let’s go.”

“Alan… When she came out… I thought.

“I know what you thought, but no harm was done. Forget it, Norris. John’s inside. Come on.”

They went to the door and stood on either side of it. Alan looked at Norris. “Go in low,” he said.

Norris nodded his head.

Alan grabbed the doorknob, jerked the door open, and lunged inside. Norris went in under him in a crouch.

John had managed to find his feet and stagger most of the way to the door. Alan and Norris hit him like the front line of the old Pittsburgh Steelers and John suffered a final painful indignity: he was knocked flat by his colleagues and sent skidding across the tiled floor like one of the weights in a barroom bowling game. He struck the far wall with a thud and let out a scream of pain which was both surprised and somehow weary.

“Jesus, that’s john!” Norris cried. “What a French fire-drill!”

“Help me with him,” Alan said.

They hurried across the room to John, who was slowly sitting up on his own. His face was a mask of blood. His nose was canted severely to the left. His upper lip was swelling like an overinflated innertube. As Alan and Norris reached him, he cupped one hand under his mouth and spat a tooth into it.

“He’th cray the,” John said in a mushy, dazed voice. “Theela hit him with the thotgun. I think thee killed him.”

“John, are you all right?” Norris asked.

“I’m a fuckin meth,” John said. He leaned forward and vomited extravagantly between his own spread legs to prove it.

Alan looked around. He was vaguely aware that it wasn’t just his ears; a telephone really was ringing. But the phone wasn’t the important thing now. He saw Hugh lying face-down by the rear wall and went over. He dropped his ear against the back of Hugh’s shirt, listening for a heartbeat. All he could hear at first was the ringing in his ears. The goddam telephones were ringing on every desk, it sounded like.

“Answer that fucking thing or take it off the hook!” Alan snapped at Norris.

Norris went to the closest phone-it happened to be on his own desk-punched the button that was flashing, and picked it up.

“Don’t bother us now,” he said. “We have an emergency situation here. You’ll have to call back later.” He dropped it back into its cradle without waiting for a response.

24

Henry Beaufort took the telephone-the heavy, heavy telephoneaway from his ear and looked at it with dimming, unbelieving eyes. “What did you say?” he whispered. Suddenly he could no longer hold the telephone receiver; it was just too damned heavy. He dropped it on the floor, slowly collapsed onto his side, and lay there panting.

25

As far as Alan could tell, Hugh was all finished. He grabbed him by the shoulders, rolled him over… and it wasn’t Hugh at all.

The face was too completely covered with blood, brains, and bits of bone for him to be able to tell who it was, but it surely wasn’t Hugh Priest.

“What in the fuck is going on here?” he said in a low, amazed voice.

26

Danforth “Buster” Keeton stood in the middle of the street, handcuffed to his own Cadillac, and watched Them watching him. Now that the Chief Persecutor and his Deputy Persecutor were gone, They had nothing else to watch.

He looked at Them and knew Them for what They were-each and every one of Them.

Bill Fullerton and Henry Gendron were standing in front of the barber shop. Bobby Dugas was standing between them with a barber’s apron still snapped around his neck and hanging down in front of him like an oversized dinner napkin. Charlie Fortin was standing in front of the Western Auto. Scott Garson and his puke lawyer friends Albert Martin and Howard Potter were standing in front of the bank, where they had probably been talking about him when the ruckus broke out.

Eyes. Fucking eyes. There were eyes everywhere. All looking at him. “I see you!” Buster cried suddenly. “I see You all! All You

People! And I know what to do! Yes! You bet!”

He opened the door of his Cadillac and tried to get in. He couldn’t do it. He was cuffed to the outside doorhandle. The chain between the cuffs was long, but not that long.

Someone laughed. Buster heard that laugh quite clearly. He looked around. Many residents of Castle Rock stood in front of the businesses along Main Street, looking back at him with the black buckshot eyes of intelligent rats. Everyone was there but Mr. Gaunt. Yet Mr. Gaunt was there; Mr. Gaunt was inside Buster’s head, telling him exactly what to do. Buster listened… and began to smile.

27

The Budwelser truck Hugh had almost sideswiped in town stopped at a couple of the little mom-n-pops on the other side of the bridge and finally pulled into the parking lot of The Mellow Tiger at 4:01 p.m.

The driver got out, grabbed his clipboard, hitched up his green khaki pants, and marched toward the building. He stopped five feet away from the door, eyes widening. He could see a pair of feet in the bar’s doorway.

“Holy Joe!” the driver exclaimed. “You okay, buddy?”

A faint wheezing cry drifted to his ears:… help…

The driver ran inside and discovered Henry Beaufort, barely alive, crumpled behind the bar.

28

“Ith Lethter Pratt,” John LaPointe croaked. Supported by Norris on one side and Sheila on the other, he had hobbled over to where Alan knelt by the body.

“Who?” Alan asked. He felt as if he had accidentally stumbled into some mad comedy. Ricky and Lucy Go to Hell. Hey Lester, you got some ’splainin to do.

“Lethter Pratt,” John said again with painful patience. “He’th the Phidthical Educaythun teather at the high thcool.”

“What’s he doing here?” Alan asked.

John LaPointe shook his head wearily. “Dunno, Alan. He jutht came in and went cray the.”

“Somebody give me a break,” Alan said. “Where’s Hugh Priest?

Where’s Clut? What in God’s name is going on here?”

29

George T. Nelson stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking around unbelievingly. The place looked as if some punk band-the Sex Pistols, maybe the Cramps-had had a party in it, along with all their fans.

“What-” he began, and could say no more. Nor did he need to. He knew what. It was the coke. Had to be. He’d been dealing among the faculty at Castle Rock High for the last six years (not all the teachers were appreciators of what Ace Merrill sometimes called Bolivian Bingo Dust, but the ones who were qualified as big appreciators), and he’d left half an ounce of almost pure coke under the mattress. It was the blow, sure it was. Someone had talked and someone else had gotten greedy. George supposed he’d known that as soon as he’d pulled into the driveway and saw the broken kitchen window.

He crossed the room and yanked up the mattress with hands that felt dead and numb. Nothing underneath. The coke was gone.

Nearly two thousand dollars’ worth of almost pure coke, gone. He sleepwalked toward the bathroom to see if his own small stash was still in the Anacin bottle on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet.

He’d never needed a hit as badly as he did just now.

He reached the doorway and stopped, eyes wide. It wasn’t the mess that riveted his attention, although this room had also been turned upside down with great zeal; it was the toilet. The ring was down, and it was thinly dusted with white stuff.

George had an idea that white stuff was not Johnson’s Baby Powder.

He walked across to the toilet, wetted his finger, and touched it to the dust. He put his finger in his mouth. The tip of his tongue went numb almost at once. Lying on the floor between the john and the tub was an empty plastic Baggie. The picture was clear.

Crazy, but clear. Someone had come in, found the coke… and then flushed it down the crapper. Why? Why? He didn’t know, but he decided when he found the person who had done this, he would ask. just before he tore his head right off his shoulders. it couldn’t hurt.

His own three-gram stash was intact. He carried it out of the bathroom and then stopped again as a fresh shock struck his eyes.

He hadn’t seen this particular abomination as he crossed the bedroom from the hall, but from this angle it was impossible to miss.

He stood where he was for a long moment, eyes wide with amazed horror, his throat working convulsively. The nests of veins at his temples beat rapidly, like the wings of small birds. He finally managed to produce one small, strangled word:… mom…!”

Downstairs, behind George T. Nelson’s oatmeal-colored sofa, Frank jewett slept on.

30

The bystanders on Lower Main, who had been called out to the sidewalk by the yelling and the gunshot, were now being entertained by a new novelty: the slow-motion escape of their Head Selectman.

Buster leaned as far into his Cadillac as he could and turned the ignition switch to the oN position. He then pushed the button that lowered the power window on the driver’s side. He closed the door again and carefully began to wriggle in through the window.

He was still sticking out from the knees down, his left arm pulled back behind him at a severe angle by the handcuff around the doorhandle, the chain lying across his large left thigh, when Scott Garson came up.

“Uh, Danforth,” the banker said hesitantly, “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that. I believe you’re arrested.”

Buster looked under his right armpit, smelling his own aromaquite spicy by now, quite spicy indeed-and saw Garson upside down. He was standing directly behind Buster. He looked as if he might be planning to try to haul Buster back out of his own car.

Buster pulled his legs up as much as he could and then shot them out, hard, like a pony kicking up dickens in the @asture. The heels of his shoes struck Garson’s face with a smack which Buster found entirely satisfying. Garson’s gold-rimmed spectacles shattered. He howled, reeled backward with his bleeding face in his hands, and fell on his back in Main Street.

“Hah!” Buster grunted. “Didn’t expect that, did you? Didn’t expect that at all, you persecuting son of a bitch, did you?”

He wriggled the rest of the way into his car. There was just enough chain. His shoulder-joint creaked alarmingly and then rotated enough in its socket to allow him to wriggle under his own arm and scoot his ass back along the seat. Now he was sitting behind the wheel with his cuffed arm out the window. He started the car.

Scott Garson sat up in time to see the Cadillac bearing down on him. Its grille seemed to leer at him, a vast chrome mountain which was going to crush him.

He rolled frantically to the left, avoiding death by less than a second. One of the Cadillac’s large front tires rolled over his right hand, squashing it pretty efficiently. Then the rear tire rolled over it, finishing the job. Garson lay on his back, looking at his grotesquely mashed fingers, which were now roughly the size of puttyknives, and began to scream up into the hot blue sky.

31

“TAMMMEEEEE FAYYYYE!”

This shriek hauled Frank jewett out of his deepening doze. He had absolutely no idea where he was in those first confused seconds-only that it was some tight, close place. An unpleasant place.

There was something in his hand, too… what was it?

He raised his right hand and almost poked out his own eye with the steak-knife. itoooooohhhh, noooooooh! TAMMEEEEEEE FAYYYYE!”

It came back to him all at once. He was behind the couch of his good old “friend,” George T. Nelson, and that was George T.

Nelson himself, in the flesh, noisily mourning his dead parakeet.

Along with this realization, everything else returned to Frank: the magazines scattered all over the office, the blackmail note, the possible (no, probable-the more he thought about it, the more probable it seemed) ruin of his career and his life.

Now, incredibly, he could hear George T. Nelson sobbing. Sobbing over a goddam flying shithouse. Well, Frank thought, I’m going to put you out of your misery, George. Who knows-maybe you’ll even wind up in bird heaven.

The sobs were approaching the sofa. Better and better. He would jump up-surprise, George!-and the bastard would be dead before he had any idea of what was up. Frank was on the verge of making his spring when George T. Nelson, still sobbing as if his heart would break, seat-dropped onto his sofa. He was a heavy man, and his weight drove the sofa back smartly toward the wall. He did not hear the surprised, breathless “Oooof."’ from behind him; his own sobs covered it. He fumbled for the telephone, dialed through a shimmer of tears and got (almost miraculously) Fred Rubin on the first ring.

“Fred!” he cried. “Fred, something terrible has happened!

Maybe it’s still happening! Oh Jesus, Fred! Oh Jesus!”

Below and behind him, Frank jewett was struggling for breath.

Edgar Allan Poe stories he’d read as a kid, stories about being buried alive, raced through his head. His face was slowly turning the color of old brick. The heavy wooden leg which had been forced against his chest when George T. Nelson collapsed onto the sofa felt like a bar of lead. The back of the sofa lay against his shoulder and the side of his face.

Above him, George T. Nelson was spilling a garbled description of what he’d found when he finally got home into Fred Rubin’s ear.

At last he paused for a moment and then cried out, “I don’t care if I shouldn’t be calking about it on the phone-HOW CAN I CARE

WHEN HE KILLED TAMMY Faye? THE BASTARD KILLED

TAMMY Faye! Who could have done it, Fred? Who? You have to help me!”

Another pause as George T. Nelson listened, and Frank realized with growing panic that he was soon going to pass out. He suddenly understood what he had to do-use the Llama automatic to shoot up through the sofa. He might not kill George T. Nelson, he might not even hit George T. Nelson, but he could sure as hell get George T.

Nelson’s attention, and once he did that he thought the odds were good that George T. Nelson would get his fat ass off this sofa before Frank died down here with his nose squashed against the baseboard heating unit.

Frank opened the hand holding the steak-knife and tried to reach for the pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants. Dreamlike horror washed through him as he realized he couldn’t get ithis fingers were opening and closing two full inches above the gun’s ivory-inlaid handle. He tried with all his remaining strength to get the hand down lower, but his pinned shoulder would not move at all; the big sofa-and George T. Nelson’s considerable weightheld it firmly against the wall.

It might have been nailed there.

Black roses-harbingers of approaching asphyxiation-began to bloom before Frank’s bulging eyes.

As from some impossible distance, he heard his old “friend” screaming at Fred Rubin, who undoubtedly had been George T.

Nelson’s partner in the cocaine deal. “What are you talking about?

I call to tell you I’ve been violated and you tell me to go see the new guy downstreet? I don’t need knickknacks, Fred, I need-” He broke off, got up, and paced across the room. With what was literally the last of his strength, Frank managed to push the sofa a few inches away from the wall. It wasn’t much, but he was able to take small sips of incredibly wonderful air.

“He sells what?” George T. Nelson shouted. “Well, Jesus! Jesus

H. Christ! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Silence again. Frank lay behind the sofa like a beached whale, sipping air and hoping his monstrously pounding head would not explode.

In a moment he would arise and blow his old “friend” George T.

Nelson’s oysters off. In a moment. When he got his breath back. And when the big black flowers currently filling his sight shrank back into nothing. In a moment. Two at the most.

“Okay,” George T. Nelson said. “I’ll go see him. I doubt if he’s the miracle-worker you think he is, but any goddam port in a storm, right? I have to tell you something, though-I don’t give much of a shit if he’s dealing or not. I’m going to find the son of a bitch who did this-that’s the first goddam order of business-and I’m going to nail him to the nearest wall. Have you got that?”

I got it, Frank thought, but just who nails who to that fabled wall still remains to be seen, my dear old party-buddy. “Yes, I did get the name!” George T. Nelson screamed into the phone. “Gaunt, Gaunt, fucking Gaunt!” He slammed the phone down, then must have thrown it across the room-Frank heard the shatter of breaking glass. Seconds later, George

T. Nelson uttered a final oath and stormed out of the house. The engine of his Iroc-Z raved to life. Frank heard him backing down the driveway as he himself slowly pushed the sofa away from the wall. Rubber screamed against pavement outside and then Frank’s old “friend” George T. Nelson was gone.

Two minutes later, a pair of hands rose into view and clutched the back of the oatmeal-colored sofa. A moment after that, the face of Frank M. jewett-pale and crazed, the rimless Mr. Weatherbee glasses sitting askew on his small pug nose and one lens crackedappeared between the hands. The sofa-back had left a red, stippled pattern on his right cheek. A few dust-bunnies danced in his thinning hair.

Slowly, like a bloated corpse rising from the bed of a river until it floats just below the surface, the grin reappeared on Frank’s face.

He had missed his old “friend” George T. Nelson this time, but George T. Nelson had no plans to leave town. His phone conversation had made that quite clear. Frank would find him before the day was over. In a town the size of Castle Rock, how could he miss?

32

Sean Rusk stood in the kitchen doorway of his house, looking anxiously out at the garage. Five minutes before, his older brother had gone out there Sean had been looking out of his bedroom window and had just happened to see him. Brian had been holding something in one hand. The distance had been too great for Sean to see what it was, but he didn’t need to see. He knew. It was the new baseball card, the one Brian kept creeping upstairs to look at.

Brian didn’t know Sean knew about that card, but Sean did. He even knew who was on it, because he’d gotten home much earlier from school today than Brian, and he had sneaked into Brian’s room to look at it. He didn’t have the slightest idea why Brian cared about it so much; it was old, dirty, dog-eared, and faded. Also, the player was somebody Sean had never heard of-a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Sammy Koberg, lifetime record one win, three losses. The guy had never even spent a whole year in the majors. Why would Brian care about a worthless card like that?

Sean didn’t know. He only knew two things for sure: Brian did care, and the way Brian had been acting for the last week or so was scary. It was like those TV ads you saw about kids on drugs. But Brian wouldn’t use drugs… would he?

Something about Brian’s face when he went out to the garage had scared Sean so badly he had gone to tell his mother. He wasn’t sure exactly what to say, and it turned out not to matter because he didn’t get a chance to say anything. She was mooning around in the bedroom, wearing her bathrobe and those stupid sunglasses from the new store downtown.

“Mom, Brian’s-” he began, and that was as far as he got.

“Go away, Sean. Mommy’s busy right now.”

“But Mom-”

“Go away, I said!”

And before he had a chance to go on his own, he’d found himself hustled unceremoniously out of the bedroom. Her bathrobe fell open as she pushed him, and before he could look away, he saw that she was wearing nothing beneath it, not even a nightgown.

She had slammed the door behind him. And locked it.

Now he stood in the kitchen doorway, waiting anxiously for Brian to come back out of the garage… but Brian didn’t.

His unease had grown in some stealthy way until it was barely controlled terror. Sean went out the kitchen door, trotted through the breezeway, and entered the garage.

It was dark and oily-smelling and explosively hot inside. For a moment he didn’t see his brother in the shadows and thought he must have gone out through the back door into the yard. Then his eyes adjusted, and he uttered a small, whimpery gasp.

Brian was sitting against the rear wall, next to the Lawnboy. He had gotten Daddy’s rifle. The butt was propped on the floor. The muzzle was pointed at his own face. Brian was supporting the barrel with one hand while the other clutched the dirty old baseball card which had somehow gained such a hold over his life this last week.

“Brian!” Sean cried. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t come any closer, Sean, you’ll get the mess on you.”

“Brian, don’t!” Sean cried, beginning to weep. “Don’t be such a wussy! You’re… you’re scaring me!”

“I want you to promise me something,” Brian said. He had taken off his socks and sneakers, and now he wriggled one of his big toes inside the Remington’s trigger-guard.

Sean felt his crotch grow wet and warm. He had never been so scared in his life. “Brian, please! Pleeease!”

“I want you to promise me you’ll never go to the new store,” Brian said. “Do you hear me?” Sean took a step toward his brother. Brian’s toe tightened on the trigger of the rifle. “No!” Sean screamed, drawing back at once. “I mean yes! Yes!” Brian let the barrel drop a little when he saw his brother retreat. His toe relaxed a bit. “Promise me.”

“Yes! Anything you want! Only don’t do that! Don’t… don’t tease me any more, Bri! Let’s go in and watch The Transformers! No… you pick! Anything you want! Even Wapner! We can watch

Wapner if you want to! All week! All month! I’ll watch with you! Only stop scaring me, Brian, please stop scaring me!” Brian Rusk might not have heard. His eyes seemed to float in his distant, serene face. “Never go there,” he said. “Needful Things is a poison place, and Mr. Gaunt is a poison man. Only he’s really not a man, Sean. He’s not a man at all. Swear to me you’ll never buy any of the poison things Mr. Gaunt sells.”

“I swear! I swear!” Sean babbled. “I swear on Mommy’s name!”

“No,” Brian said, “you can’t do that, because he got her, too. Swear on your own name, Sean. Swear it on your very own name.”

“I do!” Sean cried out in the hot, dim garage. He held his hands out imploringly to his brother. “I really do, I swear on my very own name! Now please put the gun down, Brl-”

“I love you, baby brother.” He looked down at the baseball card for a moment. “Sandy Koufax sucks,” Brian Rusk remarked, and pulled the trigger with his toe. Sean’s drilling shriek of horror rose over the blast, which was flat and loud in the hot dark garage.

33

Leland Gaunt stood at his shop window, looking out on Main Street and smiling gently. The sound of the shot from up on Ford Street was faint, but his ears were sharp and he heard it.

His smile broadened a little. He took down the sign in the window, the one which said he was open by appointment only, and put up a new one. This one read