The Dark Half - Stephen King [186]
You don't want to think like that, he warned himself. Thinking like that will get you killed.
That was almost funny, because he was a dead man already, wasn't he? There he had been, creeping up on the Beaumont driveway, meaning to sneak across the road like Tonto, take-um good look round, get-um idea how things are, Kemo Sabe . . . and Stark had simply put a pistol in his ear and told him to drop his gun and there went the ballgame.
I didn't hear him; I didn't even intuit him. People think I'm quiet, but this guy made me look like I had two left feet.
'You like my wheels?' Stark asked.
'Right now I think every police officer in Maine must like your wheels,' Alan said, 'because they're all looking for them.'
Stark gave voice to a jolly laugh. 'Now why don't I believe that?' The barrel of his gun prodded Alan in the small of the back. 'Get on inside, my good old buddy. We're just waiting for Thad. When Thad gets here, I think we'll be ready ready Teddy to rock and roll.'
Alan looked around at Stark's free hand and saw an extremely odd thing: there appeared to be no lines on the palm of that hand. No lines at all.
6
'Alan!' Liz cried. 'Are you all right?'
'Well,' Alan said, 'if it's possible for a man to fee! like an utter horse's ass and still be all right, I guess I am.'
'You couldn't have been expected to believe,' Stark said mildly. He pointed to the scissors he had removed from her panties. He had put them on one of the night-tables which flanked the big double bed, out of the twins' reach. 'Cut her legs free, Officer Alan. No need to bother with her wrists; looks like she's almost got those already. Or are you Chief Alan?'
'Sheriff Alan,' he said, and thought: He knows that. He knows me — Sheriff Alan Pangborn of Castle County — because Thad knows me. But even when he's got the upper hand he doesn't give away everything he knows. He's as sly as a weasel who's made a career out of henhouses.
And for the second time a bleak certainty of his own approaching death filled him. He tried to think of the sparrows, because the sparrows were the one element of this nightmare with which he did not believe George Stark was familiar. Then he thought better of it. The man was too sharp. If he allowed himself hope, Stark would see it in his eyes . . . and wonder what it meant.
Alan got the scissors and cut Liz Beaumont's legs free of the tape even as she freed one hand and began to unwrap the tape from her wrists.
'Are you going to hurt me?' she asked Stark apprehensively.
She held her hands up, as if the red marks the tape had left on her wrists would somehow dissuade him from doing that.
'No,' he said, smiling a little. 'Can't blame you for doin what comes naturally, can I, darlin Beth?'
She gave him a revolted, frightened took at that and then corralled the twins. She asked Stark if she could take them out in the kitchen and give them something to eat. They had slept until Stark had parked the Clarks' stolen Volvo at the rest area, and were now lively and full of fun.
'You bet,' Stark said. He seemed to be in a cheerful, upbeat mood . . . but he was holding the gun in one hand and his eyes moved ceaselessly back and forth between Liz and Alan. 'Why don't we all go out? I want to talk to the Sheriff, here.'
They trooped out to the kitchen, and Liz began to put together a meal for the twins. Alan watched the twins while she did it. They were cute kids — as cute as a pair of bunnies, and looking at them reminded him of a time when he and Annie had been much younger, a time when Toby, now a senior in high school, had been in diapers and Todd had still been years away.
They crawled happily hither and yon, and every now and then he had to redirect one of them before he or she could pull a chair over or bump his/her head on the underside of the Formica table in the kitchen galley.
Stark talked to him while he babysat.