Needful Things (89 page)

Alan squeezed his hand. “I know, Sean. What did your brother want you to promise?”

“Maybe Brian won't go to heaven if I tell.”

“Yes he will.
I
promise. And I'm a Sheriff.”

“Do Sheriffs ever break their promises?”

“They never break them when they're made to little kids in the hospital,” Alan said. “Sheriffs
can't
break their promises to kids like that.”

“Do they go to hell if they do?”

“Yes,” Alan said. “That's right. They go to hell if they do.”

“Do you swear Brian will go to heaven even if I tell? Do you swear on your very own name?”

“On my very own name,” Alan said.

“Okay,” Sean said. “He made me promise I would never go to the new store where he got the great special baseball card. He thought Sandy Koufax was on that card, but that wasn't who it was. It was some other player. It was old and dirty, but I don't think Brian knew that.” Sean paused a moment, thinking, and then went on in his eerily calm voice. “He came home one day and later on I heard him in his room, crying.”

The sheets, Alan thought. Wilma's sheets. It
was
Brian.

“Brian said Needful Things is a poison place and
he's
a poison man and I should never go there.”

“Brian
said
that? He
said
Needful Things?”

“Yes.”

“Sean—” He paused, thinking. Electric sparks were shooting through him everywhere, jigging and jagging in tiny blue splinters.

“What?”

“Did . . . did your mother get her sunglasses at Needful Things?”

“Yes.”

“She told you that she did?”

“No. But I know she did. She wears the sunglasses and that's how she visits with The King.”

“What King, Sean? Do you know?”

Sean looked at Alan as though he were crazy. “Elvis.
He's
The King.”

“Elvis,” Alan muttered. “Sure—who else?”

“I want my father.”

“I know, honey. Just a couple more questions and I'll leave you alone. Then you'll go back to sleep and when
you wake up, your father will be here.” He hoped. “Sean, did Brian say who the poison man was?”

“Yes. Mr. Gaunt. The man who runs the store.
He's
the poison man.”

Now his mind jumped to Polly—Polly after the funeral, saying
I guess it was just a matter of finally meeting the right doctor . . . Dr. Gaunt. Dr. Leland Gaunt.

He saw her holding out the little silver ball she had bought in Needful Things so he could see it . . . but cupping her hand protectively over it when he put a hand out to touch it. There had been an expression on her face in that moment which was totally unlike Polly. A look of narrow suspicion and possessiveness. Then, later, speaking in a strident, shaky, tear-filled voice which was also totally unlike her:
It's hard to find out the face you thought you loved is only a mask . . . How could you go behind my back? . . . How
could
you?

“What did you tell her?” he muttered. He was totally unaware that he had seized the counterpane of the hospital bed in one hand and was twisting it slowly into his clenched fist. “What did you tell her? And how the hell did you make her believe it?”

“Mr. Sheriff? Are you okay?”

Alan forced himself to open his fist. “Yes—fine. You're sure Brian said Mr. Gaunt, aren't you, Sean?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” Alan said. He bent over the bars, took Sean's hand, and kissed his cool, pale cheek. “Thank you for talking to me.” He let go of the boy's hand and stood up.

During the last week, there had been one piece of business on his agenda which simply hadn't gotten done—a courtesy call on Castle Rock's newest businessman. No big deal; just a friendly hello, a welcome to town, and a quick rundown on what the procedure was in case of trouble. He had meant to do it, had once even dropped by, but it kept not getting done. And today, when Polly's behavior began to make him wonder if Mr. Gaunt was on the up-and-up, the shit had
really
hit the fan, and he had wound up here, more than twenty miles away.

Is he keeping me away? Has he been keeping me away all along?

The idea should have seemed ridiculous, but in this quiet, shadowy room, it did not seem ridiculous at all.

Suddenly he needed to get back. He needed to get back just as fast as he could.

“Mr. Sheriff?”

Alan looked down at him.

“Brian said something else, too,” Sean said.

“Did he?” Alan asked. “What was that, Sean?”

“Brian said Mr. Gaunt wasn't really a man at all.”

Alan walked down the hall toward the door with the
EXIT
sign over it as quietly as he could, expecting to be frozen in his tracks by a challenging shout from Miss Hendrie's replacement at any moment. But the only person who spoke to him was a little girl. She stood in the doorway of her room, her blonde hair tied in braids which lay on the front of her faded pink flannel nightie. She was holding a blanket. Her favorite, from its ragged well-used look. Her feet were bare, the ribbons at the ends of her braids were askew, and her eyes were enormous in her haggard face. It was a face which knew more about pain than any child's face should know.

“You've got a gun,” she announced.

“Yes.”

“My dad has a gun.”

“Does he?”

“Yes. It's bigger than yours. It's bigger than the world. Are you the Boogeyman?”

“No, honey,” he said, and thought: I think maybe the Boogeyman is in my home town tonight.

He pushed through the door at the end of the corridor, went downstairs, and pushed through another door into a late twilight as sultry as any midsummer evening. He hurried around to the parking lot, not quite running. Thunder bumbled and grumbled out of the west, from the direction of Castle Rock.

He unlocked the driver's door of the station wagon,
got in, and pulled the Radio Shack microphone off its prongs. “Unit One to base. Come back.”

His only response was a rush of brainless static.

The goddam storm.

Maybe the Boogeyman ordered it up special,
a voice whispered from somewhere deep inside. Alan smiled with his lips pressed together.

He tried again, got the same response, then tried the State Police in Oxford. They came through loud and clear. Dispatch told him there was a big electrical storm in the vicinity of Castle Rock, and communications had become spotty. Even the telephones only seemed to be working when they wanted to.

“Well, you get through to Henry Payton and tell him to take a man named Leland Gaunt into custody. As a material witness will do to begin with. That's
Gaunt,
G as in George. Do you copy? Ten-four.”

“I copy you five-by, Sheriff. Gaunt, G as in George. Ten-four.”

“Tell him I believe Gaunt may be an accessory before the fact in the murders of Nettie Cobb and Wilma Jerzyck. Ten-four.”

“Copy. Ten-four.”

“Ten-forty, over and out.”

He replaced the mike, keyed the engine, and headed back toward The Rock. On the outskirts of Bridgton, he swerved into the parking lot of a Red Apple store and used the telephone to dial his office. He got two clicks and then a recorded voice telling him the number was temporarily out of service.

He hung up and went back to his car. This time he
was
running. Before he pulled out of the parking lot and back onto Route 117, he turned on the Porta-Bubble and stuck it on the roof again. By the time he was half a mile down the road he had the shuddering, protesting Ford wagon doing seventy-five.

Ace Merrill and full dark returned to Castle Rock together.

He drove the Chevy Celebrity across Castle Stream Bridge while thunder rolled heavily back and forth in the sky overhead and lightning jabbed the unresisting earth. He drove with the windows open; there was still no rain falling and the air was as thick as syrup.

He was dirty and tired and furious. He had gone to three more locations on the map in spite of the note, unable to believe what had happened, unable to believe it
could
have happened. To coin a phrase, he was unable to believe he had been aced out. At each one of the spots he had found a flat stone and a buried tin can. Two had contained more wads of dirty trading stamps. The last, in the marshy ground behind the Strout farm, had contained nothing but an old ball-point pen. There was a woman with a forties hairdo on the pen's barrel. She was wearing a forties tank-style bathing suit as well. When you held the pen up, the bathing suit disappeared.

Some treasure.

Ace had driven back to Castle Rock at top speed, his eyes wild and his jeans splattered with swamp-goo up to the knees, for one reason and one reason only: to kill Alan Pangborn. Then he would simply haul ass for the West Coast—he should have done it long before. He might get some of the money out of Pangborn; he might get none of it. Either way, one thing was certain: that son of a bitch was going to die, and he was going to die
hard.

Still three miles from the bridge, he realized that he didn't have a weapon. He had meant to take one of the autos from the crate in the Cambridge garage, but then that damned tape recorder had started up, scaring the life out of him. But he knew where they were.

Oh yes.

He crossed the bridge . . . and then stopped at the intersection of Main Street and Watermill Lane, although the right-of-way was his.

“What the
fuck?”
he muttered.

Lower Main was a tangled confusion of State Police cruisers, flashing blue lights, TV vans, and little knots of
people. Most of the action was swirling around the Municipal Building. It looked almost as though the town fathers had decided to throw a street-carnival on the spur of the moment.

Ace didn't care what had happened; the whole town could dry up and blow away as far as he was concerned. But he wanted Pangborn, wanted to tear the fucking thief's scalp off and hang it on his belt, and how was he supposed to do that with what looked like every State cop in Maine hanging out at the Sheriff's Office?

The answer came at once.
Mr. Gaunt will know. Mr. Gaunt has the artillery, and he'll have the answers to go with it. Go see Mr. Gaunt.

He glanced in his mirror and saw more blue lights top the nearest rise on the other side of the bridge. Even more cops on the way. What the fuck happened here this afternoon? he wondered again, but that was a question which could be answered another time . . . or not at all, if that was how things fell out. Meantime, he had his own business, and it began with getting out of the way before the arriving cops rear-ended him.

Ace turned left on Watermill Lane, then right onto Cedar Street, skirting the downtown area before cutting back to Main Street. He paused at the stop-light for a moment, looking at the nest of flashing blue lights at the bottom of the hill. Then he parked in front of Needful Things.

He got out of the car, crossed the street, and read the sign in the window. He felt a moment of crashing disappointment—it was not just a gun he needed, but a little more of Mr. Gaunt's blow as well—and then he remembered the service entrance in the alley. He walked up the block and around the corner, not noticing the bright yellow van parked twenty or thirty yards farther up, or the man who sat inside it (Buster had moved to the passenger seat now), watching him.

As he entered the alley, he bumped into a man who was wearing a tweed cap pulled low over his forehead.

“Hey, watch where you're going, Daddy-O,” Ace said.

The man in the tweed cap raised his head, bared his teeth at Ace, and snarled. At the same moment he pulled
an automatic from his pocket and pointed it in Ace's general direction. “Don't fuck with me, my friend, unless you want some, too.”

Ace raised his hands and stepped back. He was not afraid; he was utterly astonished. “Not me, Mr. Nelson,” he said. “Leave me out of it.”

“Right,” the man in the tweed cap said. “Have you seen that cocksucker Jewett?”

“Uh . . . the one from the junior high?”

“The Middle School, right—are there any other Jewetts in town? Get real, for Christ's sake!”

“I just got here,” Ace said cautiously. “I really haven't seen anyone, Mr. Nelson.”

“Well, I'm going to find him, and he's going to be one sorry sack of shit when I do. He killed my parakeet and shit on my mother.” George T. Nelson narrowed his eyes and added: “This is a good night to stay out of my way.”

Ace didn't argue.

Mr. Nelson stuffed the gun back into his pocket and disappeared around the corner, walking with the purposeful strides of one who is indeed highly pissed off. Ace stood right where he was for a moment, hands still raised. Mr. Nelson taught wood shop and metal shop at the high school. Ace had always believed he was one of those guys who wouldn't have nerve enough to slap a deerfly if it lit on his eyeball, but he thought he might just have to change his opinion on that. Also, Ace had recognized the gun. He should have; he had brought a whole case of them back from Boston just the night before.

“Ace!” Mr. Gaunt said. “You're just in time.”

“I need a gun,” Ace said. “Also, some more of that high-class boogerjuice, if you've got any.”

“Yes, yes . . . in time. All things in time. Help me with this table, Ace.”

“I'm going to kill Pangborn,” Ace said. “He stole my fucking treasure and I'm going to kill him.”

Mr. Gaunt looked at Ace with the flat yellow stare of a cat stalking a mouse . . . and in that moment, Ace
felt
like a mouse. “Don't waste my time telling me things I already know,” he said. “If you want my help, Ace, help
me
.”