The Dark Half - Stephen King [152]
Eddings caught a blurred glimpse of the skinned man coming in low and hard and tried to draw back. He struck the car.
Stark sliced upward, splitting the crotch of Eddings's beige trooper uniform, splitting his scrotal sac, drawing the razor up and out in a long, buttery stroke. Eddings's balls, suddenly untethered from each other, swung back against his inner thighs like heavy knots on the end of an unravelling sash-cord. Blood stained his pants around the zipper. For a moment he felt as if someone had jammed a handful of ice cream into his groin . . . and then the pain struck, hot and full of ragged teeth. He screamed.
Stark snapped the razor out, wicked-quick, at Eddings's throat, but Eddings managed somehow to get a hand up and the first stroke only split his palm in half. Eddings tried to roll to the left, and that exposed the right side of his neck.
The naked blade, pale silver in the day's hazy light, whickered through the air again, and this time it went where it was supposed to go. Eddings sank to his knees, hands between his legs. His beige pants had turned bright red almost to the knees. His head drooped, and now he looked like the object of a pagan sacrifice.
'Have a nice day, motherfucker,' Stark said in a conversational voice. He bent over, tangled his hand in Eddings's hair, and jerked his head back, baring the neck for the final stroke.
4
He opened the back door of the cruiser, lifted Eddings by the neck of his uniform shirt and the bloody seat of his trousers, and tossed him in like a sack of grain. Then he did the same with Chatterton. The latter must have weighed close to two hundred and thirty pounds, with his equipment belt and the .45 on his belt thrown in, but Stark handled him as if he were a bag stuffed with feathers. He slammed the door, then shot a glance full of bright curiosity at the house.
It was silent. The only sounds were the crickets in the high grass beside the driveway and the low, strawlike whack! whick! whack! of the lawnsprinklers. To this there was added the sound of an oncoming truck — an Orinco tanker. It roared by at sixty, headed north. Stark tensed and lowered himself slightly behind the side of the police cruiser when he saw the truck's big brake lights flare red for an instant. He uttered a single grunt of laughter when they went out again and the tanker disappeared over the next hill, accelerating again. The driver had glimpsed the state police cruiser parked in the Beaumont driveway, had checked his speedometer, and had thought speed-trap. The most natural thing in the world. He needn't have worried; this speed-trap was closed forever.
There was a lot of blood in the driveway, but puddled on the bright black asphalt, it could have been water . . . unless you got very close. So that was okay. And even if it wasn't, it would have to do.
Stark folded the straight-razor, held it in one sticky hand, went over to the door. He saw neither the little drift of dead sparrows lying by the stoop, nor the live ones which now lined the roofpeak of the house and sat in the apple tree by the garage, watching him silently.
In a minute or two, Liz Beaumont came downstairs, still half-asleep from her midday nap, to answer the doorbell.
5
She didn't scream. The scream was there, but the stripped face looking at her when she opened the door locked it deep inside her, froze it, denied it, cancelled it, buried it alive.