Needful Things - Stephen King [245]
"I guess so." Billy looked out the window and brightened a little more. A rusty old car, a car which had once been white but was now a faded no-color-call it Dirt Road Gray-was coming up the hill toward The Mellow Tiger, spreading a thick blue fog of exhaust behind it. "Look!
It's old Lenny! I ain't seen him in a coon's age!"
"Well, we still don't open until five," Henry said. He went behind the bar to use the telephone. The box containing the sawedoff shotgun was still on the bar. I think I was planning to use that, he mused. I think I really was. What the hell gets into peoplesome kind of poison?
Billy walked toward the door as Lenny's old car pulled into the parking lot.
"Lester-" John LaPointe began, and that was when a fist almost as large as a Daisy canned ham-but much harder-collided with the center of his face. There was a dirty crunching sound as his nose broke in a burst of horrible pain. John's eyes squeezed shut and brightly colored sparks of light fountained up in the darkness. He went reeling and flailing across the room, waving his arms, fighting a losing battle to stay on his feet. Blood was pouring out of his nose and over his mouth. He struck the bulletin board and knocked it off the wall.
Lester began to walk toward him again, his brow wrinkled into a beetling frown of concentration below his screaming haircut.
In the dispatcher's office, Sheila got on the radio and began yelling for Alan.
Frank Jewett was on the verge of leaving the home of his good old "friend" George T. Nelson when he had a sudden cautionary thought.
This thought was that, when George T. Nelson arrived home to find his bedroom trashed, his coke flushed, and the likeness of his mother beshitted, he might come looking for his old partybuddy. Frank decided it would be nuts to leave without finishing what he had started and if finishing what he had started meant blowing the blackmailing bastard's oysters off, so be it. There was a gun cabinet downstairs, and the idea of doing the job with one of George T. Nelson's own guns felt like poetic justice to Frank.
If he was unable to unlock the gun cabinet, or force the door, he would help himself to one of his old party-buddy's steak-knives and do the job with that. He would stand behind the front door, and when George T. Nelson came in, Frank would either blow his motherfucking oysters off or grab him by the hair and cut his motherfucking throat.
The gun would probably be the safer of the two options, but the more Frank thought of the hot blood jetting from George T. Nelson's slit neck and splashing all over his hands, the more fitting it seemed.
Et tu, Georgia. Et tu, you blackmailing fuck.
Frank's reflections were disturbed at this point by George T.
Nelson's parakeet, Tammy Faye, who had picked the most inauspicious moment of its small avian life to burst into song. As Frank listened, a peculiar and terribly unpleasant smile began to surface on his face. How did I miss that goddam bird the first time? he asked himself as he strode into the kitchen.
He found the drawer with the sharp knives in it after a little exploration and spent the next fifteen minutes poking it through the bars of Tammy Faye's cage, forcing the small bird into a fluttery, feather-shedding panic before growing bored with the game and skewering it. Then he went downstairs to see what he could do with the gun cabinet. The lock turned out to be easy, and as Frank climbed the stairs to the first floor again, he burst into an unseasonal but nonetheless cheery song: Ohh you better not fight, you better not cry, You better not pout, I'm telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town!
He sees you when you're sleeping!
He knows when you're awake!
He knows if you've been bad or good, So you better be good for goodness' sake!
Frank, who had never failed to watch Lawrence Welk every Saturday night with his own beloved mother, sang the last line in a low Larry Hooper basso. Gosh, he felt good! How could he have ever believed, only an hour or so earlier, that his life was at an end?
This wasn't the end; it was the