Needful Things - Stephen King [280]
His arm and back ached from wielding the hammer.
He looked down and saw that he was still holding it. He opened his hand and it fell to the kitchen linoleum, making a bloody splatter there. He stood looking at this splatter for almost a full minute with a kind of idiot attention. It looked to him like a sketch of his father's face drawn in blood.
He plodded through the living room and into his study, rubbing his shoulder and upper arm as he went. The handcuff chain jingled maddeningly. He opened the closet door, dropped to his knees, crawled beneath the clothes which hung at the front, and dug out the box with the pacers on the front. He backed clumsily out of the closet again (the handcuff caught in one of Myrtle's shoes and he threw it to the back of the closet with a sulky curse), took the box over to his desk, and sat down with it in front of him. Instead of excitement, he felt only sadness. Winning Ticket was wonderful, all right, but what good could it possibly do him now? It didn't matter if he put the money back or not. He had murdered his wife.
She had undoubtedly deserved it, but They wouldn't see it that way.
They would happily throw him in the deepest, darkest Shawshank Penitentiary cell they could find and throw away the key.
He saw that he had left large bloody smears on the box-top, and he looked down at himself. For the first time he noticed that he was covered with blood. His meaty forearms looked as though they belonged to a Chicago hog-butcher. Depression folded over him again in a soft, black wave. They had beaten him okay. Yet he would escape Them.
He would escape Them just the same.
He got up, weary to his very center, and plodded slowly upstairs.
He undressed as he went, kicking off his shoes in the living room, dropping his pants at the foot of the stairs, then sitting down halfway up to peel off his socks. Even they were bloody. The shirt gave him the hardest time; pulling off a shirt while you were wearing a handcuff was the devil's own job.
Almost Twenty minutes passed between the murder of Mrs.
Keeton and Buster's trudge to and through the shower. He might have been taken into custody without a problem at almost any time during that period but on Lower Main Street a transition of authority was going on, the Sheriff's Office was in almost total disarray, and the whereabouts of Danforth "Buster" Keeton simply did not seem very important.
Once he had towelled dry, he put on a clean pair of pants and a tee-shirt-he didn't have the energy to tussle again with long sleeves-and went back down to his study. Buster sat in his chair and looked at Winning Ticket again, hoping that his depression might prove to be just an ephemeral thing, that some of his earlier joy might return. But the picture on the box seemed to have faded, dulled. The brightest color in evidence was a smear of Myrtle's blood across the flanks of the two-horse.
He took the top off and looked inside. He was shocked to see that the little tin horses were leaning sadly every whichway. Their colors had also faded. A broken bit of spring poked through the hole where you inserted the key to wind the machinery.
Someone's been in here! his mind cried. Someone's been at it!
One of Them! Ruining me wasn't enough! They had to ruin my game, too!
But a deeper voice, perhaps the fading voice of sanity, whispered that this was not true. This is how i't was from the very start, the voice whispered. You just didn't see it.
He went back to the closet, meaning to take down the gun after all. It was time to use it. He was feeling around for it when the telephone rang. Buster picked it up very slowly, knowing who was on the other end.
Nor was he disappointed.
2
"Hello, Dan," said Mr. Gaunt. "How are you this fine evening?"
"Terrible," Buster said in a glum, draggy voice. "The world