Thinner - Stephen King [111]
'He cursed us,' she said, and there was a kind of wondering contempt in her voice. 'Tell him for me, mister, that God cursed us long before him or any of his tribe ever were,'
'Save it for the social worker, babe.'
She fell silent.
A quarter of a mile before the gravel pit where Frank Spurton rested, Ginelli stopped the car.
'Okay, this is far enough. Get out.'
'Sure.' She looked at him steadily with those unfathomable eyes. 'But there is one thing you should know, mister - our paths will cross again. And when they do, I will kill you.'
'No,' he said. 'You won't. Because you owe me your life tonight. And if that ain't enough for you, you ungrateful bitch, you can add in your brother's life last night. You talk, but you still don't understand the way things are, or why you ain't home-free on this, or why you ain't never gonna be home-free on this until you quit. I got a friend you could fly like a kite if you hooked up some twine to his belt. What have you got? I'll tell you what you got. You got an old man with no nose who put a curse on my friend and then ran away in the night like a hyena.'
Now she was crying, and crying hard. The tears ran down her face in streams.
'Are you saying God is on your side?' she asked him, her voice so thick the words were almost unintelligible. 'Is that what I hear you saying? You should burn in hell for such! blasphemy. Are we hyenas? If we are, it was people like your friend who made us so, My great-grandfather says there are no curses, only mirrors you hold up to the souls of men and women.'
'Get out,' he said. 'We can't talk. We can't even hear each other.'
'That's right.'
She opened the door and got out. As he pulled away she screamed: 'Your friend is a pig and he'll die thin!'
'But I don't think you will,' Ginelli said.
'What do you mean?'
Ginelli looked at his watch. It was after three o'clock. 'Tell you in the car,' he said. 'You've got an appointment at seven o'clock.'
Billy felt that sharp, hollow needle of fear in his belly again. 'With him?'
'That's right. Let's go.'
As Billy got to his feet there was another arrhythmic episode this the longest one yet. He closed his eyes and grasped at his chest, What remained of his chest. Ginelli grabbed him. 'William, are you okay?'
He looked in the mirror and saw Ginelli holding a grotesque sideshow freak in flapping clothes. The arrhythmia passed and was replaced by an even more familiar sensation - that milky, curdled rage that was directed at the old man and at Heidi.
'I'm okay,' he said. 'Where are we going,?
'Bangor,' Ginelli said.
Chapter Twenty-three
The Transcript
They took the Nova. Both things Ginelli had told him about it were true - it smelled quite strongly of cow manure, and it ate the road between Northeast Harbor and Bangor in great swallows. Genelli stopped around four to pick up a huge basket of steamer clams. They parked at a roadside rest area and divided them, along with a six-pack of beer. The two or three family groups at the picnic tables got a look at Billy Halleck and moved as far away as possible.
While they ate, Ginelli finished his story. It didn't take long.
'I was back in the John Tree room by eleven o'clock last night,' he said. 'I could have gotten there quicker, maybe, but I did a few loops and figure-eights and turn-backs just to make sure no one was behind me.
'Once I was in the room, I called New York and sent a fellow out to the telephone I gave the girl the number for. I told him to take a tape deck and a steno plug with him - the kind of gadget reporters use to do phone interviews. I didn't want to have to rely on hearsay, William, if you can dig that. I told him to call me back with the tape as soon as she hung up.
'I disinfected the cuts she put in me while I waited for the call-back. I'm not gonna say she had hydrophobia or anything like that, William, but there was so much hate in her, you know.'
'I know,' Billy said, and thought grimly: I really do know. Because I'm gaining. In that one way, I'm gaining.
The call had come at a quarter