Needful Things - Stephen King [168]
Marvin and Tarnmi, who were both the late great these days, were singing "My Mistake."
Mike and Dave came back in.
"We're going to give you three months to make good," Mike said.
Ace felt himself go limp with relief. "Right now we want our money more than we want to rip your skin off. There's something else, too."
"We want to whack Ducky Morin," Dave said. "His shit has gone on long enough."
"Guy's giving us all a bad name," Mike said.
"We think you can find him," Dave said. "We think he'll figure once an Ace-Hole, always an Ace-Hole."
"You got any comment on that, Ace-Hole?" Mike asked him.
Ace had no comment on that. He was happy just knowing that he would be seeing another weekend.
"November first is the deadline," Dave said. "You bring us our money by November first and then we all go after Ducky. If you don't, we're going to see how many pieces of you we can cut off before you finally give up and die."
8
When the balloon went up, Ace had been holding about a dozen assorted heavy-caliber weapons of both the automatic and semiautomatic varieties. He spent most of his grace period trying to turn these weapons into cash. Once he did that, he could turn cash back into coke. You couldn't have a better asset than cocaine when you needed to turn some big bucks in a hurry.
But the market for guns was temporarily in the horse latitudes.
He sold half his stock-none of the big guns-and that was it.
During the second week in September he had met a promising prospect at the Piece of Work Pub in Lewiston. The prospect had hinted in every way it was possible to hint that he would like to buy at least six and perhaps as many as ten automatic weapons, if the name of a reliable ammunition dealer went with the shooting irons. Ace could do that; the Flying Corson Brothers were the most reliable ammo dealers he knew.
Ace went into the grimy bathroom to do a couple of lines before hammering the deal home. He was suffused with the happy, relieved glow which has bedevilled a number of American Presidents; he believed he saw light at the end of the tunnel.
He laid the small mirror he carried in his shirt pocket on the toilet tank and was spooning coke onto it when a voice spoke from the urinal nearest the stall Ace was in. Ace never found out who the voice belonged to; he only knew that its owner might well have saved him fifteen years in a Federal penitentiary.
"Man you be talking to wearin a wire," the voice from the urinal said, and when Ace left the bathroom he went out the back door.
9
Following that near miss (it never occurred to him that his unseen informant might just have been amusing himself), an odd kind of paralysis settled over Ace. He became afraid to do anything but buy a little coke now and then for his own personal use. He had never experienced such a sensation of dead stop before. He hated it, but didn't know what to do about it. The first thing he did every day was look at the calendar. November seemed to be rushing toward him.
Then, this morning, he had awakened before dawn with a thought blazing in his mind like strange blue light: he had to go home. He had to go back to Castle Rock. That was where the answer was. Going home felt right but even if it turned out to be wrong, the change of scenery might break the strange vaporlock in his head.
In Mechanic Falls he was just john Merrill, an ex-con who lived in a shack with plastic on the windows and cardboard on the door.
In Castle Rock he had always been Ace Merrill, the ogre who strode through the nightmares of a whole generation of little kids. In Mechanic Falls he was poor-white back-road trash, a guy who had a custom Dodge but no garage to put it in. In Castle Rock he had been, at least for a little while, something like a king.
So he had come back, and here he was, and what now?
Ace didn't know. The town looked smaller, grimier,