Thinner - Stephen King [121]
Billy slept without knowing he slept; his thoughts simply merged into a series of ghastly, twisted dreams. In some of these he killed and in some he was killed, but in all of them something breathed and pulsed, and he could never see that something because it was inside himself.
Chapter Twenty-six
127
MYSTERY DEATH MAY HAVE BEEN GANGLAND SLAYING
A man found shot to death last evening in the cellar of a Union Street apartment building has been identified as a New York City gangland figure. Richard Ginelli, known as 'Richie the Hammer' in underworld circles, has been indicted three times - for extortion, trafficking and sale of illegal drugs, and murder - by New York State and federal authorities. A combined state and federal investigation into Ginelli's affairs was dropped in 1981 following the violent deaths of several prosecution witnesses.
A source close to the Maine state attorney general's office said last night that the idea of a so-called 'gangland hit' had come up even before the victim's identity was learned, because of the peculiar circumstances of the murder. According to the source, one of Ginelli's hands had been removed and the word 'pig' had been written on his forehead in blood.
Ginelli was apparently shot with a large-caliber weapon, but state-police ballistics officials have so far declined to release their findings, which one state-police official termed 'also a bit unusual.'
This story was on the front page of the Bangor Daily News Billy Halleck had bought that morning. He now scanned through it one final time, looked at the photograph of the apartment building where his friend had been found, then rolled the paper up and pushed it into a trashbin with the state seal of Connecticut on the side and PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE written on the swinging metal door.
'That is what it's all about,' he said.
'What, mister?' It was a little girl of about six with ribbons in her hair and a smear of dried chocolate on her chin. She was walking her dog.
'Nothing,' Billy said, and smiled at her.
'Marcy!' the little girl's mother called anxiously. 'Come over here!'
'Well, 'bye,' Marcy said.
'Bye, hon.' Billy watched her cross back to her mother. the small white poodle dog strutting ahead of her on its leash, toenails clicking. The girl had no more than reached her mother when the scolding began - Billy was sorry for the girl, who had reminded him of Linda when Lin was six or so, but he was also encouraged. It was one thing to have the scales tell him he had put back on eleven pounds; it was another - and better - thing to have someone treat him as a normal person again, even if the someone happened to be a six-year-old girl walking the family dog in a turnpike rest area a little girl who probably thought there were lots of people in the world who looked like walking gantry towers.
He had spent yesterday in Northeast Harbor, not so much resting as trying to recover a sense of sanity. He would feel it coming and then he would look at the pie sitting atop the TV in its cheap aluminum plate and it would slip.
Near dusk he had put it in the trunk of his car, and that made it a little better.
After dark, when that sense of sanity and his own deep loneliness both seemed strongest, he had found his old battered address book and had called Rhoda Simonson in Westchester County. A moment or two later he had been talking to Linda, who was deliriously glad to hear from him. She had indeed found out about the res gestae. The chain of events leading to the discovery, as well as Billy