Gerald's Game - Stephen King [160]
Ten minutes after the van went in through the gate, Ridgewick and LaPointe followed with their own headlights out and their unit just barely creeping along through the snow. They followed the van's tracks until they were pretty sure where the guy was going — the town crypt set into the side of the hill. Both of them were thinking Rudolph, but neither one of them said so out loud. LaPointe said it would have been like jinxing a guy who's throwing a no-hitter.
Ridgewick told his deputy to stop the cruiser just around the side of the hill from the crypt — said he wanted to give the guy all the rope he needed to hang himself. As it turned out, Rudolph ended up with enough to hang himself from the moon. When Ridgewick and LaPointe finally moved in with their guns drawn and their flashlights on, they caught Raymond Andrew Joubert half in and half out of an opened coffin. He had his axe in one hand, his cock in the other, and LaPointe said he looked ready to do business with either one.
I guess Joubert scared the hell out of them both when they first saw him in their lights, and I'm not a bit surprised — although I flatter myself that I can imagine better than most what it must have been like, coming on a creature like him in a cemetery crypt at two in the morning. All other circumstances aside, Joubert suffers from acromegaly, a progressive enlargement of the hands, feet, and face that happens when the pituitary gland goes into warp-drive. It's what caused his forehead to bulge the way it does, and his lips to pooch out. He also has abnormally long arms; they dangle all the way down to his knees.
There was a big fire in Castle Rock about a year ago — it burned most of the downtown — and these days the Sheriff jugs most serious offenders in Chamberlain or Norway, but neither Sheriff Ridgewick nor Deputy LaPointe wanted to make the trip over snowy roads at three in the morning, so they took him back to the renovated shed they're using as a cop-shop these days.
'They claimed it was the late hour and the snowy roads,' Brandon said, 'but I have an idea there was a little more to it than that. I don't think Sheriff Ridgewick wanted to turn over the piñata to anyone else until he'd taken at least one good crack at it himself. Anyway, Joubert was no trouble — he sat in the back of the cruiser, chipper as a chickadee, looking like something that had escaped from an episode of Tales from the Crypt and — both of them swear this is true singing "Happy Together," that old Turtles tune.
Ridgewick radioed ahead for a couple of temp deputies to meet them. He made sure Joubert was locked up tight and the deputies were armed with shotguns and plenty of fresh coffee before he and LaPointe left again. They drove back to Homeland for the van. Ridgewick put on gloves, sat on one of those green plastic Hefty bags the cops like to call "evidence blankets" when they use them on a case, and ran the vehicle back to town. He drove with all the windows open and said the van still stank like a butcher's shop after a six-day power failure.'
Ridgewick got his first good look into the back of the van when he got it under the arc-lights of the town garage. There were several rotting limbs in the storage compartments running along the sides. There was also a wicker box, much smaller than the one I saw, and a Craftsman tool-case full of burglar's tools, When Ridgewick opened the wicker box, he found six penises strung on a length of jute twine. He said he knew it for what it was at once: a necklace. Joubert later admitted that he often wore it when he went out on his graveyard expeditions, and stated his belief that if he'd been wearing it on his last trip, he never would have been caught. 'It brung me a power of good luck,' he said, and considering how long it took to catch him, Ruth, I think you'd have to say he had a point.
The worst thing, however, was the sandwich lying on the passenger seat. The thing poking out from between the two slices of Wonder Bread was pretty clearly a human tongue. It had been slathered