The Tommyknockers (52 page)

“Well, you know, I think that might be part of our problem,” Dick began. “You see—”

Dick
did
hold them in town as long as he could without being conspicuous about it. It was a quarter to eight before they left, and by then twilight was drawing down. Also, Dick knew, if they didn't leave soon, they would start wondering how come none of the backup units they had requested were arriving.

They had both talked on their cruiser's radio to Derry Base, and both hung the mike up again looking puzzled and
distracted. The responses they were getting from the other end were right; it was the
voice
that seemed a little off. But neither of them could be bothered with such a minor matter, at least not for the time being. There were too many other things to cope with. The magnitude of the accident, for one thing. The fact that they had known the victim, for another. Trying to lay the groundwork of a potentially big case without committing any of the procedural fuckups that would muddy the waters later on, for a third.

Also, they were beginning to feel the effects of being in Haven.

They were like men applying vinyl seal to a big wooden floor in a room with no ventilation, getting stoned without even knowing it. They weren't healing thoughts—it was too early for that and they would be gone before it could happen—but they were feeling very strange. It was slowing them down, making ordinary routine something they had to fight their way through.

Dick Allison got all this from their minds as he sat across the street drinking a cup of coffee in the Haven Lunch. Ayuh, they were too busy and too screwed-up to think about the fact that

(Tug Ellender)

their dispatcher didn't exactly sound like himself tonight. The reason why was very simple. They weren't talking to Tug Ellender. They were talking to Buck Peters; their radio transmissions were not going to and coming from Derry but to and from the garage of Elt Barker's Shell, where Buck Peters was hunched, sweating, over a microphone, with Andy Baker beside him. Buck sent out fresh instructions and information on Andy's radio (a little something he had scrambled together in his spare time, a little something that could have contacted life on Uranus, had there been any goodbuddies up there to send back a big ten-four). Several townspeople were concentrating hard on the minds of Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons. They relayed to Buck everything they were able to pick up about Ellender, from whom the cops just naturally
expected
to hear. Buck Peters had some natural mimicry (he was a great hit doing whoever happened to be President that year, plus such favorites as Jimmy Cagney and John Wayne, at each year's Grange Stage Spectacular). He was not Rich Little, never would
be, but when he “did” somebody, you knew who it was. Usually.

More important, the listeners were able to relay to Buck how he should respond to each transmission, since almost every speaker knows in his own mind what response he expects to get from his questions or statements. If Bent and Jingles bought the impersonation—and to a large extent they really did—it wasn't so much due to Buck's talents as to their own fulfilled expectations in “Tug's” replies. Andy had further been able to blur Buck's voice by overlaying some static—not as much as they would hear on their way back to Derry, but enough so that “Tug's” voice grew a little blurred whenever that oddness

(Jesus that doesn't sound like Tug much at all I wonder does he have a cold)

surfaced in one of their minds.

At a quarter past seven, when Beach brought him a fresh cup of coffee, Dick asked: “You all set?”

“Sure am.”

“And you're sure that gadget will work?”

“It works fine . . . want to see it?” Beach was almost fawning.

“No. There isn't time. What about the deer? You got that?”

“Ayuh. Bill Elderly kilt it and Dave Rutledge dressed it out.”

“That's good. Get going.”

“Okay, Dick.” Beach took off his apron and hung it on a nail behind the counter. He turned over the sign which hung above the door, from
OPEN
to
CLOSED.
Ordinarily it would just have hung there, but tonight, because the glass was broken, it stirred and twisted in the mild breeze.

Beach paused and looked back at Dick with narrow, sunken anger.

“She wasn't supposed to do
nothing
like that,” he said.

Dick shrugged. It didn't matter; it was done. “She's gone. That's the important thing. The kids are doing fine with that picture. As for Ruth . . . there's no one else like her in town.”

“There's that fellow out at the old Garrick place.”

“He's drunk all the time. And he
wants
to dig it up. Go on, Beach. They'll be leaving soon, and we want it
to happen as far out of the village as you can
make
it happen.”

“Okay, Dick. Be careful.”

Dick smiled. “We all got to be careful now. This is touchy.”

He watched Beach get into his truck and back out of the space in front of the Haven Lunch that had been that old Chevy's home for the last twelve years. As the truck started up the street, Beach driving slowly and weaving to avoid the litters of broken glass, Dick could see the shape under the tarp in the truck's bed, and, near the back, something else, wrapped in a sheet of heavy plastic. The biggest deer Bill Elderly had been able to find on such short notice. Deer hunting was most definitely against the law during July in the State of Maine.

When Beach's pickup was out of sight
(MAKE LOVE NOT WAR BE READY FOR BOTH NRA,
the bumper sticker on the tailgate read), Dick turned back to the counter and picked up his coffee cup. As always Beach's coffee was strong and good. He needed that. Dick was more than tired; he was worn out. Although there was still good light left in the sky and although he had always been the sort of person who found it impossible to go to sleep until the National Anthem had played on the last available TV channel, all he wanted now was his own bed. This had been a tense, frightening day, and it wouldn't be over until Beach reported in. Nor would the mess Ruth McCausland had succeeded in making be cleaned up when the two cops were erased. They could hide a lot of things, but not the simple fact that those cops had been on their way back from Haven, where another cop (just a town constable, true, but a cop was a cop, and this one had once been married to a State Bear, just to add to the fun) had been erased from the equation.

All of which meant that the fun was just beginning.

“If you call it fun,” Dick said sourly to no one in particular. “Be dogfucked if
I
do.” The coffee began to burn with acid indigestion in Dick's stomach. He went on drinking it anyway.

Outside, a powerful motor roared. Dick swiveled around on his stool and watched the cops drive out of town, the flashers on top of their cruiser swinging blue light and black shadow on the wreckage.

Christina Lindley and Bobby Tremain stood side by side, watching the blank sheet in the developing bath, neither of them breathing as they waited for the image to come or not come.

Little by little, it did.

There was the Haven town-hall clock-tower. In living, true color. And the hands of the clock stood at 3:05.

Bobby let out his breath in a low, slow exhalation. Perfect, he said.

Not quite, Christina said. There's one more thing.

He turned to her, apprehensive. What? What's wrong?

Nothing. Everything's right. It's just that there's one more thing we have to do.

She was not ugly, but because she wore glasses and her hair was mouse-brown, she had always
considered
herself ugly. She was seventeen and had never been on a date. Now none of that seemed to matter. She unzipped her skirt and pushed it, her rayon half-slip, and her cotton panties, both bought at the discount store in Derry, down. She stepped out of them and carefully took the wet photograph from the developing bath. She stood on tiptoe to hang it up, smooth buttocks flexing. Then she turned to him, legs spread.

I
need doing.

He took her standing up. Against the wall. When her hymen burst, she bit his shoulder hard enough to bring blood from him, as well. And when they came together, they did it snarling and clawing and it was very, very good.

Just like old times,
Bobby thought as he drove them out to the Applegate place, and wondered exactly what he meant by that.

Then he decided it really didn't matter anyway.

Beach got his Chevy pickup to a creaky sixty-five—as fast as it would go. One of the few things he hadn't gotten around to overhauling with his fantastic new knowledge
was the old bomber. But he hoped it would get him as far as he needed to go tonight, and Old Betsy came through for him again.

When he had gotten over the Troy town line without hearing them or seeing any sign of their flashers behind him, he eased the truck back to fifty-five (with some relief; it had been on the edge of overheating), and when he got into Newport he dropped back to forty-five. Dark was coming on hard by then.

He was over the Derry town line and just starting to worry that the frigging cops had gone back some other way—it seemed unlikely, since this was the quickest way, but Jesus, where
were
they?—when he heard the low mutter of their thoughts.

He pulled over and sat quietly for a moment, head cocked, eyes half-closed, listening, making sure. His mouth, oddly infirm and puckered with most of the teeth gone, was the mouth of a much older man. It was something about

(freckles)

Ruth. It was them, all right. The thought came clearer

(you could see the freckles right through the blood)

and Beach nodded. It was them, all right. They were coming along fast. He'd have time, but only if he hustled.

Beach drove another quarter of a mile up the road, rounded a curve, and saw the last long stretch of Route 3 between here and Derry. He turned his pickup sideways, blocking the road. Then he removed the tarp from the rifle-thing in back, fingers plucking nervously at hayrope knots as their voices grew stronger, stronger, stronger in his head.

When their lights splashed the trees on this side of the curve, Beach got his head down. He reached for the train transformers, six of them, that had been nailed to a board (and the board had been bolted to the truck-bed so it wouldn't slide around) and turned them on, one after another. He heard the hum as they powered up . . . then that sound, every sound, was lost in the shriek of brakes and tires. Now light that was flashbulb-white and shot through with strobing blue flashes filled the bed of the pickup truck and Beach pressed himself against the bottom, hands laced over his head, thinking he had blown it, parked too close to a blind turn, and they were going to crash into his truck, and they might only be injured but
he would be killed, and they would find the ruins of his “rifle” and say
Well now, what's this?
And . . . and . . .

You fucked up, Beach, they saved your life and you fucked up . . . oh, damn you . . . damn you . . . damn you . . .

Then the shrieking tires stopped. The smell of cooked rubber was strong and sickening, but the crash for which he had been braced hadn't come. Blue lights strobed. A microphone crackled static.

Dimly he heard the hoarse-voiced cop say, “What's
this
shit?”

Shakily Beach did a girly-pushup and peered over the edge of the truckbed with just his eyes. He saw their cruiser halted at the end of a long pair of black skidmarks. Even by starlight those marks were clearly visible. The cruiser was sitting at a cockeyed angle not nine feet away.
If they had been going just five miles an hour faster
 . . .

Yeah, but they weren't.

Sounds. The double-clunk of their doors closing as they got out of their car. The faint, dull hum of the transformers which powered his gadget—a gadget that was not all that different from the ones Ruth had planted in the bellies of her dolls. And a low buzzing sound. Flies. They smelled the blood under the plastic sheet but couldn't get at the deer's carcass.

You'll get your chance soon enough, Beach thought, and grinned. Too bad you won't get a taste of those old boys out there.

“I saw that truck back in Haven, Bent,” the hoarse-voiced one said. “Parked in front of the restaurant.”

Beach swiveled the culvert pipe slightly in its cradle. Looking through it, he could see them both. And if one of them moved out of the actual power axis of the gadget, that was okay; there was a slight flare effect.

Get away from the car, boys,
Beach thought, picking up the doorbell from Western Auto and settling a thumb on it. His grin showed pink gums.
Don't want to get none of the car. Move away, all right?

“Who's there?” the other cop shouted.

Tommyknockers here, knocking at your door, you meddling shithead,
he thought, and began to giggle. He couldn't help it. He tried to stifle it as best he could.

“If someone's in that truck, you better speak up!”

He began to giggle louder; just couldn't help it. And maybe that was just as well, because they took a look at each other and then began to move toward the truck, unholstering their guns. Toward the truck and away from their cruiser.

Beach waited until he was sure the cruiser wouldn't be touched by the flare—they had told him not to harm the police car, and he intended not to take so much as a layer of chrome off the bumper. When the cops were clear, Beach pushed the doorbell.
Avon calling, shitheads,
he thought, and this time he didn't just giggle; he
whooped.
A thick branch of green fire shot out in the dark, catching both of the policemen and enveloping them. Beach saw several bright yellow sparks inside that green glare, and understood that one of the cops was triggering his pistol off again and again.