Needful Things (74 page)

Or it might not—how could he tell such a thing when he didn't know what the situation
was?
Polly had accused him of prying . . . of snooping. That covered a lot of territory, none of it mapped. Besides, there was something else. Telling the dispatcher to put out a pick-up and hold was part of what the job was all about. So was making sure your field officers knew that the man they were after might be dangerous. Giving out the same information to your girlfriend on an open radio/telephone patch was a different matter entirely. He had done the right thing and he knew it.

This did not quiet the ache in his heart, however, and he made another effort to focus his mind on the business ahead—finding Hugh Priest, bringing him in, getting him a goddam lawyer if he wanted one, and then asking him why he had stuck a corkscrew into Nettie's dog, Raider.

For a moment it worked, but as he started the station wagon's engine and pulled away from the curb, it was still Polly's face—not Hugh's—he saw in his mind.

At about the same time Alan was heading across town to arrest Hugh Priest, Henry Beaufort was standing in his driveway and looking at his Thunderbird. The note he'd found under the windshield wiper was in one hand. The damage the chickenshit bastard had done to the tires was bad, but the tires could be replaced. It was the scratch he had drawn along the car's right-hand side that really toasted Henry's ass.

He looked at the note again and read it aloud. “Don't you
ever
cut me off and then keep my car-keys you damn
frog!”

Who had he cut off lately? Oh, all kinds of people. A night when he didn't have to cut
someone
off was a rare night, indeed. But cut off
and
car-keys kept on the board behind the bar? Only one of those just lately.

Only one.

“You motherfucker,” The Mellow Tiger's owner and operator said in a soft, reflective voice. “You stupid crazy motherfucking sonofabitch.”

He thought about going back inside to get his deer rifle and then thought better of it. The Tiger was just up the road, and he kept a rather special box under the bar. Inside it was a double-barrelled Winchester shotgun sawed off at the knees. He'd kept it there ever since that numb fuck Ace Merrill had tried to rob him a few years back. It was a highly illegal weapon, and Henry had never used it.

He thought he might just use it today.

He touched the ugly scratch Hugh had laid into the side of his T-Bird, then crumpled up the note and tossed it aside. Billy Tupper would be up at the Tiger by now, sweeping the floor and swamping out the heads. Henry would get the sawed-off, then borrow Billy's Pontiac. It seemed he had a little asshole-hunting to do.

Henry kicked the balled-up note into the grass. “You been taking those stupid-pills again, Hugh, but you aren't going to be taking any more after today—I guarantee it.” He touched the scratch a final time. He had never been so angry in his whole life. “I guaran-fuckin-tee it.”

Henry set off up the road toward The Mellow Tiger, walking fast.

In the process of tearing apart George T. Nelson's bedroom, Frank Jewett found half an ounce of coke under the mattress of the double bed. He flushed it down the john, and as he watched it swirl away, he felt a sudden cramp in his belly. He started to unbuckle his pants, then walked back into the trashed bedroom again instead. Frank supposed he had gone utterly crazy, but he no longer cared much. Crazy people didn't have to think about the future. To crazy people, the future was a very low priority.

One of the few undisturbed things in George T. Nelson's bedroom was a picture on the wall. It was a picture of an old lady. It was in an expensive gold frame, and this suggested to Frank that it was a picture of George T. Nelson's sainted mother. The cramp struck again. Frank removed the picture from the wall and put it on the floor. Then he unbuckled his pants, squatted carefully above it, and did what came naturally.

It was the high point of what had been, up 'til then, a very bad day.

Lenny Partridge, Castle Rock's oldest resident and holder of the Boston
Post
Cane which Aunt Evvie Chalmers had once possessed, also drove one of Castle Rock's oldest cars. It was a 1966 Chevrolet Bel-Air which had once been white. It was now a generic smudged no-color—call it Dirt Road Gray. It wasn't in very good shape. The glass in the back window had been replaced by a flapping sheet of all-weather plastic some years ago, the rocker panels had rusted out so badly that Lenny could view the road through a complicated lacework of rust as he drove along, and the exhaust pipe hung down like the rotted arm of a man who had died in a dry climate. Also, the oil-seals were gone. When Lenny drove the Bel-Air, he spread great clouds of fragrant blue smoke out behind him, and the fields he passed on his daily trip into town looked as if a homicidal aviator had just dusted them with paraquat. The Chevy gobbled three (sometimes four) quarts of oil a day. This gaudy consumption did not bother Lenny in the least; he bought recycled Diamond motor oil from Sonny Jackett in the five-gallon economy size, and he always made sure that Sonny deducted ten per cent . . . his Golden Ager discount. And because he hadn't driven the Bel-Air at a speed greater than thirty-five miles an hour in the last ten years, it would probably hold together longer than Lenny himself.

While Henry Beaufort was starting up the road to The Mellow Tiger on the other side of the Tin Bridge, almost five miles away, Lenny was guiding his rusty Bel-Air over the top of Castle Hill.

There was a man standing in the middle of the road with his arms held up in an imperial stop gesture. The man was bare chested and barefooted. He wore only a pair of khaki pants with the fly unzipped, and, around his neck, a moth-eaten runner of fur.

Lenny's heart took a large wheezy leap in his scrawny chest and he slammed both of his feet, clad in a pair of slowly disintegrating high-tops, down on the brake pedal. It sank almost to the floor with an unearthly moan and the Bel-Air finally stopped less than three feet from the man
in the road, whom Lenny now recognized as Hugh Priest. Hugh had not so much as flinched. When the car stopped, he strode rapidly around to where Lenny was sitting, hands pressed against the front of his thermal undershirt, trying to catch his breath and wondering if this was the final cardiac arrest.

“Hugh!” he gasped. “Why, what in the tarnal hell are you doin? I almost run you down! I—”

Hugh opened the driver's door and leaned in. The fur stole he was wearing around his neck swung forward and Lenny flinched back from it. It looked like a half-rotten foxtail with great hunks of fur missing from the hide. It smelled bad.

Hugh seized him by the straps of his overalls and hauled him out of the car. Lenny uttered a squawk of terror and outrage.

“Sorry, oldtimer,” Hugh said in the absent voice of a man who has much greater problems than this one on his mind. “I need your car. Mine's a little under the weather.”

“You can't—”

But Hugh most definitely could. He tossed Lenny across the road as if the old fellow were no more than a bag of rags. When Lenny came down, there was a clear snapping sound and his squawks turned to mournful, hooting cries of pain. He had broken one collarbone and two ribs.

Ignoring him, Hugh got behind the wheel of the Chevy, pulled the door shut, and floored the accelerator. The engine let out a scream of surprise and a blue fog of oilsmoke rolled out of the sagging tailpipe. He was rolling down the hill at better than fifty miles an hour before Lenny Partridge could even manage to thrash his way over onto his back.

Andy Clutterbuck swung onto Castle Hill Road at approximately 3:35 p.m. He passed Lenny Partridge's old oil-guzzler going the other way and didn't give it a thought;
Clut's mind was totally occupied with Hugh Priest, and the rusty old Bel-Air was just another part of the scenery.

Clut didn't have the slightest idea of why or how Hugh might have been involved in the deaths of Wilma and Nettie, but that was all right; he was a footsoldier and that was all. The whys and hows were someone else's job, and this was one of those days when he was damned glad of it. He
did
know that Hugh was a nasty drunk whom the years had not sweetened. A man like that might do anything . . . especially when he was deep in his cups.

He's probably, at work, anyway, Clut thought, but as he approached the ramshackle house which Hugh called home, he unsnapped the strap on his service revolver just the same. A moment later he saw the sun twinkling off glass and chrome in Hugh's driveway and his nerves cranked up until they were humming like telephone wires in a gale. Hugh's
car
was here, and when a man's car was at home, the man usually was, too. It was just a fact of country life.

When Hugh had left his driveway on foot, he had turned right, away from town and toward the top of Castle Hill. If Clut had looked in that direction, he would have seen Lenny Partridge lying on the soft shoulder of the road and flopping around like a chicken taking a dustbath, but be didn't look that way, All of Clut's attention was focused on Hugh's house. Lenny's thin, birdlike cries went in one of Clut's ears, directly across his brain without raising the slightest alarm, and out the other.

Clut drew his gun before getting out of the cruiser.

William Tupper was only nineteen and he was never going to be a Rhodes Scholar, but he was smart enough to be terrified by Henry's behavior when Henry came into the Tiger at twenty minutes to four on the last real day of Castle Rock's existence. He was also smart enough to know trying to refuse Henry the keys to his Pontiac would do no good; in his present mood, Henry (who was, under
ordinary circumstances, the best boss Billy had ever had) would just knock him down and take them.

So for the first—and perhaps the only—time in his life, Billy tried guile. “Henry,” he said timidly, “you look like you could use a drink. I know
I
could. Why don't you let me pour us both a short one before you go?”

Henry had disappeared behind the bar. Billy could hear him back there, rummaging around and cursing under his breath. Finally he stood up again, holding a rectangular wooden box with a small padlock on it. He put the box on the bar and then began to pick through the ring of keys he wore at his belt.

He considered what Billy had said, began to shake his head, then reconsidered. A drink really wasn't such a bad idea; it would settle both his hands and his nerves. He found the right key, popped the lock on the box, and laid the lock aside on the bar. “Okay,” he said. “But if we're gonna do it, let's do it right. Chivas. Single for you, double for me.” He pointed his finger at Billy. Billy flinched—he was suddenly sure Henry was going to add:
But you're coming with me.
“And don't you tell your mother I let you have hard liquor in here, do you understand me?”

“Yessir,” Billy said, relieved. He went quickly to get the bottle before Henry could change his mind. “I understand you perfect.”

Deke Bradford, the man who ran Castle Rock's biggest and most expensive operation—Public Works—was utterly disgusted.

“Nope, he's not here,” he told Alan. “Hasn't been in all day. But if you see him before I do, do me a favor and tell him he's fired.”

“Why have you held onto him as long as you have, Deke?”

They were standing in the hot afternoon sunlight outside Town Garage #1. Off to the left, a Case Construction and Supply truck was backed up to a shed. Three men
were offloading small but heavy wooden cases. A red diamond shape—the symbol for high explosives—was stencilled on each of these. From inside the shed, Alan could hear the whisper of air conditioning. It seemed very odd to hear an air conditioner running this late in the year, but in Castle Rock, this had been an extremely odd week.

“I kep' him on longer than I should,” Deke admitted, and ran his hands through his short, graying hair. “I did it because I thought there was a good man hidin somewhere inside of him.” Deke was one of those short, stocky men—fireplugs with legs—who always looked ready to take a large chomp out of someone's ass. He was, however, one of the sweetest, kindest men Alan had ever met. “When he wasn't drunk or too hung over, wasn't nobody in this town'd work harder for you than Hugh would. And there was somethin in his face made me think he might not be one of those men who just has to go on drinkin until the devil knocks em down. I thought maybe with a steady job, he'd straighten up and fly right. But this last week.”

“What about this last week?”

“Man's been going to hell in a handbasket. Looked like he was all the time on something, and I don't necessarily mean booze. It seemed like his eyes sank way back in his head, and he was always lookin over your shoulder when you talked to him, never right at you. Also, he started talking to himself.”

“About what?”

“I dunno. I doubt if the other guys do, either. I hate to fire a man, but I'd made up my mind on Hugh even before you pulled in here this afternoon. I'm done with him.”

“Excuse me, Deke.” Alan went back to the car, called Sheila, and told her Hugh hadn't been at work all day.

“See if you can reach Clut, Sheila, and tell him to really watch his ass. And send John out there as backup,” He hesitated over the next, part knowing the caution had resulted in more than a few needless shootings, and then went ahead. He had to; he owed it to his officers in the field. “Clut and John are to consider Hugh armed and dangerous. Got it?”

“Armed and dangerous, ten-four.”

“Okay. Ten-forty, Unit One out.”

He racked the microphone and walked back to Deke.

“Do you think he might have left town, Deke?”