The Dark Half - Stephen King [27]
'Okay,' Norris said humbly. 'Okay, Sheriff.'
'Norris, do you think you could call me 'Alan' if you really worked on it? If you practiced?'
'Sure, Sheriff, I guess so.'
Alan grunted and turned for one last look at the area of the ditch that would, in all probability, be cordoned off with bright yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tapes attached to surveyor's poles when he got back. The county coroner would be here. Henry Payton from the Oxford State Police Barracks would be here. The photographer and the technicians from the Attorney General's Capital Crimes Division probably wouldn't be — unless there happened to be a couple of them in the area already on another case — but they would arrive shortly after. By one in the afternoon, the state police's rolling lab would be here, too, complete with hot and cold running forensics experts and a guy whose job it was to mix up plaster and take moulage casts of the tire-prints Norris had either been smart enough or lucky enough not to run over with the wheels of his own cruiser (Alan opted, rather reluctantly, for lucky).
And what would it all come to? Why, just this. A half-drunk old man had stopped to do a favor for a stranger. (Hop on up here, boy, Alan could hear him saying, I ain't going only a couple of miles, but I'll get you a little further on your way), and the stranger had responded by beating the old man to death and then stealing his truck.
He guessed the man in the business suit had asked Homer to pull over — the most likely pretext would have been to say he needed to take a leak — and once the truck was stopped, he'd clipped the old man, dragged him out, and —
Ah, but that was when it got bad. So very goddam bad.
Alan looked down into the ditch one final time, to where Norris Ridgewick squatted by the bloody piece of meat that had been a man, patiently waving the flies away from what had been Homer's face with his citation clipboard, and felt his stomach turn over again.
He was just an old man, you son of a whore — an old man who was half in the bag and only had one honest arm to boot, an old man whose one little pleasure left was his bowling league night. So why didn't you just clip him that one good one in the cab of his truck and then leave him be? It was a warm night, and even if it'd been a little chilly, he most likely would have been okay. I'd bet my watch we're going to find a whole lot of antifreeze in his system. And the truck's license plate number goes out on the wire either way. So why this? Man, I hope I get a chance to ask you.
But did the reason matter? It sure didn't to Homer Gamache. Not anymore. Nothing was ever going to matter to Homer again. Because after clipping him that first one, the hitchhiker had pulled him out of the cab and dragged him into the ditch, probably hauling him by the armpits. Alan didn't need the boys from Capital Crimes to read the marks left by the heels of Gamache's shoes. Along the way, the hitcher had discovered Homer's disability. And at The bottom of the trench, he had wrenched the old man's prosthetic arm from his body and bludgeoned him to death with it.
Five
96529Q
'Hold it, hold it,' Connecticut State Trooper Warren Hamilton said in a loud voice, although he was the only one in the cruiser. It was the evening of June 2nd, some thirty-five hours after the discovery of Homer Gamache's body in a Maine town Trooper Hamilton had never heard of.
He was in the lot of the Westport I-95 McDonald's (southbound). He made it a habit to swing into the lots of the food-and-gas stops when he was cruising the Interstate; if you crawled up the last row of the parking spots at night with your lights off, you sometimes made some good busts. Better than good. Awesome. When he sensed he might have come upon such an opportunity, he very often talked to himself. These soliloquies often started with Hold it, hold it, then progressed to something like Let's check this sucker out or Ask Mamma if she believes this. Trooper Hamilton was