Needful Things - Stephen King [98]
He returned a week later, meaning to win back what he had lost so he could quit evens. And he had almost made it. Almost-that was the key word. The way he had almost made it to the exit turnstiles. The week after, he had lost two hundred and ten dollars.
That left a hole in the checking account Myrtle would notice, and so he had borrowed a little bit from the town's petty-cash fund to cover the worst of the shortfall. A hundred dollars. Peanuts, really.
Past that point, it all began to blur together. The pit had greased sides, all right, and once you started sliding you were doomed.
You could expend your energy clawing at the sides and succeed in slowing your fall but that, of course, only drew out the agony.
If there had been a point of no return, it had been the summer of 1989. The pacers ran nightly during the summer, and Keeton was in attendance constantly through the second half of July and all of August. Myrtle had thought for awhile that he was using the racetrack as an excuse, that he was actually seeing another woman, and that was a laugh-it really was. Keeton couldn't have got a hardon if Diana herself had driven down from the moon in her chariot with her toga open and a FUCK ME DANFORTH Sign hung around her neck. The thought of how deep he'd dipped into the town treasury had caused his poor dick to shrivel to the size of a pencil eraser.
When Myrtle finally became convinced of the truth, that it was only horse racing after all, she had been relieved. it kept him out of the house, where he tended to be something of a tyrant, and he couldn't be losing too badly, she had reasoned, because the checkbook balance didn't fluctuate that much. It was just that Danforth had found a hobby to keep him amused in his middle age.
Only horse racing after all, Keeton thought as he walked down Main Street with his hands plunged deep into his overcoat pockets.
He uttered a strange, wild laugh that would have turned heads if there had been anyone on the street. Myrtle kept her eye on the checking account. The thought that Danforth might have plundered the T-bills which were their life savings never occurred to her.
Likewise, the knowledge that Keeton Chevrolet was tottering on, the edge of extinction belonged to him alone.
She balanced the checkbook and the house accounts.
He was a CPA.
When it comes to embezzlement, a CPA can do a better job than most but in the end the package always comes undone.
The string and tape and wrapping paper on Keeton's package had begun to fall apart in the autumn of 1990. He had held things together as well as he could, hoping to recoup at the track. By then he had found a bookie, which enabled him to make bigger bets than the track would handle.
It hadn't changed his luck, however.
And then, this summer, the persecution had begun in earnest.
Before, They had only been toying with him. Now They were moving in for the kill, and the Day of Armageddon was less than a week away.
I'll get Them, Keeton thought. I'm not done yet. I've still got a trick or two up my sleeve.
He didn't know what those tricks were though; that was the trouble.
Never mind, There's a way. I know there's a uHere his thoughts ceased. He was standing in front of the new store, Needful Things, and what he saw in the window drove everything else slap out of his mind for a moment or two.
It was a rectangular cardboard box, brightly colored, with a picture on the front. A board game, he supposed. But it was a board game about horse racing, and he could have sworn that the painting, which showed two pacers sweeping down on the finish line neckand-neck, was of the Lewiston Raceway. If that wasn't the main grandstand in the background, he was a monkey.
The name of the game was WINNING TICKET.
Keeton stood looking at it for almost five minutes, as hypnotized as a kid looking at a display of