Needful Things - Stephen King [290]
"You've got a gun," she announced.
"Yes."
"My dad has a gun."
"Does he?"
"Yes. It's bigger than yours. It's bigger than the world. Are you the Boogeyman?"
"No, honey," he said, and thought: I think maybe the Boogeyman is in my home town tonight.
He pushed through the door at the end of the corridor, went downstairs, and pushed through another door into a late twilight as sultry as any midsummer evening. He hurried around to the parking lot, not quite running. Thunder bumbled and grumbled out of the west, from the direction of Castle Rock.
He unlocked the driver's door of the station wagon, got in, and pulled the Radio Shack microphone off its prongs. "Unit One to base.
Come back."
His only response was a rush of brainless static.
The goddam storm.
Maybe the Boogeyman ordered it up special, a voice whispered from somewhere deep inside. Alan smiled with his lips pressed together.
He tried again, got the same response, then tried the State Police in Oxford. They came through loud and clear. Dispatch told him there was a big electrical storm in the vicinity of Castle Rock, and communications had become spotty. Even the telephones only seemed to be working when they wanted to.
"Well, you get through to Henry Payton and tell him to take a man named Leland Gaunt into custody. As a material witness will do to begin with. That's Gaunt, G as in George. Do you copy?
Ten-four."
"I copy you five-by, Sheriff. Gaunt, G as in George. Ten-four."
"Tell him I believe Gaunt may be an accessory before the fact in the murders of Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck. Ten-four."
"Copy. Ten-four."
"Ten-forty, over and out."
He replaced the mike, keyed the engine, and headed back toward The Rock. On the outskirts of Bridgton, he swerved into the parking lot of a Red Apple store and used the telephone to dial his office. He got two clicks and then a recorded voice telling him the number was temporarily out of service.
He hung up and went back to his car. This time he was running.
Before he pulled out of the parking lot and back onto Route 117, he turned on the Porta-Bubble and stuck it on the roof again. By the time he was half a mile down the road he had the shuddering, protesting Ford wagon doing seventy-five.
Ace Merrill and full dark returned to Castle Rock together.
He drove the Chevy Celebrity across Castle Stream Bridge while thunder rolled heavily back and forth in the sky overhead and lightning jabbed the unresisting earth. He drove with the windows open; there was still no rain falling and the air was as thick as syrup.
He was dirty and tired and furious. He had gone to three more locations on the map in spite of the note, unable to believe what had happened, unable to believe it could have happened. To coin a phrase, he was unable to believe he had been aced out. At each one of the spots he had found a flat stone and a buried tin can.
Two had contained more wads of dirty trading stamps. The last, in the marshy ground behind the Strout farm, had contained nothing but an old ball-point pen. There was a woman with a forties hairdo on the pen's barrel. She was wearing a forties tank-style bathing suit as well. When you held the pen up, the bathing suit disappeared.
Some treasure.
Ace had driven back to Castle Rock at top speed, his eyes wild and his jeans splattered with swamp-goo up to the knees, for one reason and one reason only: to kill Alan Pangborn. Then he would simply haul ass for the West Coast-he should have done it long before. He might get some of the money out of Pangborn; he might get none of it. Either way, one thing was certain: that son of a bitch was going to die, and he was going to die hard.
Still three miles from the bridge, he realized that he didn't have a weapon. He had meant to take one of the autos from the crate in the Cambridge garage, but then that damned tape recorder had started up, scaring the life out of him. But he knew where they were.
Oh yes.