Needful Things - Stephen King [239]
"Okay." Polly's face, suffused with alien anger, tried to swim to the surface of his mind. He forced it back and concentrated on Hugh Priest again. But for one terrible second he could see no faces at all; only an awful blankness.
"Alan? You there? Ten-four?"
"Yes. You bet. Call Clut and tell him to get on over to Hugh Priest's house near the end of Castle Hill Road. He'll know where.
I imagine Hugh's at work, but if he does happen to be taking the day off, I'll want Clut to pick him up and bring him in for questioning. Ten-four?"
"Ten-four, Alan."
"Tell him to proceed with extreme caution. Tell him Hugh is wanted for questioning in the deaths of Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck.
He should be able to fill in the rest of the blanks for himself.
Ten-four."
"Oh!" Sheila sounded both alarmed and excited. "Ten-four, Sheriff."
"I'm on my way to the town motor pool. I expect to find Hugh there. Ten-forty over and out."
As he racked the mike (it felt as if he had been holding it for at least four years) he thought: If you'd told Polly what you just put on the air to Sheila, this situation you've got on your hands might be a little less nasty.
Or it might not-how could he tell such a thing when he didn't know what the situation was? Polly had accused him of prying of snooping. That covered a lot of territory, none of it mapped.
Besides, there was something else. Telling the dispatcher to put out a pick-up-and-hold was part of what the job was all about. So was making sure your field officers knew that the man they were after might be dangerous. Giving out the same information to your girlfriend on an open radio/telephone patch was a different matter entirely. He had done the right thing and he knew it.
This did not quiet the ache in his heart, however, and he made another effort to focus his mind on the business ahead-finding Hugh Priest, bringing him in, getting him a goddam lawyer if he wanted one, and then asking him why he had stuck a corkscrew into Nettle's dog, Raider.
For a moment it worked, but as he started the station wagon's engine and pulled away from the curb, it was still Polly's face-not Hugh's-he saw in his mind.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At about the same time Alan was heading across town to arrest Hugh Priest, Henry Beaufort was standing in his driveway and looking at his Thunderbird. The note he'd found under the windshield wiper was in one hand. The damage the chickenshit bastard had done to the tires was bad, but the tires could be replaced. It was the scratch he had drawn along the car's right-hand side that really toasted Henry's ass.
He looked at the note again and read it aloud. "Don't you ever cut me off and then keep my car-keys you damnfrog!"
Who had he cut off lately? Oh, all kinds of people. A night when he didn't have to cut someone off was a rare night, indeed. But cut off and car-keys kept on the board behind the bar? Only one of those just lately.
Only one.
"You motherfucker," The Mellow Tiger's owner and operator said in a soft, reflective voice. "You stupid crazy motherfucking sonofabitch."
He thought about going back inside to get his deer rifle and then thought better of it. The Tiger was just up the road, and he kept a rather special box under the bar. Inside it was a doublebarrelled Winchester shotgun sawed off at the knees. He'd kept it there ever since that numb fuck Ace Merrill had tried to rob him a few years back.
It was a highly illegal weapon, and Henry had never used it.
He thought he might just use it today.
He touched the ugly scratch Hugh had laid into the side of his T-Bird, then crumpled up the note and tossed it aside. Billy Tupper would be up at the Tiger by now, sweeping the floor and swamping out the heads. Henry would get the sawed-off, then borrow Billy's Pontiac.
It seemed he had a little asshole-hunting to do.
Henry kicked the balled-up note into the grass. "You been taking those stupid-pills again, Hugh, but you aren't going