Needful Things - Stephen King [175]
He watched the green Challenger make an illegal U-turn on Main Street and head back toward Castle Stream and the edge of town. Then he turned and looked thoughtfully up the street at the green awning.
Ace had come back to his old home town and bought a book-Treasure Island, to be exact. He had bought it in Needful Things.
I thought that place was closed today, Alan thought. Wasn't that what the sign said?
He walked up the street to Needful Things. He had not been wrong about the sign; it read
CLOSED COLUMBUS DAY.
If he'll see Ace, maybe he'll see me, Alan thought, and raised his fist to knock. Before he could bring it down, the pager clipped to his belt went off. Alan pushed the button that turned the hateful gadget off and stood indecisively in front of the shop door a moment longer but there was really no question about what he had to do now. If you were a lawyer or a business executive, maybe you could afford to ignore your pages for awhile, but when you were a County Sheriff-and one who was elected rather than appointed there wasn't much question about priorities.
Alan crossed the sidewalk, then paused and spun around quickly.
He felt a little like the player who is "it" in a game of Red Light, the one whose job it is to catch the other players in motion so he can send them all the way back to the beginning. The feeling that he was being watched had returned, and it was very strong.
He was positive he would see the surprised twitch of the drawn shade on Mr. Gaunt's side of the door.
But there was nothing. The shop just went on dozing in the unnaturally hot October sunlight, and if he hadn't seen Ace coming out with his own eyes, Alan would have sworn the place was empty, watched feeling or no watched feeling.
He crossed to his cruiser, leaned in to grab the mike, and radioed in.
"Henry Payton called," Sheila told him. "He's already got preliminary reports on Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck from Henry Ryan-by?"
"I copy. BY."
"Henry said if you want him to give you the high spots, he'll be in from right now until about noon. By."
"Okay. I'm just up Main Street. I'll be right in. By."
"Uh, Alan?"
"Yeah?"
"Henry also asked if we're going to get a fax machine before the turn of the century, so he can just send copies of this stuff instead of calling all the time and reading it to you. By."
"Tell him to write a letter to the Head Selectman," Alan said grumpily. "I'm not the one who writes the budget and he knows it."
"Well, I'm just telling you what he said. No need to get all huffy about it. By."
Alan thought Sheila sounded rather huffy herself, however.
"Over and out," he said.
He got into Unit 1 and racked the mike. He glanced at the bank in time to see the big digital read-out over the door announce the time as ten-fifty and the temperature as eighty-two degrees. Jesus, we don't need this, he thought. Everyone in town's got a goddam case of prickly heat.
Alan drove slowly back to the Municipal Building, lost in thought.
He couldn't shake the feeling that there was something going on in Castle Rock, something which was on the verge of slipping out of control. It was crazy, of course, crazy as hell, but he just couldn't shake it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The town's schools were closed for the holiday, but Brian Rusk wouldn't have gone even if they had been open.
Brian was sick. it wasn't any kind of physical illness, not measles or chicken pox or even the Hershey Squirts, the most humiliating and debilitating of them all. Nor was it a mental disease, exactly-his mind was involved, all right, but it felt almost as if that involvement were a side-effect. The part of him which had taken sick was deeper inside him than his mind; some essential part of his make-up which was available to no doctor's needle or microscope had gone gray and ill.
He had always been a sunshiny sort of boy, but that sun was gone now, buried behind heavy banks of cloud which were still building.
The clouds had begun to gather on the afternoon he had thrown the mud at Wilma jerzyck's sheets, they had thickened when