The Dead Zone (40 page)

He hung up. “He's going to verify my bona fides, then check it through, then call me back. You want a cup of . . . no, you don't drink it, do you?”

“No,” Johnny said. “I'll settle for a glass of water.”

He went over to the big glass cooler and drew a paper cupful of water. Outside the storm howled and pounded.

Behind him, Bannerman said awkwardly: “Yeah, okay. You were right. He's the son I'd've liked to have had. My wife had Katrina by cesarian. She can never have another one, the doctor said it would kill her. She had the Band-Aid operation and I had a vasectomy. Just to be sure.”

Johnny went to the window and looked out on darkness, his cup of water in his hand. There was nothing to see but snow, but if he turned around, Bannerman would break off—you didn't have to be psychic to know that.

“Frank's dad worked on the B&M line and died in an accident when Frank was five or so. He was drunk, tried to make a coupling in a state where he probably would have pissed down his own leg and never known it. He got crushed between two flatcars. Frank's had to be the man of the house ever since. Roscoe says he had a girl in high school, but Mrs. Dodd put paid to that in a hurry.”

I bet she did,
Johnny thought.
A woman who would do that thing . . . that clothespin thing . . . to her own son . . . that sort of woman would stop at nothing. She must be almost as crazy as he is.

“He came to me when he was sixteen and asked if there was such a thing as a part-time policeman. Said it was the only thing he'd ever really wanted to do or be since he was a kid. I took a shine to him right off. Hired him to work around the place and paid him out of my own pocket. Paid him what I could, you know, he never complained about the wages. He was the sort of kid who would have worked for free. He put in an application for full-time work the month before he graduated from high school, but at that time we didn't have any vacancies. So he went to work at Donny Haggars' Gulf and took a night course in police work at the university down in Gorham. I guess Mrs. Dodd tried to put paid to that, too—felt she was alone too much of the time, or something—but that time Frank stood up to her . . . with my encouragement. We took him on in July of 1971 and he's been with the department ever since. Now you tell me this and I think of Katrina being out yesterday morning, walking right past whoever did it . . . and it's like some dirty kind of incest, almost. Frank's been at our house, he's eaten our food, babysat Katie once or twice . . . and you tell me . . .”

Johnny turned around. Bannerman had taken off his glasses and was wiping his eyes again.

“If you really can see such things, I pity you. You're a freak of God, no different from a two-headed cow I once saw in the carnival. I'm sorry. That's a shit thing to say, I know.”

“The Bible says God loves all his creatures,” Johnny said. His voice was a bit unsteady.

“Yeah?” Bannerman nodded and rubbed the red places on the sides of his nose where his glasses sat. “Got a funny way of showing it, doesn't he?”

About twenty minutes later the telephone rang and Bannerman answered it smartly. Talked briefly. Listened. Johnny watched his face get old. He hung up and looked at Johnny for a long time without speaking.

“November 12, 1972,” he said. “A college girl. They found
her in a field out by the turnpike. Ann Simons, her name was. Raped and strangled. Twenty-three years old. No semen type obtained. It's still not proof, Johnny.”

“I don't think, in your own mind, you need any more proof,” Johnny said. “And if you confront him with what you have, I think he'll break down.”

“And if he doesn't?”

Johnny remembered the vision of the bandstand. It whirled back at him like a crazy, lethal boomerang. The tearing sensation. The pain that was pleasant, the pain that recalled the pain of the closthespin, the pain that reconfirmed everything.

“Get him to drop his pants,” Johnny said.

Bannerman looked at him.

The reporters were still out in the lobby. In truth, they probably wouldn't have moved even had they not suspected a break in the case—or at least a bizarre new development. The roads out of town were impassable.

Bannerman and Johnny went out the supply closet window.

“Are you sure this is the way to do it?” Johnny asked, and the storm tried to rip the words out of his mouth. His legs hurt.

“No,” Bannerman said simply, “but I think you should be in on it. Maybe I think he should have the chance to look you in the face, Johnny. Come on. The Dodds are only two blocks from here.”

They set off, hooded and booted, a pair of shadows in the driving snow. Beneath his coat Bannerman was wearing his service pistol. His handcuffs were clipped to his belt. Before they had gone a block through the deep snow Johnny was limping badly, but he kept his mouth grimly shut about it.

But Bannerman noticed. They stopped in the doorway of the Castle Rock Western Auto.

“Son, what's the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” Johnny said. His head was starting to ache again, too.

“It sure is something. You act like you're walking on two broken legs.”

“They had to operate on my legs after I came out of the coma. The muscles had atrophied. Started to melt is how Dr.
Brown put it. The joints were decayed. They fixed it up the best they could with synthetics . . .”

“Like the Six Million Dollar Man, huh?”

Johnny thought of the neat piles of hospital bills back home, sitting in the top drawer of the dining room hutch.

“Yes, something like that. When I'm on them too long, they stiffen up. That's all.”

“You want to go back?”

You bet I do. Go back and not have to think about this hellacious business anymore. Wish I'd never come. Not my problem. This is the guy who compared me to a two-headed cow.

“No, I'm okay,” he said.

They stepped out of the doorway and the wind grabbed them and tried to bowl them along the empty street. They struggled through the harsh, snow-choked flare of arc-sodium streetlights, bent into the wind. They turned into a side street and five houses down Bannerman stopped in front of a small and neat New England saltbox. Like the other houses on the street, it was dark and battened down.

“This is the house,” Bannerman said, his voice oddly colorless. They worked their way through the snowdrift that the wind had thrown against the porch and mounted the steps.

Mrs. Henrietta Dodd was a big woman who was carrying a dead weight of flesh on her frame. Johnny had never seen a woman who looked any sicker. Her skin was a yellowish-gray. Her hands were nearly reptilian with an eczemalike rash. And there was something in her eyes, narrowed to glittering slits in their puffy sockets, that reminded him unpleasantly of the way his mother's eyes had sometimes looked when Vera Smith was transported into one of her religious frenzies.

She had opened the door to them after Bannerman had rapped steadily for nearly five minutes. Johnny stood beside him on his aching legs, thinking that this night would never end. It would just go on and on until the snow had piled up enough to avalanche down and bury them all.

“What do you want in the middle of the night, George Bannerman?” she asked suspiciously. Like many fat women,
her voice was a high, buzzy reed instrument—it sounded a bit like a fly or a bee caught in a bottle.

“Have to talk to Frank, Henrietta.”

“Then talk to him in the morning,” Henrietta Dodd said, and started to close the door in their faces.

Bannerman stopped the door's swing with a gloved hand. “I'm sorry, Henrietta. Has to be now.”

“Well, I'm not going to wake him up!” she cried, not moving from the doorway. “He sleeps like the dead anyway! Some nights I ring my bell for him, the palpitations are terrible sometimes, and does he come? No, he sleeps right through it and he could wake up some morning to find me dead of a heart attack in my bed instead of getting him his goddam runny poached egg! Because you work him too hard!”

She grinned in a sour kind of triumph; the dirty secret exposed and hats over the windmill.

“All day, all night, swing shift, chasing after drunks in the middle of the night and any one of them could have a .32 gun under the seat, going out to the ginmills and honkytonks, oh, they're a rough trade out there but a lot you mind! I guess I know what goes on in those places, those cheap slutty women that'd be happy to give a nice boy like my Frank an incurable disease for the price of a quarter beer!”

Her voice, that reed instrument, swooped and buzzed. Johnny's head pumped and throbbed in counterpoint. He wished she would shut up. It was a hallucination, he knew, just the tiredness and stress of this awful night catching up, but it began to seem more and more to him that this was his mother standing here, that at any moment she would turn from Bannerman to him and begin to huckster him about the wonderful talent God had given him.

“Mrs. Dodd . . . Henrietta . . .” Bannerman began patiently.

Then she did turn to Johnny, and regarded him with her smart-stupid little pig's eyes.

“Who's this?”

“Special deputy,” Bannerman said promptly. “Henrietta, I'll take the responsibility for waking Frank up.”

“Oooh, the
responsibility!”
she cooed with monstrous, buzzing sarcasm, and Johnny finally realized she was afraid. The fear was coming off her in pulsing, noisome waves—that was what was making his headache worse. Couldn't Bannerman feel it? “The ree-spon-si-
bil
-i-tee! Isn't that
biiig
of you, my God yes! Well, I won't have my boy waked up in the middle
of the night, George Bannerman, so you and your
special deputy
can just go peddle your goddam papers!”

She tried to shut the door again and this time Bannerman shoved it all the way open. His voice showed tight anger and beneath that terrible tension. “Open up, Henrietta, I mean it, now.”

“You can't do this!” she cried. “This isn't no police state! I'll have your job! Let's see your warrant!”

“No, that's right, but I'm going to talk to Frank,” Bannerman said, and pushed past her.

Johnny, barely aware of what he was doing, followed. Henrietta Dodd made a grab for him. Johnny caught her wrist—and a terrible pain flared in his head, dwarfing the sullen thud of the headache.
And the woman felt it, too.
The two of them stared at each other for a moment that seemed to last forever, an awful, perfect understanding. For that moment they seemed welded together. Then she fell back, clutching at her ogre's bosom.

“My heart . . . my heart . . .” She scrabbled at her robe pocket and pulled out a phial of pills. Her face had gone to the color of raw dough. She got the cap off the phial and spilled tiny pills all over the floor getting one into her palm. She slipped it under her tongue. Johnny stood staring at her in mute horror. His head felt like a swelling bladder full of hot blood.

“You
knew?”
he whispered.

Her fat, wrinkled mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. No sound came out. It was the mouth of a beached fish.

“All of this time
you knew?”

“You're a devil!” she screamed at him. “You're a monster . . . devil . . . oh my heart . . . oh, I'm dying . . . think I'm dying . . . call the doctor . . .
George Bannerman don't you go up there and wake my baby!”

Johnny let go of her, and unconsciously rubbing his hand back and forth on his coat as if to free it of a stain, he stumbled up the stairs after Bannerman. The wind outside sobbed around the eaves like a lost child. Halfway up he glanced back. Henrietta Dodd sat in a wicker chair, a sprawled mountain of meat, gasping and holding a huge breast in each hand. His head still felt as if it were swelling and he thought dreamily:
Pretty soon it'll just pop and that'll be the end. Thank God.

An old and threadbare runner covered the narrow hall
floor. The wallpaper was watermarked. Bannerman was pounding on a closed door. It was at least ten degrees colder up here.

“Frank? Frank! It's George Bannerman! Wake up, Frank!”

There was no response. Bannerman turned the knob and shoved the door open. His hand had fallen to the butt of his gun, but he had not drawn it. It could have been a fatal mistake, but Frank Dodd's room was empty.

The two of them stood in the doorway for a moment, looking in. It was a child's room. The wallpaper—also watermarked—was covered with dancing clowns and rocking horses. There was a child-sized chair with a Raggedy Andy sitting in it, looking back at them with its shiny blank eyes. In one corner was a toybox. In the other was a narrow maple bed with the covers thrown back. Hooked over one of the bedposts and looking out of place was Frank Dodd's holstered gun.

“My God,” Bannerman said softly. “What is this?”

“Help,” Mrs. Dodd's voice floated up. “Help me . . .”

“She knew,” Johnny said. “She knew from the beginning, from the Frechette woman. He told her. And she covered up for him.”

Bannerman backed slowly out of the room and opened another door. His eyes were dazed and hurt. It was a guest bedroom, unoccupied. He opened the closet, which was empty except for a neat tray of D-Con rat-killer on the floor. Another door. This bedroom was unfinished and cold enough to show Bannerman's breath. He looked around. There was another door, this one at the head of the stairs. He went to it, and Johnny followed. This door was locked.

“Frank? Are you in there?” He rattled the knob. “Open it, Frank!”

There was no answer. Bannerman raised his foot and kicked out, connecting with the door just below the knob. There was a flat cracking sound that seemed to echo in Johnny's head like a steel platter dropped on a tile floor.