Gerald's Game - Stephen King [31]
'Let go of him,' she told the dog, but her voice was now meek and sad and strengthless. The dog barely twitched its ears at the sound of it and didn't pause at all. It merely went on pulling the thing with the disarrayed widow's peak and the blotchy complexion. This thing no longer looked like Disco Gerald — not a bit. Now it was only Dead Gerald, sliding across the bedroom floor with a dog's teeth buried in its flabby biceps.
A frayed flap of skin hung over the dog's snout. Jessie tried to tell herself it looked like wallpaper, but wallpaper did not — at least as far as she knew — come with moles and a vaccination scar. Now she could see Gerald's pink, fleshy belly, marked only by the small caliber bullet-hole that was his navel. His penis flopped and dangled in its nest of black pubic hair. His buttocks whispered along the hardwood boards with ghastly, frictionless ease.
Abruptly the suffocating atmosphere of her terror was pierced by a shaft of anger so bright it was like a stroke of heart-lightning inside her head. She did more than accept this new emotion; she welcomed it. Rage might not help her get out of this nightmarish situation, but she sensed that it would serve as an antidote to her growing sense of shocked unreality.
'You bastard,' she said in a low, trembling voice. 'You cowardly, slinking bastard.'
Although she couldn't reach anything on Gerald's side of the bed-shelf, Jessie found that, by rotating her left wrist inside the handcuff so that her hand was pointing back over her shoulder, she could walk her fingers over a short stretch of the shelf on her own side. She couldn't turn her head enough to see the things she was touching — they were just beyond that hazy spot people call the corner of their eye — but it didn't really matter. She had a pretty good idea of what was up there. She pattered her fingers back and forth, running their tips lightly over tubes of make-up, pushing a few farther back on the shelf and knocking others off it. Some of these latter landed on the coverlet; others bounced off the bed or her left thigh and landed on the floor. None of them were even close to the sort of thing she was looking for. Her fingers closed on a jar of Nivea face cream, and for a moment she allowed herself to think it might do the trick, but it was only a sample-sized jar, too small and light to hurt the dog even if it had been made of glass instead of plastic. She dropped it back onto the shelf and resumed her blind search.
At their farthest stretch, her exploring fingers encountered the rounded edge of a glass object that was by far the biggest thing she had touched. For a moment she couldn't place it, and then it came to her. The stein hanging on the wall was only one souvenir of Gerald's Alpha Grab A Hoe days; she was touching another one. It was an ashtray, and the only reason she hadn't placed it immediately was because it belonged on Gerald's end of the shelf, next to his glass of icewater. Someone — possibly Mrs Dahl, the cleaning lady, possibly Gerald himself — had moved it over to her side of the bed, maybe in the course of dusting the shelf, or maybe to make room for something else. The reason didn't matter, anyway. It was there, and right now that was enough.
Jessie closed her fingers over its rounded edge, feeling two notches in it — cigarette parking — spaces. She gripped the ashtray, drew her hand back as far as she could, then brought it forward again. Her luck was in and she snapped her wrist down at the instant the handcuff chain snubbed tight, like a big-league pitcher breaking off a curve. All of this was an act of pure impulse, the missile sought for, found, and thrown before she had time to ensure the failure of the shot by reflecting on how unlikely