Needful Things - Stephen King [166]
His uncle, however, held a radically different view of things.
"Nope," Reginald Marion "Pop" Merrill told him. "I know where your money comes from-when you have money, that is. It comes from that white shit."
"Aw, Uncle Reginald-" "Don't you Uncle Reginald me," Pop had replied. "You got a spot of it on y'nose right now. Careless. Folks who use that white shit and deal it always get careless. Careless people end up in the Shank. That's if they're lucky. If they ain't, they wind up fertilizing a patch of swamp about six feet long and three feet deep. I can't collect money if the people who owe it to me are dead or doing time. I wouldn't give you the sweat out of my dirty asshole, is what I mean to say."
That particular embarrassment had come shortly after Alan Pangborn had assumed his duties as Sheriff of Castle County. And Alan's first major bust had come when he surprised Ace and two of his friends trying to crack the safe in Henry Beaufort's office at The Mellow Tiger. It was a very good bust, a textbook bust, and Ace had found himself in Shawshank less than four months after his uncle had warned him of the place. The charges of attempted robbery were dropped in a plea-bargain, but Ace still got a pretty good dose of hard time on a nighttime breaking and entering charge.
He got out in the spring of 1989 and moved to Mechanic Falls.
He had a job to go to; Oxford Plains Speedway participated in the state's pre-release program, and John "Ace" Merrill obtained a position as maintenance man and part-time pit mechanic.
A good many of his old friends were still around-not to mention his old customers-and soon Ace was doing business and having nosebleeds again.
He kept the job at the Speedway until his sentence was officially up, and quit the day it was. He'd gotten a phone call from the Flying Corson Brothers in Danbury, Connecticut, and soon he was dealing shooting irons again as well as the Bolivian marching powder.
The ante had gone up while he was in stir, it seemed; instead of pistols, rifles, and repeating shotguns, he now found himself doing a lively business in automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
The climax had come in June of this year, when he sold a groundfired Thunderbolt missile to a seafaring man with a South American accent. The seafaring man stowed the Thunderbolt below, then paid Ace seventeen thousand dollars in fresh hundreds with nonsequential serial numbers.
"What do you use a thing like that for?" Ace had asked with some fascination.
"Anytheeng you want to, sefior," the seafaring man had replied unsmilingly.
Then, in July, everything had crashed. Ace still didn't really understand how it could have happened, except that it probably would have been better if he had stuck with the Flying Corson Brothers for coke as well as guns. He had taken delivery of two pounds of Colombian flake from a guy in Portland, financing the deal with the help of Mike and Dave Corson. They had kicked in about eighty-five thousand. That particular pile of blow had seemed worth twice the asking price-it had tested high blue. Ace knew that eighty-five big ones was a lot more boost than he was used to handling, but he felt confident and ready to move up. In those days, "No problem!" had been Ace Merrill's main guidepost to living.
Things had changed since then. Things had changed a lot.
These changes began when Dave Corson called from Danbury, Connecticut, to ask Ace what he thought he was doing, trying to pass off baking soda as cocaine. The guy in Portland had apparently managed to stiff Ace, high blue or no high blue, and when Dave Corson began to realize this, he stopped sounding so friendly. In fact, he began to sound positively unfriendly.
Ace could have done a fade. Instead, he gathered all his courage-which was not inconsiderable, even in his middle age-and went to see the Flying Corson Brothers. He gave them his view of what had happened. He did his explaining in the back of a Dodge van with wall-to-wall carpet, a heated mud-bed, and a mirror on the ceiling. He was