Needful Things (53 page)

Ace opened his mouth. Closed it again. Opened it. Closed it.

“Stop that,” said Mr. Gaunt. “You look like a fish in an aquarium.”

Ace looked at the book in his hand. He put it on the counter and riffled through the pages, which were crammed tight with small print. And something breezed out. It was a large and ragged chunk of brown paper, unevenly folded, and he recognized it at once—it had been torn from a Hemphill's Market shopping bag. How often, as a little boy, had he watched his uncle tear off a piece of brown paper just like this one from one of the bags he kept under his ancient Tokeheim cash register? How many times had he watched him add up figures on such a scrap . . . or write an IOU on it?

He unfolded it with shaking hands.

It was a map, that much was clear, but at first he could make nothing of it—it was just a bunch of lines and crosses and squiggly circles.

“What the fuck?”

“You need something to focus your concentration, that's all,” Mr. Gaunt said. “This might help.”

Ace looked up. Mr. Gaunt had put a small mirror in an ornate silver frame on the glass case beside his own cash register. Now he opened the other envelope he had taken from the locked drawer, and spilled a generous quantity of cocaine onto the mirror's surface. To Ace's not inexperienced eye, it looked to be of fabulously high quality;
the spotlight over the display case kicked thousands of little sparkles from the clean flakes.

“Jesus, mister!” Ace's nose began to tingle in anticipation. “Is that Colombian?”

“No, this is a special hybrid,” Mr. Gaunt said. “It comes from the Plains of Leng.” He took a gold letter opener from the inside pocket of his fawn jacket and began to organize the pile of blow into long, chubby lines.

“Where's that?”

“Over the hills and far away,” Mr. Gaunt replied without looking up. “Don't ask questions, Ace. Men who owe money do well to simply enjoy the good things which come their way.”

He put the letter opener back and drew a short glass straw from the same pocket. He handed it to Ace. “Be my guest.”

The straw was amazingly heavy—not glass after all but some sort of rock crystal, Ace guessed. He bent over the mirror, then hesitated. What if the old guy had AIDS or something like that?

Don't ask questions, Ace. Men who owe money do well to simply enjoy the good things which come their way.

“Amen,” Ace said aloud, and tooted up. His head filled with that vague banana-lemon taste that really good cocaine always seemed to have. It was mellow, but it was also powerful. He felt his heart begin to pound. At the same time, his thoughts grew sharply focused and took on a polished chromium edge. He remembered something a guy had told him not long after he fell in love with this stuff:
Things have more names when you're coked up. A lot more names.

He hadn't understood then, but he thought he did now.

He offered the straw to Gaunt, but Gaunt shook his head. “Never before five,” he said, “but you enjoy, Ace.”

“Thanks,” Ace said.

He looked at the map again and found that he could now read it perfectly. The two parallel lines with the X between them was clearly the Tin Bridge, and once you realized that, everything else fell neatly into place. The squiggle which ran between the lines, through the X, and up to the top of the paper was Route 117. The small circle
with the larger circle behind it must represent the Gavineaux dairy farm: the big circle would be the cowbarn. It all made sense. It was as clear and clean and sparkly as the crisp heap of dope this incredibly hip dude had poured out of the little envelope.

Ace bent over the mirror again. “Fire when ready,” he murmured, and took another two lines. Bang! Zap! “Christ, that's powerful stuff,” he said in a gasping voice.

“Sho nuff,” Mr. Gaunt agreed gravely.

Ace looked up, suddenly sure the man was laughing at him, but Mr. Gaunt's face was calm and clear. Ace bent over the map again.

Now it was the crosses which caught his eye. There were seven of them—no, actually there were eight. One appeared to be on the dead, swampy ground owned by old man Treblehorn . . . except old man Treblehorn was dead, had been for years, and hadn't there been talk at one time that his uncle Reginald had gotten most of that land as repayment of a loan?

Here was another, on the edge of the Nature Conservancy on the other side of Castle View, if he had his geography right. There were two out on Town Road #3, near a circle that was probably the old Joe Camber place, Seven Oaks Farm. Two more on the land supposedly owned by Diamond Match on the west side of Castle Lake.

Ace stared up at Gaunt with wild, bloodshot eyes. “Did he bury his money? Is that what the crosses mean?
Are they the places he buried his money?”

Mr. Gaunt shrugged elegantly. “I'm sure I don't know. It seems logical, but logic often has little to do with the way people behave.”

“But it
could
be,” Ace said. He was becoming frantic with excitement and cocaine overload; what felt like stiff bundles of copper wire were exploding in the big muscles of his arms and belly. His sallow face, pocked with the scars of adolescent acne, had taken on a dark flush. “It
could
be! All the places those crosses are . . .
all that could be Pop's property!
Do you see? He might have put all that land in a blind trust or whatever the fuck they call it . . . so nobody could buy it . . . so nobody could find what he put there . . .”

He snorted the rest of the coke on the mirror and
then leaned over the counter. His bulging, bloodshot eyes jittered in his face.

“I could be more than just out of the shithole,” he said in a low, trembling whisper. “I could be fucking
rich.”

“Yes,” Mr. Gaunt said, “I'd say that's a good possibility. But remember that, Ace.” He cocked his thumb toward the wall, and the sign there which read

I DO NOT ISSUE REFUNDS OR MAKE EXCHANGES CAVEAT EMPTOR!

Ace looked at the sign. “What's it mean?”

“It means that you're not the first person who ever thought he had found the key to great riches in an old book,” Mr. Gaunt said. “It also means that I still need a stockboy and a driver.”

Ace looked at him, almost shocked. Then he laughed. “You kidding?” He pointed at the map. “I've got a lot of digging to do.”

Mr. Gaunt sighed regretfully, folded the sheet of brown paper, put it back into the book, and placed the book in the drawer under the cash register. He did all this with incredible swiftness.

“Hey!” Ace yelled. “What are you doing?”

“I just remembered that book is already promised to another customer, Mr. Merrill. I'm sorry. And I really am closed—it's Columbus Day, you know.”

“Wait a minute!”

“Of course, if you had seen fit to take the job, I'm sure something could have been worked out. But I can see that you're very busy; you undoubtedly want to make sure your affairs are in order before the Corson Brothers turn you into coldcuts.”

Ace's mouth had begun to open and close again. He was trying to remember where the little crosses had been and was discovering that he couldn't do it. All of them seemed to blend together into one big cross in his jazzed-up, flying mind . . . the sort of cross you saw in cemeteries.

“All right!” he cried. “All right, I'll take the fucking job!”

“In that case, I believe this book is for sale after all,” Mr. Gaunt said. He drew it out of the drawer and checked the flyleaf. “It goes for a dollar and a half.” His jostling
teeth appeared in a wide, sharky smile. “That's a dollar thirty-five, with the employee discount.”

Ace drew his wallet from his back pocket, dropped it, and almost clouted his head on the edge of the glass case bending over to pick it up.

“But I've got to have some time off,” he told Mr. Gaunt.

“Indeed.”

“Because I really do have some digging to do.”

“Of course.”

“Time is short.”

“How wise of you to know it.”

“How about when I get back from Boston?”

“Won't you be tired?”

“Mr. Gaunt, I can't afford to be tired.”

“I might be able to help you there,” Mr. Gaunt said. His smile widened and his teeth bulged from it like the teeth of a skull. “I might have a little pick-me-up for you, is what I mean to say.”

“What?” Ace asked, his eyes widening. “What did you say?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing,” Ace said. “Never mind.”

“All right—do you still have the keys I gave you?”

Ace was surprised to discover that he had stuffed the envelope containing the keys into his back pocket.

“Good.” Mr. Gaunt rang up $1.35 on the old register, took the five-dollar bill Ace had laid on the counter, and rendered three dollars and sixty-five cents change. Ace took it like a man in a dream.

“Now,” Mr. Gaunt said. “Let me give you a few directions, Ace. And remember what I said: I want you back by midnight. If you're not back by midnight, I will be unhappy. When I'm unhappy, I sometimes lose my temper. You wouldn't want to be around when that happens.”

“Do you Hulk out?” Ace asked jestingly.

Mr. Gaunt looked up with a grinning ferocity that caused Ace to retreat a step. “Yes,” he said. “That's just what I do, Ace. I Hulk out. Indeed I do. Now pay attention.”

Ace paid attention.

It was quarter of eleven and Alan was just getting ready to go down to Nan's and catch a quick cup of coffee when Sheila Brigham buzzed him. It was Sonny Jackett on line one, she said. He insisted on talking to Alan and nobody else.

Alan picked up the phone. “Hello, Sonny—what can I do for you?”

“Well,” Sonny said in his drawling downeast accent, “I hate to put more trouble on your plate after the double helpin you got yesterday, Sheriff, but I think an old friend of yours is back in town.”

“Who's that?”

“Ace Merrill. I seen his car parked upstreet from here.”

Oh shit, what next?
Alan thought. “Did you see him?”

“Nope, but you can't miss the car. Puke-green Dodge Challenger—what the kids call a ramrod. I seen it up to the Plains.”

“Well, thanks, Sonny.”

“Don't mention it—what do you suppose that booger's doin back in Castle Rock, Alan?”

“I don't know,” Alan said, and thought as he hung up:
But I guess I better find out.

There was a space empty next to the green Challenger. Alan swung Unit 1 in next to it and got out. He saw Bill Fullerton and Henry Gendron looking out the barber-shop window at him with bright-eyed interest and raised a hand to them. Henry pointed across the street. Alan nodded and crossed. Wilma Jerzyck and Nettie Cobb kill each other on a street-corner one day and Ace Merrill turns up the next, he thought. This town's turning into Barnum & Bailey's Circus.

As he reached the sidewalk on the far side, he saw Ace come sauntering out of the shadow cast by the green
awning of Needful Things. He had something in one hand. At first Alan couldn't tell what it was, but as Ace drew closer, he decided he
had
been able to tell; he just hadn't been able to believe it. Ace Merrill wasn't the sort of guy you expected to see with a book in his hand.

They drew together in front of the vacant lot where the Emporium Galorium had once stood.

“Hello, Ace,” Alan said.

Ace didn't seem in the least surprised to see him. He took his sunglasses from the V of his shirt, shook them out one-handed, and slipped them on. “Well, well, well—how they hangin, boss?”

“What are you doing in Castle Rock, Ace?” Alan asked evenly.

Ace looked up at the sky with exaggerated interest. Little glints of light twinkled on the lenses of his Ray-Bans. “Nice day for a ride,” he said. “Summery.”

“Very nice,” Alan agreed. “Have you got a valid license, Ace?”

Ace looked at him reproachfully. “Would I be out driving if I didn't? That wouldn't be legal, would it?”

“I don't think that's an answer.”

“I took the re-exam as soon as they gave me my pink sheet,” Ace said. “I'm street-legal. How's that, boss? Is that an answer?”

“Maybe I could check for myself.” Alan held out his hand.

“Why, I don't think you trust me!” Ace said. He spoke in the same jocular, teasing voice, but Alan heard the anger beneath it.

“Let's just say I'm from Missouri.”

Ace shifted the book to his left hand so he could dig the wallet out of his hip pocket with his right, and Alan got a better look at the cover. The book was
Treasure Island,
by Robert Louis Stevenson.

He looked at the license. It was signed and valid.

“The car registration is in the glove compartment, if you want to cross the street and look at that, too,” Ace said. Alan could hear the anger in his voice more clearly now. And the old arrogance as well.

“I think I'll trust you on that one, Ace. Why don't you tell me what you're really doing back here in town?”

“I came to look at
that,”
Ace said, and pointed to the vacant lot. “I don't know why, but I did. I doubt if you believe me, but it happens to be the truth.”

Oddly enough, Alan did believe him.

“I see you bought a book, too.”

“I can read,” Ace said. “I doubt if you believe that, either.”

“Well, well.” Alan hooked his thumbs into his belt. “You had a look and you bought a book.”

“He's a poet and he don't know it.”

“Why, I guess I am. It's good of you to point it out, Ace. Now I guess you'll be sliding on out of town, won't you?”

“What if I don't? You'd find something to bust me for, I guess. Is the word ‘rehabilitation' in your vocabulary, Sheriff Pangborn?”