Needful Things (75 page)

“Him?”
Deke cocked his head to one side and spat tobacco juice. “Guys like him
never
leave town until they've picked up their last paycheck. Most of em never leave at all. When it comes to remembering what roads lead out of town, guys like Hugh seem to have some sort of forgetting disease.”

Something caught Deke's eye and he turned toward the men offloading the wooden crates. “Watch what you're doing with those, you guys! You're s'posed to be unloadin em, not playin pepper with em!”

“That's a lot of bang you got there,” Alan said.

“Ayuh—twenty cases. We're gonna blow a granite jar-top over at the gravel-pit out on #5. The way it looks to me, we'll have enough left over to blow Hugh all the way to Mars, if you want to.”

“Why did you get so much?”

“It wasn't my idea; Buster added to my purchase order, God knows why. I can tell you one thing, though—he's gonna shit when he sees the electrical bill for this month . . . unless a cold front moves in. That air conditioner sucks up the juice somethin wicked, but you got to keep that stuff cool or it sweats. They all tell you this new bang don't do it, but I believe in better safe than sorry.”

“Buster topped your order,” Alan mused.

“Yeah—by four or six cases, I can't remember which. Wonders'll never cease, huh?”

“I guess not. Deke, can I use your office phone?”

“Be my guest.”

Alan sat behind Deke's desk for a full minute, sweating dark patches beneath the arms of his uniform shirt and listening to the telephone at Polly's house ring again and again and again. At last he dropped the handset back into the cradle.

He left the office in a slow walk, head down. Deke was padlocking the door of the dynamite shack, and when he turned to Alan, his face was long and unhappy. “There was a good man somewhere inside of Hugh Priest, Alan. I swear to God there was. A lot of times that man comes out. I seen it happen before. More often than most
people'd believe. With Hugh . . .” He shrugged. “Huh-uh. No soap.”

Alan nodded.

“Are you okay, Alan? You look like you come over funny.”

“I'm fine,” Alan said, smiling a little. But it was the truth; he
had
come over funny. Polly too. And Hugh. And Brain Rusk. It seemed as if everyone had come over funny today.

“Want a glass of water or cold tea? I got some.”

“Thanks, but I better get going.”

“All right. Let me know how it turns out.”

That was something Alan couldn't promise to do, but he had a sickening little feeling in the pit of his stomach that Deke would be able to read all about it for himself in a day or two. Or watch it on TV.

Lenny Partridge's old Chevy Bel-Air pulled into one of the slant parking spaces in front of Needful Things shortly before four, and the man of the hour got out. Hugh's fly was still unzipped, and he was still wearing the fox-tail around his neck. He crossed the sidewalk, his bare feet slapping on the hot concrete, and opened the door. The small silver bell overhead jingled.

The only person who saw him go in was Charlie Fortin. He was standing in the doorway Western Auto and smoking one of his stinky home-rolled cigarettes. “Old Hugh finally flipped,” Charlie said to no one in particular.

Inside, Mr. Gaunt looked at old Hugh with a pleasant, expectant little smile . . . as if barefooted, bare-chested men wearing moth-eaten fox-tails around their necks showed up in his shop every day. He made a small checkmark on the sheet beside the cash register. The last checkmark.

“I'm in trouble,” Hugh said, advancing on Mr. Gaunt. His eyes rolled from side to side in their sockets like pinballs. “I'm in a real mess this time.”

“I know,” Mr. Gaunt said in his most soothing voice.

“This seemed like the right piace to come. I dunno—I keep dreaming about you. I . . . I didn't know where else to turn.”

“This
is
the right place, Hugh.”

“He cut my tires,” Hugh whispered. “Beaufort, the bastard who owns The Mellow Tiger. He left a note. ‘You know what I'll come after next time Hubert,' it said. I know what
that
means. You bet I do.” One of Hugh's grubby, large-fingered hands caressed the mangy fur, and an expression of adoration spread across his face, it would have been sappy if it had not been so clearly genuine. “My beautiful, beautiful fox-tail.”

“Perhaps you ought to take care of him,” Mr. Gaunt suggested thoughtfully, “before he can take care of you. I know that sounds a little . . . well . . .
extreme
 . . . but when you consider—”

“Yes! Yes! That's just what I want to do!”

“I think I have just the thing,” Mr. Gaunt said. He bent down, and when he straightened up he had an automatic pistol in his left hand. He pushed it across the glass top of the case. “Fully loaded.”

Hugh picked it up. His confusion seemed to blow away like smoke as the gun's solid weight filled his hand. He could smell gun-grease, low and fragrant.

“I . . . I left my wallet at home,” he said.

“Oh, you don't need to worry about
that,”
Mr. Gaunt told him. “At Needful Things, Hugh, we insure the things we sell.” Suddenly his face hardened. His lips peeled back from his teeth and his eyes blazed. “Go get him!” he cried in a low, harsh voice. “Go get the bastard that wants to destroy what is yours! Go get him, Hugh! Protect yourself! Protect your
property!”

Hugh grinned suddenly. “Thanks, Mr. Gaunt. Thanks a lot.”

“Don't mention it,” Mr. Gaunt said, dropping immediately back into his normal tone of voice, but the small silver bell was already jangling as Hugh went back out, stuffing the automatic into the sagging waistband of his trousers as he walked.

Mr. Gaunt went to the window and watched Hugh get behind the wheel of the tired Chevy and back it into
the street. A Budweiser truck rolling slowly down Main Street blared its horn and swerved to avoid him.

“Go get him, Hugh,” Mr. Gaunt said in a low voice. Small wisps of smoke began to rise from his ears and his hair; thicker threads emerged from his nostrils and from between the square white tombstones of his teeth. “Get all of them you can. Party down, big fella.”

Mr. Gaunt threw back his head and began to laugh.

John LaPointe hurried toward the side door of the Sheriff's Office, the one that gave on the Municipal Building parking lot. He was excited. Armed and dangerous. It wasn't often that you got to assist in arresting an armed and dangerous suspect. Not in a sleepy little town like Castle Rock, anyway. He had forgotten all about his missing wallet (at least for the time being), and Sally Ratcliffe was even further from his mind.

He reached for the door just as someone opened it from the other side. All at once John was facing two hundred and twenty pounds of angry Phys Ed coach.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” Lester Pratt said in his new soft and silky voice. He held up a black leather wallet. “Lose something, you ugly two-timing gambling godless son of a bitch?”

John didn't have the slightest idea what Lester Pratt was doing here, or how he could have found his lost wallet. He only knew that he was Clut's designated backup and he had to get going right away.

“Whatever it is, I'll talk to you about it later, Lester,” John said, and reached for his wallet. When Lester first pulled it back out of his reach and then brought it down hard, smacking him in the center of the face with it, John was more astounded than angry.

“Oh, I don't want to
talk,
” Lester said in his new soft and silky voice. “I wouldn't waste my time.” He dropped the wallet, grabbed John by the shoulders, picked him up, and threw him back into the Sheriff's Office. Deputy LaPointe flew six feet through the air and landed on top
of Norris Ridgewick's desk. His butt skated across it, plowing a path through the heaped paperwork and knocking Norris's
IN/OUT
basket onto the floor. John followed, landing on his back with a painful thump.

Sheila Brigham was staring through the dispatcher's window, her mouth wide open.

John began to pick himself up. He was shaken and dazed, without the slightest clue as to what was going on here.

Lester was walking toward him in a fighting strut. His fists were held up in an old fashioned John L. Sullivan pose that should have been comic but wasn't. “I'm going to learn you a lesson,” Lester said in his new soft and silky voice. “I'm going to teach you what happens to Catholic fellows who steal Baptist fellows' girls. I'm going to teach you all about it, and when I'm done, you'll have it so right you'll never forget it.”

Lester Pratt closed in to teaching distance.

Billy Tupper might not have been an intellectual, but he was a sympathetic ear, and a sympathetic ear was the best medicine for Henry Beaufort's rage that afternoon. Henry drank his drink and told Billy what had happened . . . and as he talked, he felt himself calming down. It occurred to him that if he had gotten the shotgun and just kept rolling, he might have ended this day not behind his bar but behind those of the holding cell in the Sheriff's Office. He loved his T-Bird a lot, but he began to realize he didn't love it enough to go to prison for it. He could replace the tires, and the scratch down the side would eventually buff out. As for Hugh Priest, let the law take care of him.

He finished the drink and stood up.

“You still goin after him, Mr. Beaufort?” Billy asked apprehensively.

“I wouldn't waste my time,” Henry said, and Billy breathed a sigh of relief. “I'm going to let Alan Pangborn take care of him. Isn't that what I pay my taxes for, Billy?”

“I guess so.” Billy looked out the window and
brightened a little more. A rusty old car, a car which had once been white but was now a faded no-color—call it Dirt Road Gray—was coming up the hill toward The Mellow Tiger, spreading a thick blue fog of exhaust behind it. “Look! It's old Lenny! I ain't seen him in a coon's age!”

“Well, we still don't open until five,” Henry said. He went behind the bar to use the telephone. The box containing the sawed off shotgun was still on the bar. I think I was planning to use that, he mused. I think I really was. What the hell gets into people—some kind of poison?

Billy walked toward the door as Lenny's old car pulled into the parking lot.

“Lester—” John LaPointe began, and that was when a fist almost as large as a Daisy canned ham—but much harder—collided with the center of his face. There was a dirty crunching sound as his nose broke in a burst of horrible pain. John's eyes squeezed shut and brightly colored sparks of light fountained up in the darkness. He went reeling and flailing across the room, waving his arms, fighting a losing battle to stay on his feet. Blood was pouring out of his nose and over his mouth. He struck the bulletin board and knocked it off the wall.

Lester began to walk toward him again, his brow wrinkled into a beetling frown of concentration below his screaming haircut.

In the dispatcher's office, Sheila got on the radio and began yelling for Alan.

Frank Jewett was on the verge of leaving the home of his good old “friend” George T. Nelson when he had a sudden cautionary thought. This thought was that, when George T. Nelson arrived home to find his bedroom trashed, his coke flushed, and the likeness of his mother beshitted, he
might come looking for his old party-buddy. Frank decided it would be nuts to leave without finishing what he had started . . . and if finishing what he had started meant blowing the blackmailing bastard's oysters off, so be it. There was a gun cabinet downstairs, and the idea of doing the job with one of George T. Nelson's own guns felt like poetic justice to Frank. If he was unable to unlock the gun cabinet, or force the door, he would help himself to one of his old party-buddy's steak-knives and do the job with
that.
He would stand behind the front door, and when George T. Nelson came in, Frank would either blow his motherfucking oysters off or grab him by the hair and cut his motherfucking throat. The gun would probably be the safer of the two options, but the more Frank thought of the hot blood jetting from George T. Nelson's slit neck and splashing all over his hands, the more fitting it seemed.
Et tu,
Georgie.
Et tu,
you blackmailing fuck.

Frank's reflections were disturbed at this point by George T. Nelson's parakeet, Tammy Faye, who had picked the most inauspicious moment of its small avian life to burst into song. As Frank listened, a peculiar and terribly unpleasant smile began to surface on his face. How did I miss that goddam bird the first time? he asked himself as he strode into the kitchen.

He found the drawer with the sharp knives in it after a little exploration and spent the next fifteen minutes poking it through the bars of Tammy Faye's cage, forcing the small bird into a fluttery, feather-shedding panic before growing bored with the game and skewering it. Then he went downstairs to see what he could do with the gun cabinet. The lock turned out to be easy, and as Frank climbed the stairs to the first floor again, he burst into an unseasonal but nonetheless cheery song:

Ohh . . . you better not fight, you better not cry,

You better not pout, I'm telling you why,

Santa Claus is coming to town!

He sees you when you're sleeping!

He knows when you're awake!

He knows if you've been bad or good,

So you better be good for goodness' sake!

Frank, who had never failed to watch Lawrence Welk every Saturday night with his own beloved mother, sang the last line in a low Larry Hooper basso. Gosh, he felt good! How could he have ever believed, only an hour or so earlier, that his life was at an end? This wasn't the end; it was the beginning! Out with the old—especially dear old “friends” like George T. Nelson—and in with the new!