Needful Things (87 page)

He unscrewed the top of the bottle and grimaced—
the stuff inside smelled like a melting tractor battery. Tendrils of smoke rose from the mouth of the bottle.
Got to be careful with this stuff,
Buster thought.
Got to be real careful.

He put the empty cuff under his right thigh and pulled the chain taut. Then he poured some of the bottle's contents on the chain just below the cuff on his wrist, being careful not to drip any of the dark, viscous liquid on his skin. The steel immediately began to smoke and bubble. A few drops struck the rubber floormat and it also began to bubble. Smoke and a horrid frying smell rose from it. After a few moments Buster pulled the empty cuff out from under his thigh, hooked his fingers through it, and yanked briskly. The chain parted like paper and he threw it on the floor. He was still wearing a bracelet, but he could live with that; the chain and the swinging empty cuff had been the real pain in the keister. He slotted the key in the ignition, started the engine, and drove away.

Not three minutes later, a Castle County Sheriff's car driven by Seaton Thomas turned into the driveway of the Keeton home, and old Seat discovered Myrtle Keeton sprawled half in and half out of the doorway between the garage and the kitchen. Not long after, his car was joined by four State Police units. The cops tossed the house from top to bottom, looking for either Buster or some sign of where he might have gone. No one gave the game sitting on his study desk a second glance. It was old, dirty, and obviously broken. It looked like something that might have come out of a poor relation's attic.

Eddie Warburton, the janitor at the Municipal Building, had been pissed off at Sonny Jackett for more than two years. Over the last couple of days, this anger had built into a red rage.

When the transmission of Eddie's neat little Honda Civic had seized up during the summer of 1989, Eddie hadn't wanted to take it to the nearest Honda dealership. That would have involved a large towing fee. Bad enough
that the tranny hadn't expired until three weeks after the drive-train warranty had done the same thing. So he had gone to Sonny Jackett first, had asked Sonny if he had any experience working on foreign cars.

Sonny told him he did. He spoke in that expansive, patronizing way most back-country Yankees had of talking to Eddie.
We're not prejudiced, boy,
that tone said.
This is the north, you know. We don't hold with all that southern crap. Of
COURSE
you're a nigger, anyone can see that, but it don't mean a thing to us. Black, yellow, white, or green, we rook em all like you've never seen. Bring it on in here.

Sonny had fixed the Honda's transmission, but the bill had been a hundred dollars more than Sonny had said it would be, and they'd almost gotten into a fist-fight over it one night at the Tiger. Then Sonny's
lawyer
(Yankees or crackers, it was Eddie Warburton's experience that all white men had
lawyers)
called Eddie and told him Sonny was going to take him to small claims court. Eddie ended up fifty dollars out of pocket as a result of that little experience and the fire in the Honda's electrical system happened five months later. The car had been parked in the Municipal Building's lot. Someone had yelled to Eddie, but by the time he got outside with a fire extinguisher, the interior of his car was a dancing mass of yellow fire. It had been a total loss.

He'd wondered ever since if Sonny Jackett had set that fire. The insurance investigator said it was a
bona fide
accident which had been caused by a short-circuit . . . a one-in-a-million type of thing. But what did that fellow know? Probably nothing, and besides, it wasn't
his
money. Not that the insurance had been enough to cover Eddie's investment.

And now he knew. He knew for sure.

Earlier today he had gotten a little package in the mail. The items inside had been extremely enlightening: a number of blackened alligator clips, an old, lop-eared photograph, and a note.

The clips were of the sort a man could use to start an electrical fire. One simply stripped the insulation from the right pairs of wires in the right places, clipped the wires together, and
voilà.

The snapshot showed Sonny and a number of his
whitebread friends, the fellows who were always lounging on kitchen chairs in the gas station office when you went down there. The location was not Sonny's Sunoco, however; it was Robicheau's Junkyard out on Town Road #5. The hankies were standing in front of Eddie's burned-out Civic, drinking beer, laughing . . . and eating chunks of watermelon.

The note was short and to the point.
Dear Nigger: Fucking with me was a bad mistake.

At first Eddie wondered why Sonny would send him such a note (although he did not relate it to the letter he himself had slipped through Polly Chalmers's mail-slot at Mr. Gaunt's behest). He decided it was because Sonny was even dumber and meaner than most honkies. Still—if the business was still rankling in Sonny's guts, why had he waited so long to reopen it? But the more he brooded over those old times

(Dear Nigger:)

the less the questions seemed to matter. The note and the blackened alligator clips and that old photograph got into his head, buzzing there like a cloud of hungry mosquitoes.

Earlier tonight he had bought a gun from Mr. Gaunt.

The fluorescents in the Sunoco station's office threw a white trapezoid on the macadam of the service tarmac as Eddie pulled in—driving the second-hand Olds which had replaced the Civic. He got out, one hand in his jacket pocket, holding the gun.

He paused outside the door for a minute, looking in. Sonny was sitting beside his cash register in a plastic chair which was rocked back on its rear legs. Eddie could just see the top of Sonny's cap over his open newspaper. Reading the paper. Of course. White men always had
lawyers,
and after a day of shafting black fellows like Eddie, they always sat in their offices, rocked back in their chairs and reading the paper.

Fucking white men, with their fucking
lawyers
and their fucking
newspapers.

Eddie drew the automatic pistol and went inside. A part of him which had been asleep suddenly woke up and screamed in alarm that he shouldn't do this, it was a mistake. But the voice didn't matter. It didn't matter because
suddenly Eddie didn't seem to be inside himself at all. He seemed to be a spirit hovering over his own shoulder, watching all this happen. An evil imp had taken over his controls.

“I got something for you, you cheating sumbitch,” Eddie heard his mouth say, and watched his finger pull the trigger of the automatic twice. Two small black circles appeared in a headline which said
MCKERNAN APPROVAL RATING SOARS
. Sonny Jackett screamed and jerked. The rear legs of the tipped-back chair skidded and Sonny went tumbling to the floor with blood soaking into his coverall . . . except the name stitched on the coverall in gold thread was
RICKY
. It wasn't Sonny at all but Ricky Bissonette.

“Ah, shit!” Eddie screamed. “I shot the wrong fuckin honky!”

“Hello, Eddie,” Sonny Jackett remarked from behind him. “Good thing for me I was in the shithouse, wasn't it?”

Eddie began to turn. Three bullets from the automatic pistol Sonny had bought from Mr. Gaunt late that afternoon entered his lower back, pulverizing his spine, before he could get even halfway around.

He watched, eyes wide and helpless, as Sonny bent down toward him. The muzzle of the gun Sonny held was as big as the mouth of a tunnel and as dark as forever. Above it, Sonny's face was pale and set. A streak of grease ran down one cheek.

“Planning to steal my new socket-wrench set wasn't your mistake,” Sonny said as he pressed the barrel of the automatic against the center of Eddie Warburton's forehead. “Writing and
telling
me you were gonna do it . . .
that
was your mistake.”

A great white light—the light of understanding—suddenly went on in Eddie's mind.
Now
he remembered the letter he had pushed through the Chalmers woman's mail-slot, and he found himself able to put that piece of mischief together with the note he had received and the one Sonny was talking about.

“Listen!” he whispered. “You have to listen to me, Jackett—we been played for suckers, both of us. We—”

“Goodbye, black boy,” Sonny said, and pulled the trigger.

Sonny looked fixedly at what remained of Eddie Warburton for almost a full minute, wondering if he should have listened to what Eddie had to say. He decided the answer was no. What could a fellow dumb enough to send a note like that have to say that could possibly matter?

Sonny got up, walked into the office, and stepped over Ricky Bissonette's legs. He opened the safe and took out the adjustable socket-wrenches Mr. Gaunt had sold him. He was still looking at them, picking each one up, handling it lovingly, then putting it back in the custom case again, when the State Police arrived to take him into custody.

Park at the corner of Birch and Main,
Mr. Gaunt had told Buster on the telephone,
and just wait. I will send someone to you.

Buster had followed these instructions to the letter. He had seen a great many comings and goings at the mouth of the service alley from his vantage point one block up—almost all his friends and neighbors, it seemed to him, had a little business to do with Mr. Gaunt this evening. Ten minutes ago the Rusk woman had walked down there with her dress unbuttoned, looking like something out of a bad dream.

Then, not five minutes after she came back out of the alley, putting something into her dress pocket (the dress was still unbuttoned and you could see a lot, but who in his right mind, Buster wondered, would want to look), there had been several gunshots from farther up Main Street. Buster couldn't be sure, but he thought they came from the Sunoco station.

State Police cruisers came winding up Main from the Municipal Building, their blue lights flashing, scattering reporters like pigeons. Disguise or no disguise, Buster decided it would be prudent to climb into the back of the van for a little while.

The State Police cars roared by, and their whirling
blue lights picked out something which leaned against the van's rear doors—a green canvas duffle bag. Curious, Buster undid the knot in the drawstring, pulled the mouth of the bag open, and looked inside.

There was a box on top of the bag's contents. Buster took it out and saw the rest of the duffle was full of timers. Hotpoint clock-timers. There were easily two dozen of them. Their smooth white faces stared up at him like pupilless Orphan Annie eyes. He opened the box he had removed and saw it was full of alligator clips—the kind electricians sometimes used to make quick connections.

Buster frowned . . . and then, suddenly, his mind's eye saw an office form—a Castle Rock fund-release form, to be exact. Typed neatly in the space provided for
Goods and/or Services to Be Supplied
were these words: 16
CASES OF DYNAMITE.

Sitting in the back of the van, Buster began to grin. Then he began to laugh. Outside, thunder boomed and rolled. A tongue of lightning licked out of the dragging belly of a cloud and jabbed down into Castle Stream.

Buster went on laughing. He laughed until the van shook with it.

“Them!” he cried, laughing. “Oh, boy, have we got something for Them! Have we
ever!”

Henry Payton, who had come to Castle Rock to pull Sheriff Pangborn's smoking irons out of the fire, stood in the doorway of the Sunoco station's office with his mouth open. They had two more men down. One was white and one was black, but both were dead.

A third man, the station owner according to the name on his coverall, sat on the floor by the open safe with a dirty steel case cradled in his arms as if it were a baby. Beside him on the floor was an automatic pistol. Looking at it, Henry felt an elevator go down in his guts. It was the twin of the one Hugh Priest had used to shoot Henry Beaufort.

“Look,” one of the officers behind Henry said in a quiet, awed voice. “There's another one.”

Henry turned his head to look, and heard the tendons in his neck creak. Another gun—a third automatic pistol—lay near the outstretched hand of the black guy.

“Don't touch em,” he said to the other officers. “Don't even get near em.” He stepped over the pool of blood, seized Sonny Jackett by the lapels of his coverall, and pulled him to his feet. Sonny did not resist, but he clutched the steel case tighter against his breast.

“What went on here?” Henry yelled into his face. “What in God's name went on?”

Sonny gestured toward Eddie Warburton, using his elbow so he would not have to let go of the case. “He came in. He had a gun. He was crazy. You can see he was crazy; look what he did to Ricky. He thought Ricky was me. He wanted to steal my adjustables. Look.”

Sonny smiled and tilted the steel case so Henry could look at the jumble of rusty ironmongery inside.

“I couldn't let him do that, could I? I mean . . . these are
mine.
I paid for them, and they're
mine.”

Henry opened his mouth to say something. He had no idea what it would have been, and it never got out. Before he could say the first word, there were more gunshots, this time from up on Castle View.

Lenore Potter stood over the body of Stephanie Bonsaint with a smoking automatic pistol in her hand. The body lay in the flowerbed behind the house, the only one the evil, vindictive bitch hadn't torn up on her previous two trips.

“You shouldn't have come back,” Lenore said. She had never fired a gun in her life before and now she had killed a woman . . . but the only feeling she had was one of grim exultation. The woman had been on her property, tearing up her garden (Lenore had waited until the bitch actually got going—
her
mamma hadn't raised any fools), and she had been within her rights.
Perfectly
within her rights.