Needful Things - Stephen King [267]
A single one-dollar bill fell out of it.
I decided to "share and share alike" and am going to leave you exactly what you deserve.
"You crab-infested bastard," Ace whispered, and picked up the dollar bill with shaking fingers.
Welcome back to town, Ace-Hole!
"YOU SONOFA WHORE!" Ace screamed so loudly that he felt something in his throat strain and almost rupture. The echo came back dimly: whore whore whore
He began to tear the dollar up, then forced his fingers to relax.
Huh-uh. No way, jose.
He was going to save this. The son of a bitch had wanted Pop's money, had he? He had stolen what rightfully belonged to Pop's last living relative, had he? Well, all right. Good. Fine. But he should have all of it. And Ace intended to see that the Sheriff had just that. So, after he removed Pusbag's testicles with his pocket-knife, he intended to stuff this dollar bill into the bloody hole where they had been.
"You want the money, Daddy-O?" Ace asked in a soft, musing voice.
"Okay. That's okay. No problem. No fucking problem."
He got to his feet and began walking back toward the car in a stiff, staggering version of his usual hood strut.
By the time he got there, he was almost running.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1
By quarter to six, a weird twilight had begun to creep over Castle Rock; thunderheads were stacking up on the southern horizon. Low, distant boomings muttered over the woods and fields from that direction. The clouds were moving toward town, growing as they came.
The streetlights, governed by a master photoelectric cell, came on a full half hour earlier than they usually did at that time of year.
Lower Main Street was a crowded confusion. It had been overrun by State Police vehicles and TV newsvans. Radio calls crackled and entwined in the hot, still air. TV technicians paid out cable and yelled at the people-kids, mostly-who tripped over the loose lengths of it before they could anchor it temporarily to the pavement with duct tape. Photographers from four daily papers stood outside the barricades in front of the Municipal Building and took stills which would appear on front pages the following day. A few localssurprisingly few, if anyone had bothered to notice such thingsrubbernecked. A TV correspondent stood in the glare of a hiintensity lamp and taped his report with the Municipal Building in the background. "A senseless wave of violence swished through Castle Rock this afternoon," he began, then stopped. "Swished?" he asked himself disgustedly. "Shit, let's take it again from the top."
To his left, a TV-dude from another station was watching his crew prepare for what would be a live feed in less than twenty minutes.
More of the onlookers had been drawn to the familiar faces of the TV correspondents than to the barricades, where there had been nothing to see since two orderlies from Medical Assistance had brought out the unfortunate Lester Pratt in a black plastic bag, loaded him into the back of their ambulance, and driven away.
Upper Main, away from the blue strobes of the State Police cruisers and the bright pools of the TV lights, was almost entirely deserted.
Almost.
Every now and then a car or a pick-up truck would park in one of the slant spaces in front of Needful Things. Every now and then a pedestrian would saunter up to the new shop, where the display lights were off and the shade was pulled down on the door under the canopy.
Every now and then one of the rubberneckers on Lower Main would break away from the shifting knot of onlookers and walk up the street, past the vacant lot where the Emporium Galorium had once stood, past You Sew and Sew, closed and dark, to the new store.
No one noticed this trickle of visitors-not the police, not the camera crews, not the correspondents, not the majority of the bystanders. They were looking at THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, and their backs were turned to the place where, less than three hundred yards away, the crime was still going on.
If some disinterested observer had been keeping an eye on