Needful Things (54 page)

“Yes,” Alan said, “but the definition isn't Ace Merrill.”

“You don't want to push me, man.”

“I'm not. If I start, you'll know it.”

Ace took off his sunglasses. “You guys never quit, do you? You never . . . fucking . . . quit.”

Alan said nothing.

After a moment Ace seemed to regain his composure.

He put his Ray-Bans back on. “You know,” he said, “I think I
will
leave. I've got places to go and things to do.”

“That's good. Busy hands are happy hands.”

“But if I want to come back, I will. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Ace, and I want to tell you that I don't think that would be wise at all. Do you hear
me?”

“You don't scare me.”

“If I don't,” Alan said, “you're even dumber than I thought.”

Ace looked at Alan for a moment through his dark glasses, then laughed. Alan didn't care for the sound of it—it was a creepy sort of laugh, strange and off-center. He stood and watched as Ace crossed the street in his outdated hood's strut, opened the door of his car, and got in. A moment later the engine roared into life. Exhaust blatted through the straight-pipes; people stopped on the street to look.

That's an illegal muffler, Alan thought. A glasspack. I could cite him for that.

But what would be the point? He had bigger fish to fry than Ace Merrill, who was leaving town anyway. For good this time, he hoped.

He watched the green Challenger make an illegal U-turn on Main Street and head back toward Castle Stream and the edge of town. Then he turned and looked thoughtfully up the street at the green awning. Ace had come back to his old home town and bought a book—
Treasure Island,
to be exact. He had bought it in Needful Things.

I thought that place was closed today, Alan thought. Wasn't that what the sign said?

He walked up the street to Needful Things. He had not been wrong about the sign; it read

CLOSED COLUMBUS DAY
.

If he'll see Ace, maybe he'll see me, Alan thought, and raised his fist to knock. Before he could bring it down, the pager clipped to his belt went off. Alan pushed the button that turned the hateful gadget off and stood indecisively in front of the shop door a moment longer . . . but there was really no question about what he had to do now. If you were a lawyer or a business executive, maybe you could afford to ignore your pages for a while, but when you were a County Sheriff—and one who was elected rather than appointed—there wasn't much question about priorities.

Alan crossed the sidewalk, then paused and spun around quickly. He felt a little like the player who is “it” in a game of Red Light, the one whose job it is to catch the other players in motion so he can send them all the way back to the beginning. The feeling that he was being watched had returned, and it was very strong. He was positive he would see the surprised twitch of the drawn shade on Mr. Gaunt's side of the door.

But there was nothing. The shop just went on dozing in the unnaturally hot October sunlight, and if he hadn't seen Ace coming out with his own eyes, Alan would have sworn the place was empty, watched feeling or no watched feeling.

He crossed to his cruiser, leaned in to grab the mike, and radioed in.

“Henry Payton called,” Sheila told him. “He's already got preliminary reports on Nettie Cobb and Wilma Jerzyck from Henry Ryan—by?”

“I copy. By.”

“Henry said if you want him to give you the high spots, he'll be in from right now until about noon. By.”

“Okay. I'm just up Main Street. I'll be right in. By.”

“Uh, Alan?”

“Yeah?”

“Henry also asked if we're going to get a fax machine before the turn of the century, so he can just send copies of this stuff instead of calling all the time and reading it to you. By.”

“Tell him to write a letter to the Head Selectman,” Alan said grumpily. “I'm not the one who writes the budget and he knows it.”

“Well, I'm just telling you what he
said.
No need to get all huffy about it. By.”

Alan thought Sheila sounded rather huffy herself, however. “Over and out,” he said.

He got into Unit 1 and racked the mike. He glanced at the bank in time to see the big digital read-out over the door announce the time as ten-fifty and the temperature as eighty-two degrees. Jesus, we don't need this, he thought. Everyone in town's got a goddam case of prickly heat.

Alan drove slowly back to the Municipal Building, lost in thought. He couldn't shake the feeling that there was something going on in Castle Rock, something which was on the verge of slipping out of control. It was crazy, of course, crazy as hell, but he just couldn't shake it.

The town's schools were closed for the holiday, but Brian Rusk wouldn't have gone even if they had been open.

Brian was sick.

It wasn't any kind of physical illness, not measles or chicken pox or even the Hershey Squirts, the most humiliating and debilitating of them all. Nor was it a mental disease, exactly—his mind was involved, all right, but it felt almost as if that involvement were a side-effect. The part of him which had taken sick was deeper inside him than his mind; some essential part of his make-up which was available to no doctor's needle or microscope had gone gray and ill. He had always been a sunshiny sort of boy, but that sun was gone now, buried behind heavy banks of cloud which were still building.

The clouds had begun to gather on the afternoon he had thrown the mud at Wilma Jerzyck's sheets, they had thickened when Mr. Gaunt had come to him in a dream, dressed in a Dodger uniform, and told him he wasn't done paying for his Sandy Koufax card yet . . . but the overcast had not become total until he had come down to breakfast this morning.

His father, dressed in the gray fatigues he wore to work at the Dick Perry Siding and Door Company in South Paris, was seated at the kitchen table with the Portland
Press-Herald
open in front of him.

“Goddam Patriots,” he said from behind his newspaper
barricade. “When the hell are they gonna get a quarterback that can throw the goddam ball?”

“Don't swear in front of the boys,” Cora said from the stove, but she didn't speak with her usual exasperated forcefulness—she sounded distant and preoccupied.

Brian slipped into his chair and poured milk on his corn flakes.

“Hey Bri!” Sean said cheerfully. “You wanna go downtown today? Play some video games?”

“Maybe,” Brian said. “I guess—” Then he saw the headline on the front page of the paper and stopped talking.

MURDEROUS SPAT LEAVES TWO WOMEN

DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK

“It was a duel,” State Police Source Claims

There were photographs of two women, side by side. Brian recognized both of them. One was Nettie Cobb, who lived around the corner on Ford Street. His mom said she was a nut, but she had always seemed okay to Brian. He had stopped a couple of times to pet her dog when she was walking him, and she seemed pretty much like anyone else.

The other woman was Wilma Jerzyck.

He poked at his cereal but didn't actually eat any of it. After his father left for work, Brian dumped the soggy corn flakes into the garbage pail and then crept upstairs to his room. He expected his mother to come cawing after him, asking how come he was throwing away good food while children were starving in Africa (she seemed to believe the thought of starving kids could improve your appetite), but she didn't; she seemed lost in a world of her own this morning.

Sean was right there, however, bugging him just like always.

“So what do you say, Bri? You want to go downtown? Do you?” He was almost dancing from one foot to the other in his excitement. “We could play some video games, maybe check out that new store with all the neat stuff in the window—”

“You stay out of there!” Brian shouted, and his little
brother recoiled, a look of shock and dismay spreading over his face.

“Hey.” Brian said, “I'm sorry. But you don't want to go in there, Sean-O. That place sucks.”

Sean's lower lip was trembling. “Kevin Pelkey says—”

“Who are you going to believe? That wet end or your own brother? It's no good, Sean. It's . . .” He wet his lips and then said what he understood as the bottom of the truth: “It's bad.”

“What's the matter with you?” Sean asked. His voice was fierce and teary. “You've been acting like a dope all weekend! Mom, too!”

“I don't feel so good, that's all.”

“Well . . .” Sean considered. Then he brightened. “Maybe some video games would make you feel better. We can play Air Raid, Bri! They got Air Raid! The one where you sit right inside, and it tilts back and forth! It's awesome!”

Brian considered it briefly. No. He couldn't imagine going down to the video arcade, not today, maybe not ever again. All the other kids would be there—today you'd have to wait in line to get at the good games like Air Raid—but he was different from them now, and he might always be different.

After all,
he
had a 1956 Sandy Koufax card.

Still, he wanted to do something nice for Sean, for
anyone
—something that would make up a little for the monstrous thing he had done to Wilma Jerzyck. So he told Sean he might want to play some video games that afternoon, but to take some quarters in the meantime. Brian shook them out of his big plastic Coke bottle bank.

“Jeepers!” Sean said, his eyes round. “There's eight . . . nine . . . ten quarters here! You really
must
be sick!”

“Yeah, I guess I must be. Have fun, Sean-O. And don't tell Mom, or she'll make you put them back.”

“She's in her room, moonin around in those dark glasses,” Sean said. “She doesn't even know we're alive.” He paused for a moment and then added: “I hate those dark glasses. They're totally creepy.” He looked more closely at his big brother. “You really don't look so great, Bri.”

“I don't feel so great,” Brian said truthfully. “I think I'll lie down.”

“Well . . . I'll wait for you awhile. See if you feel any better. I'll be watchin cartoons on channel fifty-six. Come on down if you feel better.” Sean shook the quarters in his cupped hands.

“I will,” Brian said, and closed his door softly as his little brother walked away.

But he hadn't felt any better. As the day drew on, he just went on feeling

(cloudier)

worse and worse. He thought of Mr. Gaunt. He thought of Sandy Koufax. He thought of that glaring newspaper headline—
MURDEROUS SPAT LEAVES TWO WOMEN DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK
. He thought of those pictures, familiar faces swimming up from clumps of black dots.

Once he almost fell asleep, and then the little record player started up in his mother and father's bedroom. Mom was playing her scratchy Elvis 45s again. She had been doing it almost all weekend.

Thoughts went whirling and rocking through Brian's head like bits of clutter caught up in a cyclone.

MURDEROUS SPAT.

“You know they said you was high-class . . . but that was just a lie . . .”

It was a duel.

MURDEROUS
:
Nettie Cobb, the lady with the dog. “You ain't never caught a rabbit . . .” When you deal with me, you want to remember two things.

SPAT
:
Wilma Jerzyck, the lady with the sheets.

Mr. Gaunt knows best . . .

“. . . and you ain't no friend of mine.”

. . . and the duelling isn't done until Mr. Gaunt
SAYS
it's done.

Around and around these thoughts went, a jumble of terror, guilt, and misery set to the beat of Elvis Presley's golden hits. By noon, Brian's stomach had begun to roil and knot. He hurried down to the bathroom at the end of the hall in his stocking feet, closed the door, and vomited into the toilet bowl as quietly as he could. His mother didn't
hear. She was still in her room, where Elvis was now telling her he wanted to be her teddy bear.

As Brian walked slowly back to his room, feeling more miserable than ever, a horrible, haunting certainty came to him: his Sandy Koufax card was gone. Someone had stolen it last night while he slept. He had participated in a murder because of that card, and now it was gone.

He broke into a run, almost slipped on the rug in the middle of his bedroom floor, and snatched his baseball-card book from the top of the dresser. He turned through the pages with such terrified speed that he tore several loose from the ring-binders. But the card—
the
card—was still there: that narrow face looking out at him from beneath its plastic covering on the last page. Still there, and Brian felt a great, miserable relief sweep through him.

He slipped the card from its pocket, went over to the bed, and lay down with it in his hands. He didn't see how he could ever let go of it again. It was all he had gotten out of this nightmare. The only thing. He didn't like it anymore, but it was his. If he could have brought Nettie Cobb and Wilma Jerzyck back to life by burning it up, he would have been hunting for matches at once (or so he really believed), but he
couldn't
bring them back, and since he couldn't, the thought of losing the card and having nothing at all was insupportable.

So he held it in his hands and looked at the ceiling and listened to the dim sound of Elvis, who had moved on to “Wooden Heart.” It was not surprising that Sean had told him he looked bad; his face was white, his eyes huge and dark and listless. And his own heart felt pretty wooden, now that he thought about it.