Needful Things - Stephen King [259]
The flames flared. The little pile of stamps and photos quickly crumpled to black ash. The flames guttered, went out and at the moment they did, a sudden gust of wind blew through the stillness of the day, breaking the clot of ash up into flakes. They whirled upward in a funnel which Polly followed with eyes that had gone suddenly wide and frightened. Where, exactly, had that freak gust of wind come from?
Oh, please! Can't you stop being so damnedAt that moment the growling sound, low, like an idling outboard motor, rose from the hot, dark maw of the barn again. It wasn't her imagination and it wasn't a creaking board.
It was a dog.
Polly looked that way, frightened, and saw two sunken red circles of light peering out at her from the darkness.
She ran around the car, bumping her hip painfully against the right side of the hood in her hurry, got in, rolled up the windows, and locked the doors. She turned the ignition key. The engine cranked over but did not start.
No one knows where I am, she realized. No one but Mr. Gaunt and he wouldn't tell.
For a moment she imagined herself trapped out here, the way Donna Trenton and her son had been trapped. Then the engine burst into life and she backed out of the driveway so fast she almost ran her car into the ditch on the far side of the road. She dropped the transmission into drive and headed back to town as fast as she dared to go.
She had forgotten all about washing her hands.
4
Ace Merrill rolled out of bed around the same time that Brian Rusk was blowing his head off thirty miles away.
He went into the bathroom, shucking out of his dirty skivvies as he walked, and urinated for an hour or two. He raised one arm and sniffed his pit. He looked at the shower and decided against it. He had a big day ahead of him. The shower could wait.
He left the bathroom without bothering to flush-if it's yellow, let it mellow was an integral part of Ace's philosophy-and went directly to the bureau, where the last of Mr. Gaunt's blow was laid out on a shaving mirror. It was great stuff-easy on the nose, hot in the head. It was also almost gone. Ace had needed a lot of goPower last night, just as Mr. Gaunt had said, but he had a pretty good idea there was more where this had come from.
Ace used the edge of his driver's license to shape a couple of lines. He snorted them with a rolled-up five-dollar bill, and something that felt like a Shrike missile went off in his head.
"Boom!" cried Ace Merrill in his best Warner Wolf voice. "Let's go to the videotape!"
He pulled a pair of faded jeans up over his naked hips and then got into a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt. It's what all the well-dressed treasure-hunters are wearing this year, he thought, and laughed wildly.
My, that coke was fine!
He was on his way out the door when his eye fell on last night's take and he remembered that he had meant to call Nat Copeland in Portsmouth. He went back into the bedroom, dug through the clothes which were balled helter-skelter in his top bureau drawer, and finally came up with a battered address book. He went back into the kitchen, sat down, and dialled the number he had. He doubted that he would actually catch Nat in, but it was worth a try.
The coke buzzed and whipsawed in his head, but he could already feel the rush tapering off. A headshot of cocaine made a new man of you. The only trouble was, the first thing the new man wanted