Duma Key (85 page)

I offered to go with him as far as security, and he shook his head. “You shouldn't have to watch as Wireman removes his shoes for a business school graduate,” he said. “This is where we say
adiós,
Edgar.”

“Wireman—” I said, and could say no more. My throat was filled with tears.

He pulled me into his arms and kissed me firmly on both cheeks. “Listen, Edgar. It's time for Act Three. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Come down to Mexico when you're ready. And if you want to.”

“I'll think about it.”

“You do that.
Con Dios, mi amigo; siempre con Dios.
”

“And you, Wireman. And you.”

I watched him walk away with his tote-bag slung over one shoulder. I had a sudden brilliant memory of his voice the night Emery had attacked me in Big Pink, of Wireman shouting
cojudo de puta madre
just before driving the candlestick into the dead thing's face. He had been magnificent. I willed him to turn back one final time . . . and he did. Must have caught a thought, my mother would have said. Or had an intuition. That's what Nan Melda would have said.

He saw me still standing there and his face lit in
a grin. “Do the day, Edgar!” he cried. People turned to look, startled.

“And let the day do you!” I called back.

He saluted me, laughing, then walked into the jetway. And of course I
did
eventually come south to his little town, but although he's always alive for me in his sayings—I never think of them in anything but the present tense—I never saw the man himself again. He died of a heart attack two months later, in Tamazunchale's open-air market, while dickering for fresh tomatoes. I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don't we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

iii

Back at the place on Aster Lane, my easel stood in the living room, where the light was good. The canvas on it was covered with a piece of toweling. Beside it, on the table with my oil paints, were several aerial photos of Duma Key, but I'd hardly glanced at them; I saw Duma in my dreams, and still do.

I tossed the towel on the couch. In the foreground of my painting—my last painting—stood Big Pink, rendered so realistically I could almost hear the shells grating beneath it with each incoming wave.

Propped against one of the pilings, the perfect surreal touch, were two red-headed dolls, sitting side by side. On the left was Reba. On the right was Fancy, the one Kamen had fetched from Minnesota. The one that had been Illy's idea. The Gulf, usually so blue during my time on Duma Key, I had painted a dull and ominous green. Overhead, the sky was filled
with black clouds; they massed to the top of the canvas and out of sight.

My right arm began to itch, and that remembered sensation of power began to flow first into me and then through me. I could see my picture almost with the eye of a god . . . or a goddess. I could give this up, but it would not be easy.

When I made pictures, I fell in love with the world.

When I made pictures, I felt whole.

I painted awhile, then put the brush aside. I mixed brown and yellow together with the ball of my thumb, then skimmed it over the painted beach . . . oh so lightly . . . and a haze of sand lifted, as if on the first hesitant puff of air.

On Duma Key, beneath the black sky of an inriding June storm, a wind began to rise.

Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

February 2006–June 2007

I have taken liberties with the geography of Florida's west coast, and with its history, as well. Although Dave Davis was real, and did indeed disappear, he is used here fictionally.

And no one in Florida calls out-of-season storms “Alices” except me.

I want to thank my wife, the novelist Tabitha King, who read this book in an early draft and suggested valuable changes; the Sweet Owen cookie-tin was only one of them.

I want to thank Russ Dorr, my old medical friend, who patiently explained both Broca's area and the physics of contracoup injuries.

I also want to thank Chuck Verrill, who edited the book with his usual combination of gentleness and ruthlessness.

Teddy Rosenbaum, my friend and copy-editor:
muchas gracias.

And you, my old friend Constant Reader; always you.

Stephen King

Bangor, Maine

“The Cat from Hell”

A bonus story from Stephen King's new collection

JUST AFTER SUNSET

Available now from Scribner

The Cat from Hell

Halston thought the old man in the wheelchair looked sick, terrified, and ready to die. He had experience in seeing such things. Death was Halston's business; he had brought it to eighteen men and six women in his career as an independent hitter. He knew the death look.

The house—mansion, actually—was cold and quiet. The only sounds were the low snap of the fire on the big stone hearth and the low whine of the November wind outside.

“I want you to make a kill,” the old man said. His voice was quavery and high, peevish. “I understand that is what you do.”

“Who did you talk to?” Halston asked.

“With a man named Saul Loggia. He says you know him.”

Halston nodded. If Loggia was the go-between, it was all right. And if there was a bug in the room, anything the old man—Drogan—said was entrapment.

“Who do you want hit?”

Drogan pressed a button on the console built into the arm of his wheelchair and it buzzed forward. Close-up, Halston could smell the yellow odors of fear, age, and urine all mixed. They disgusted him, but he made no sign. His face was still and smooth.

“Your victim is right behind you,” Drogan said softly.

Halston moved quickly. His reflexes were his life and they were always set on a filed pin. He was off the couch, falling to one knee, turning, hand inside his specially tailored sport coat, gripping the handle of the short-barrelled .45 hybrid
that hung below his armpit in a spring-loaded holster that laid it in his palm at a touch. A moment later it was out and pointed at . . . a cat.

For a moment Halston and the cat stared at each other. It was a strange moment for Halston, who was an unimaginative man with no superstitions. For that one moment as he knelt on the floor with the gun pointed, he felt that he knew this cat, although if he had ever seen one with such unusual markings he surely would have remembered.

Its face was an even split: half black, half white. The dividing line ran from the top of its flat skull and down its nose to its mouth, straight-arrow. Its eyes were huge in the gloom, and caught in each nearly circular black pupil was a prism of firelight, like a sullen coal of hate.

And the thought echoed back to Halston:
We know each other, you and I.

Then it passed. He put the gun away and stood up. “I ought to kill you for that, old man. I don't take a joke.”

“And I don't make them,” Drogan said. “Sit down. Look in here.” He had taken a fat envelope out from beneath the blanket that covered his legs.

Halston sat. The cat, which had been crouched on the back of the sofa, jumped lightly down into his lap. It looked up at Halston for a moment with those huge dark eyes, the pupils surrounded by thin green-gold rings, and then it settled down and began to purr.

Halston looked at Drogan questioningly.

“He's very friendly,” Drogan said. “At first. Nice friendly pussy has killed three people in this household. That leaves only me. I am old, I am sick . . . but I prefer to die in my own time.”

“I can't believe this,” Halston said. “You hired me to hit a cat?”

“Look in the envelope, please.”

Halston did. It was filled with hundreds and fifties, all of them old. “How much is it?”

“Six thousand dollars. There will be another six when you bring me proof that the cat is dead. Mr. Loggia said twelve thousand was your usual fee?”

Halston nodded, his hand automatically stroking the cat
in his lap. It was asleep, still purring. Halston liked cats. They were the only animals he did like, as a matter of fact. They got along on their own. God—if there was one—had made them into perfect, aloof killing machines. Cats were the hitters of the animal world, and Halston gave them his respect.

“I need not explain anything, but I will,” Drogan said. “Forewarned is forearmed, they say, and I would not want you to go into this lightly. And I seem to need to justify myself. So you'll not think I'm insane.”

Halston nodded again. He had already decided to make this peculiar hit, and no further talk was needed. But if Drogan wanted to talk, he would listen.

“First of all, you know who I am? Where the money comes from?”

“Drogan Pharmaceuticals.”

“Yes. One of the biggest drug companies in the world. And the cornerstone of our financial success has been this.” From the pocket of his robe he handed Halston a small, unmarked vial of pills. “Tri-Dormal-phenobarbin, compound G. Prescribed almost exclusively for the terminally ill. It's extremely habit-forming, you see. It's a combination painkiller, tranquilizer, and mild hallucinogen. It is remarkable in helping the terminally ill face their conditions and adjust to them.”

“Do you take it?” Halston asked.

Drogan ignored the question. “It is widely prescribed throughout the world. It's a synthetic, was developed in the fifties at our New Jersey labs. Our testing was confined almost solely to cats, because of the unique quality of the feline nervous system.”

“How many did you wipe out?”

Drogan stiffened. “That is an unfair and prejudicial way to put it.”

Halston shrugged.

“In the four-year testing period which led to FDA approval of Tri-Dormal-G, about fifteen thousand cats . . . uh, expired.”

Halston whistled. About four thousand cats a year. “And now you think this one's back to get you, huh?”

“I don't feel guilty in the slightest,” Drogan said, but that quavering, petulant note was back in his voice. “Fifteen thousand test animals died so that hundreds of thousands of human beings—”

“Never mind that,” Halston said. Justifications bored him.

“That cat came here seven months ago. I've never liked cats. Nasty, disease-bearing animals . . . always out in the fields . . . crawling around in barns . . . picking up God knows what germs in their fur . . . always trying to bring something with its insides falling out into the house for you to look at . . . it was my sister who wanted to take it in. She found out. She paid.” He looked at the cat sleeping on Halston's lap with dead hate.

“You said the cat killed three people.”

Drogan began to speak. The cat dozed and purred on Halston's lap under the soft, scratching strokes of Halston's strong and expert killer's fingers. Occasionally a pine knot would explode on the hearth, making it tense like a series of steel springs covered with hide and muscle. Outside the wind whined around the big stone house far out in the Connecticut countryside. There was winter in that wind's throat. The old man's voice droned on and on.

Seven months ago there had been four of them here—Drogan, his sister Amanda, who at seventy-four was two years Drogan's elder, her lifelong friend Carolyn Broadmoor (“of the Westchester Broadmoors,” Drogan said), who was badly afflicted with emphysema, and Dick Gage, a hired man who had been with the Drogan family for twenty years. Gage, who was past sixty himself, drove the big Lincoln Mark IV, cooked, served the evening sherry. A day-maid came in. The four of them had lived this way for nearly two years, a dull collection of old people and their family retainer. Their only pleasures were
The Hollywood Squares
and waiting to see who would outlive whom.

Then the cat had come.

“It was Gage who saw it first, whining and skulking around the house. He tried to drive it away. He threw sticks and small rocks at it, and hit it several times. But it wouldn't go. It smelled the food, of course. It was little
more than a bag of bones. People put them out beside the road to die at the end of the summer season, you know. A terrible, inhumane thing.”

“Better to fry their nerves?” Halston asked.

Drogan ignored that and went on. He hated cats. He always had. When the cat refused to be driven away, he had instructed Gage to put out poisoned food. Large, tempting dishes of Calo cat food spiked with Tri-Dormal-G, as a matter of fact. The cat ignored the food. At that point Amanda Drogan had noticed the cat and had insisted they take it in. Drogan had protested vehemently, but Amanda had gotten her way. She always did, apparently.

“But she found out,” Drogan said. “She brought it inside herself, in her arms. It was purring, just as it is now. But it wouldn't come near me. It never has . . . yet. She poured it a saucer of milk. ‘Oh, look at the poor thing, it's starving,' she cooed. She and Carolyn both cooed over it. Disgusting. It was their way of getting back at me, of course. They knew the way I've felt about felines ever since the Tri-Dormal-G testing program twenty years ago. They enjoyed teasing me, baiting me with it.” He looked at Halston grimly. “But they paid.”

In mid-May, Gage had gotten up to set breakfast and had found Amanda Drogan lying at the foot of the main stairs in a litter of broken crockery and Little Friskies. Her eyes bulged sightlessly up at the ceiling. She had bled a great deal from the mouth and nose. Her back was broken, both legs were broken, and her neck had been literally shattered like glass.

“It slept in her room,” Drogan said. “She treated it like a baby . . . ‘Is oo hungry, darwing? Does oo need to go out and do poopoos?' Obscene, coming from an old battle-axe like my sister. I think it woke her up, meowing. She got his dish. She used to say that Sam didn't really like his Friskies unless they were wetted down with a little milk. So she was planning to go downstairs. The cat was rubbing against her legs. She was old, not too steady on her feet. Half-asleep. They got to the head of the stairs and the cat got in front of her . . . tripped her . . .”