The Dark Half - Stephen King [176]
'I called to check in with Thad,' he said. 'It's been awhile, and I wanted to know how they're doing. I gather there's been trouble.
Trouble so big you wouldn't believe it,' Harrison said grimly. Two of my men are dead. We're pretty sure Beaumont did it.'
We're pretty sure Beaumont did it.
The peculiarity of the acts seems to rise in direct ratio to the intelligence of the man or woman so afflicted.
Alan felt déjà vu not just stealing into his mind but marching over his whole body like an invading army. Thad, it always came back to Thad. Of course. He was intelligent, he was peculiar, and he was, by his own admission, suffering from symptoms which suggested a brain tumor.
The boy didn't have a brain tumor at all, you know.
If those tests showed negative, then it's because there's nothing to show.
Forget the tumor. The sparrows are what you want to be thinking about now — because the sparrows are flying again.
'What happened?' he asked Trooper Harrison.
'He cut Tom Chatterton and lack Eddings dunned near to pieces, that's what happened!' Harrison shouted, startling Alan with the depth of his fury. 'He's got his family with him, and I want that son of a bitch!'
'What . . . how did he get away?'
'I don't have the time to go into it,' Harrison said. 'It's a sorry fucking story, Sheriff. He was driving a red and gray Chevrolet Suburban, a goddam whale on wheels, but we think he must have ditched it someplace and switched. He's got a summer place down there. You know the locale and the layout, right?'
'Yes,' Alan said. His mind was racing. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw it was a minute or so shy of three-forty. Time. It all came back to time. And he realized he hadn't asked Fuzzy Martin what time it had been when he saw the Toronado rolling out of his barn. It hadn't seemed important at the moment. Now it did. 'What time did you lose him, Trooper Harrison?'
He thought he could feel Harrison fuming at that, but when he answered, he did so without anger or defensiveness. 'Around twelve-thirty. He must have taken awhile to switch cars, if that's what he did, and then he went to his house in Ludlow — '
'Where was he when you lost him? How far away from his house?'
'Sheriff, I'd like to answer all your questions, but there's no time. The point is, if he's headed for his place down there — it seems unlikely, but the guy's crazy, so you never know — he won't have arrived yet, and he'll be there soon. Him and his whole fam'damly. It would be very nice if you and a couple of your men were there to greet him. If something pops, you radio Henry Payton at the Oxford State Police Barracks and we'll send more back-up than you've ever seen in your life. Don't try to apprehend him yourself under any circumstances. We're assuming the wife's been taken hostage, if she's not dead already, and that goes double for the kids.'
'Yes, he'd have to have taken his wife by force if he killed the troopers on duty, wouldn't he?' Alan agreed, and found himself thinking, But you'd make them part of it if you could, wouldn't you? Because your mind is made up and you're not going to change it. Hell, man, you're not even going to think, straight or otherwise, until the blood dries an your friends.
There were a dozen questions he wanted to ask, and the answers to those would probably produce another four dozen — but Harrison was right about one thing. There wasn't time.
He hesitated for a moment, wanting very badly to ask Harrison about the most important thing of all, wanting to ask the jackpot question: Was Harrison sure Thad had had time to get to his house, kill the men on guard, there, and spirit his family away, all before the first reinforcements arrived? But to ask the question would be to claw at the painful wound this Harrison was trying to deal with right now, because buried in the question was that condemning, irrefutable judgment: You lost him. Somehow you lost him. You had a job to do and you tucked it UP.
'Can I depend on you,