Roadwork - Stephen King [39]
"Go home, Bart, Ordner said.
"What do you want, Steve?"
Ordner shook his head impatiently. "We're done, Bart. If you want to have an encounter session with someone, go to a bar."
"What do you want from me?"
"Only for you to get out of here and go home."
"What do you want from life, then? Where are you hooked into things?"
"Go home, Bart."
"Answer me! What do you want?" He looked at Ordner nakedly.
Ordner answered quietly, "I want what everyone wants. Go home, Bart."
He left without looking back. And he never went there again.
When he got to Magliore's Used Cars, it was snowing hard and most of the cars he passed had their headlights on. His windshield wipers beat a steady back-and-forth tune, and beyond their sweep snow that had been defrosted into slush ran down the Saf-T-Glass like tears.
He parked in back and walked around to the office. Before he went in, he looked at his ghostly reflection in the plate glass and scrubbed a thin pink film from his lips. The encounter with Ordner had upset him more than he would have believed. He had picked up a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in a drugstore and had chugged half of it on the way out here. Probably won't shit for a week, Fred. But Freddy wasn't at home. Maybe he had gone to visit Monohan's relatives in Bombay.
The woman behind the adding machine gave him a strange speculative smile and waved him in.
Magliore was alone. He was reading The Wall Street Journal, and when he came in, Magliore threw it across the desk and into the wastebasket. It landed with a rattling thump.
"It's going right to fucking hell," Magliore said, as if continuing an interior dialogue that had started some time ago. "All these stockbrokers are old women, just like Paul Harvey says. Will the president resign? Will he? Won't he? Will he? Is GE going to go bankrupt with the energy shortage? It gives me a pain in the ass."
"Yeah," he said, but not sure of what he was agreeing to. He felt uneasy, and he wasn't totally sure Magliore remembered who he was. What should he say? I'm the guy who called you a dork, remember? Christ, that was no way to start.
"Snowing harder, ain't it?"
"Yes, it is."
"I hate the snow. My brother, he goes to Puerto Rico November first every year, stays until April fifteenth. He owns forty percent of a hotel there. Says he has to look after his investment. Shit. He wouldn't know how to look after his own ass if you gave him a roll of Charmin. What do you want?"
"Huh?" He jumped a little, and felt guilty.
"You came to me to get something. How can I get it for you if I don't know what it is?"
When it was put with such abrupt baldness, he found it hard to speak. The word for what he wanted seemed to have too many corners to come out of his mouth. He remembered something he had done as a kid and smiled a little.
"What's funny?" Magliore asked with sharp pleasantness. "With business the way it is, I could use a joke."
"Once, when I was a kid, I put a yo-yo in my mouth," he said.
"That's funny?"
"No, I couldn't get it out. That's funny. My mother took me to the doctor and he got it out. He pinched my ass and when I opened my mouth to yell, he just yanked it out."
"I ain't going to pinch your ass," Magliore said. "What do you want, Dawes?"
"Explosives," he said.
Magliore looked at him. He rolled his eyes. He started to say something and slapped one of his hanging jowls instead. "Explosives."
"Yes. "
"I knew this guy was a fruiter," Magliore told himself. "I told Pete when you left, 'There goes a guy looking for an accident to happen.' That's what I told him. "
He said nothing. Talk of accidents made him think of Johnny Walker.
"Okay, Okay, I'll bite. What do you want explosives for? You going to blow up the Egyptian Trade Exposition? You going to skyjack an airplane? Or maybe just blow your mother-in-law to hell?"
"I wouldn't waste explosives on her," he said stiffly, and that made them both laugh, but it didn't break the tension.
"So what is it? Who have you got a hardon against?"
He said: "I don't have a hardon against anyone. If I wanted to kill somebody,