The Dead Zone (38 page)

There were two deputies in the outer office, one of them snoozing, the other drinking coffee and looking glumly through a pile of reports.

“His wife kick him out or something?” Bannerman asked sourly, nodding toward the sleeper.

“He just got back from Augusta,” the deputy said. He was little more than a kid himself, and there were dark circles of weariness under his eyes. He glanced over at Johnny curiously.

“Johnny Smith, Frank Dodd. Sleeping beauty over there is Roscoe Fisher.”

Johnny nodded hello.

“Roscoe says the A.G. wants the whole case,” Dodd told Bannerman. His look was angry and defiant and somehow pathetic. “Some Christmas present, huh?”

Bannerman put a hand on the back of Dodd's neck and shook him gently. “You worry too much, Frank. Also, you're spending too much time on the case.”

“I just keep thinking there must be something in these reports . . .” He shrugged and then flicked them with one finger.
“Something.”

“Go home and get some rest, Frank. And take sleeping beauty with you. All we need is for one of those photographers to get a picture of him. They'd run it in the papers with a caption like ‘In Castle Rock the Intensive Investigation Goes On,' and we'd all be out sweeping streets.”

Bannerman led Johnny into his private office. The desk was awash in paperwork. On the windowsill was a triptych showing Bannerman, his wife, and his daughter Katrina. His degree hung neatly framed on the wall, and beside it, in another frame, the front page of the Castle Rock
Call
which had announced his election.

“Coffee?” Bannerman asked him, unlocking a file cabinet.

“No thanks. I'll stick to tea.”

“Mrs. Sugarman guards her tea jealously,” Bannerman said. “Takes it home with her every day, sorry. I'd offer you a tonic, but we'd have to run the gauntlet out there again to get to the machine. Jesus Christ, I wish they'd go home.”

“That's okay.”

Bannerman came back with a small clasp envelope. “This is it,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, then handed the envelope over.

Johnny held it but did not immediately open it. “As long as you understand that nothing comes guaranteed. I can't promise. Sometimes I can and sometimes I can't.”

Bannerman shrugged tiredly and repeated: “No venture, no gain.”

Johnny undid the clasp and shook an empty Marlboro cigarette box out into his hand. Red and white box. He held it in his left hand and looked at the far wall. Gray wall. Industrial gray wall. Red and white box. Industrial gray box. He put the cigarette package in his other hand, then cupped it in both. He waited for something, anything to come. Nothing did. He held it longer, hoping against hope, ignoring the knowledge that when things came, they came at once.

At last he handed the cigarette box back. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“No soap, huh?”

“No.”

There was a perfunctory tap at the door and Roscoe Fisher stuck his head in. He looked a bit shamefaced. “Frank and I are going home, George. I guess you caught me coopin.”

“As long as I don't catch you doing it in your cruiser,” Bannermann said. “Say hi to Deenie for me.”

“You bet.” Fisher glanced at Johnny for a moment and then closed the door.

“Well,” Bannerman said. “It was worth the try, I guess. I'll run you back . . .”

“I want to go over to the common,” Johnny said abruptly.

“No, that's no good. It's under a foot of snow.”

“You can find the place, can't you?”

“Of course I can. But what'll it gain?”

“I don't know. But let's go across.”

“Those reporters are going to follow us, Johnny. Just as sure as God made little fishes.”

“You said something about a back door.”

“Yeah, but it's a fire door. Getting in that way is okay, but if we use it to go out, the alarm goes off.”

Johnny whistled through his teeth. “Let them follow along, then.”

Bannermann looked at him thoughtfully for several moments and then nodded. “Okay.”

When they came out of the office, the reporters were up and surrounding them immediately. Johnny was reminded of a rundown kennel over in Durham where a strange old woman kept collies. The dogs would all run out at you when you went past with your fishing pole, yapping and snarling and generally scaring the hell out of you. They would nip but not actually bite.

“Do you know who did it, Johnny?”

“Have any ideas at all?”

“Got any brainwaves, Mr. Smith?”

“Sheriff, was calling in a psychic your idea?”

“Do the state police and the A.G.'s office know about this development, Sheriff Bannerman?”

“Do you think you can break the case, Johnny?”

“Sheriff, have you deputized this guy?”

Bannerman pushed his way slowly and solidly through them, zipping his coat. “No comment, no comment.” Johnny said nothing at all.

The reporters clustered in the foyer as Johnny and Bannerman went down and snowy steps. It wasn't until they bypassed the cruiser and began wading across the street that one of them realized they were going to the common. Several of them ran back for their topcoats. Those who had been dressed for outside when Bannerman and Johnny emerged from the office now floundered down the Town Office steps after them, calling like children.

Flashlights bobbing in the snowy dark. The wind howled, blowing snow past them this way and that in errant sheets.

“You're not gonna be able to see a damn thing,” Bannerman said. “You w . . .
holy shit!”
He was almost knocked off his feet as a reporter in a bulky overcoat and a bizarre tam o'shanter sprawled into him.

“Sorry, Sheriff,” he said sheepishly. “Slippery. Forgot my galoshes.”

Up ahead a yellow length of nylon rope appeared out of the gloom. Attached to it was a wildly swinging sign reading POLICE INVESTIGATION.

“You forgot your brains, too,” Bannerman said. “Now you keep back, all of you! Keep right back!”

“Town common's public property, Sheriff!” one of the reporters cried.

“That's right, and this is police business. You stay behind this rope here or you'll spend the night in my holding cell.”

With the beam of his flashlight he traced the course of the rope for them and then held it up so Johnny could pass beneath. They walked down the slope toward the snowmounded shapes of the benches. Behind them the reporters gathered at the rope, pooling their few lights so that Johnny and George Bannerman walked in a dull sort of spotlight.

“Flying blind,” Bannerman said.

“Well, there's nothing to see, anyway,” Johnny said. “Is there?”

“No, not now. I told Frank he could take that rope down
anytime. Now I'm glad he didn't get around to it. You want to go over to the bandstand?”

“Not yet. Show me where the cigarette butts were.”

They went on a little farther and then Bannerman stopped. “Here,” he said, and shone his light on a bench that was little more than a vague hump poking out of a drift.

Johnny took off his gloves and put them in his coat pockets. Then he knelt and began to brush the snow away from the seat of the bench. Again Bannerman was struck by the haggard pallor of the man's face. On his knees before the bench he looked like a religious penitent, a man in desperate prayer.

Johnny's hands went cold, then mostly numb. Melted snow ran off his fingers. He got down to the splintered, weather-beaten surface of the bench. He seemed to see it very clearly, almost with magnifying power. It had once been green, but now much of the paint had flaked and eroded away. Two rusted steel bolts held the seat to the backrest.

He seized the bench in both hands, and sudden weirdness flooded him—he had felt nothing so intense before and would feel something so intense only once ever again. He stared down at the bench, frowning, gripping it tightly in his hands. It was . . .

(A summer bench)

How many hundreds of different people had sat here at one time or another, listening to “God Bless America,” to “Stars and Stripes Forever” (
“Be kind to your web-footed friends . . . for a duck may be somebody's moooother . . .”
), to the Castle Rock Cougars' fight song? Green summer leaves, smoky haze of fall like a memory of cornhusks and men with rakes in mellow dusk. The thud of the big snare drum. Mellow gold trumpets and trombones. School band uniforms . . .

(for a duck . . . may be . . . somebody's mother . . .)

Good summer people sitting here, listening, applauding, holding programs that had been designed and printed in the Castle Rock High School graphic arts shop.

But this morning a killer had been sitting here. Johnny could
feel
him.

Dark tree branches etched against a gray snow-sky like runes. He (I) am sitting here, smoking, waiting, feeling good, feeling like he (I) could jump right over the roof of the world and land lightly on two feet. Humming a song. Something by
the Rolling Stones. Can't get that, but very clearly everything is . . . is what?

All right.
Everything is all right, everything is gray and waiting for snow, and I'm . . .

“Slick,” Johnny muttered. “I'm slick, I'm so slick.”

Bannerman leaned forward, unable to catch the words over the howling wind. “What?”

“Slick,” Johnny repeated. He looked up at Bannerman and the Sheriff involuntarily took a step backward. Johnny's eyes were cool and somehow inhuman. His dark hair blew wildly around his white face, and overhead the winter wind screamed through the black sky. His hands seemed welded to the bench.

“I'm so fucking slick,”
he said clearly. A triumphant smile had formed on his lips. His eyes stared through Bannerman. Bannerman believed. No one could be acting this, or putting it on. And the most terrible part of it was . . . he was
reminded
of someone. The smile . . . the tone of voice . . . Johnny Smith was gone; he seemed to have been replaced by a human blank. And lurking behind the planes of his ordinary features, almost near enough to touch, was another face. The face of the killer.

The face of someone he
knew.

“Never catch me because I'm too slick for you.” A little laugh escaped him, confident, lightly taunting . . . “I put it on every time, and if they scratch . . . or bite . . . they don't get a bit of me . . . because
I'm so SLICK!”
His voice rose to a triumphant, crazy shriek that competed with the wind, and Bannerman fell back another step, his flesh crawling helplessly, his balls tight and cringing against his guts.

Let it stop,
he thought.
Let it stop now. Please.

Johnny bent his head over the bench. Melting snow dripped between his bare fingers.

(Snow. Silent snow, secret snow—)

(She put a clothespin on it so I'd know how it felt. How it felt when you got a disease. A disease from one of those nasty-fuckers, they're all nasty-fuckers, and they have to be stopped, yes, stopped, stop them, stop, the stop, the STOP—OH MY GOD THE STOP SIGN—!)

He was little again. Going to school through the silent, secret snow. And there was a man looming out of the shifting whiteness, a terrible man, a terrible black grinning man with eyes as shiny as quarters, and there was a red STOP sign clutched in one gloved hand . . . him! . . . him! . . .
him!

(OH MY GOD DON'T . . . DON'T LET HIM GET ME . . . MOMMA . . . DON'T LET HIM GET MEEEEE . . .)

Johnny screamed and fell away from the bench, his hands suddenly pressed to his cheeks. Bannerman crouched beside him, badly frightened. Behind the rope the reporters stirred and murmured.

“Johnny! Snap out of it! Listen, Johnny . . .”

“Slick,” Johnny muttered. He looked up at Bannerman with hurt, frightened eyes. In his mind he still saw that black shape with the shiny-quarter eyes looming out of the snow. His crotch throbbed dully from the pain of the clothespin the killer's mother had made him wear. He hadn't been the killer then, oh no, not an animal, not a pusbag or a shitbag or whatever Bannerman had called him, he'd only been a scared little boy with a clothespin on his . . . his . . .

“Help me get up,” he muttered.

Bannerman helped him to his feet.

“The bandstand now,” Johnny said.

“No, I think we ought to go back, Johnny.”

Johnny pushed past him blindly and began to flounder toward the bandstand, a big circular shadow up ahead. It bulked and loomed in the darkness, the death place. Bannerman ran and caught up to him.

“Johnny, who is it? Do you know who . . . ?”

“You never found any scraps of tissue under their fingernails because he was wearing a raincoat,” Johnny said. He panted the words out. “A raincoat with a hood. A slick vinyl raincoat. You go back over the reports. You go back over the reports and you'll see. It was raining or snowing every time. They clawed at him, all right. They fought him. Sure they did. But their fingers just slipped and slid over it.”

“Who, Johnny? Who?”

“I don't know. But I'm going to find out.”

He stumbled over the lowest of the six steps leading up to the bandstand, fumbled for his balance, and would have lost it if Bannerman had not gripped his arm. Then they were up on the stage. The snow was thin here, a bare dusting, kept off by the conical roof. Bannerman trained his flashlight beam on the floor and Johnny dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl slowly across it. His hands were bright red. Bannerman thought that they must be like chunks of raw meat by now.