The Dark Half - Stephen King [136]
'Really, it's just the second floor — '
'We'll wait out in the hall.'
'You guys don't know how much all of this is starting to depress me,' Thad said.
'Orders,' Garrison-or-Harriman said. It was clear that Thad's depression — or happiness, for that matter — meant less than zero to him.
'Yeah,' Thad said, giving it up. 'Orders.'
He headed for the side door. The two cops followed him at a distance of a dozen paces, looking more like cops in their street-clothes than they ever had in their uniforms, Thad suspected.
After the still, humid heat, the air-conditioning struck Thad with a wallop. All at once his shirt felt as if it were freezing to his skin. The building, so full of life and racket during the Septemberto-May academic year, felt a little creepy on this weekend afternoon at the end of spring. It would fill up to maybe a third of its usual hustle and bustle on Monday, when the first three-week summer session started, but for today, Thad found himself feeling a trifle relieved to have his police guard with him. He thought the second floor, where his office was, might be entirely deserted, which would at least allow him to avoid the necessity of explaining his large, watchful friends.
It turned out not to be entirely deserted, but he got off easily just the same. Rawlie DeLesseps was wandering down the hallway from the department common room toward his own office, drifting in his usual Rawlie DeLesseps way . . . which meant he looked as if he might have recently sustained a hard blow to the head which had disrupted both his memory and his motor control. He moved dreamily from one side of the corridor to the other in mild loops, peering at the cartoons, poems, and announcements tacked to the bulletin boards on the locked doors of his colleagues. He might have been on his way to his office, it looked that way, but even someone who knew him well would probably have declined to make book on it. The stem of an enormous yellow pipe was clamped between his dentures. The dentures were not quite as yellow as the pipe, but they were close. The pipe was dead, had been since late 1985, when his doctor had forbidden him to smoke it following a mild heart attack. I never liked to smoke that much anyway, Rawlie would explain in his gentle, distracted voice when someone asked him about the pipe. But without the bit in my teeth . . . gentlemen, I would not know where to go or what to do if I were lucky enough to arrive there. Most times he gave the impression of not knowing where to go or what to do anyway . . . as he did now. Some people knew Rawlie for years before discovering he was not at all the absent-minded, educated fool he seemed to be. Some never discovered it at all.
'Hello, Rawlie,' Thad said, picking through his keys.
Rawlie blinked at him, shifted his gaze to scan the two men behind Thad, dismissed them, and returned his gaze to Thad once more.
'Hello, Thaddeus,' he said. 'I didn't think you were teaching any summer courses this year.'
'I'm not.'
'Then what can have possessed you to come here, of all places, on the first bona fide dog day of summer?'
'Just picking up some Honors files,' Thad said. 'I'm not going to be here any longer than I have to, believe me.'
'What did you do to your hand? It's black and blue all the way to the wrist.'
'Well,' Thad said, looking embarrassed. The story made him sound like a drunk or an idiot, or both . . . but it still went down a lot easier than the truth would have done. Thad had been dourly amused to find that the police— accepted it as easily as Rawlie did now — there had not been a single question about how or why he had managed to slam his own hand in the door of his bedroom closet.
He bad instinctively known exactly the right story to tell — even in his agony he had known that. He was expected to do clumsy things it was part of his character. In a way, it