Needful Things (78 page)

George had an idea that white stuff was not Johnson's Baby Powder.

He walked across to the toilet, wetted his finger, and touched it to the dust. He put his finger in his mouth. The tip of his tongue went numb almost at once. Lying on the floor between the John and the tub was an empty plastic Baggie. The picture was clear. Crazy, but clear. Someone had come in, found the coke . . . and then
flushed it down the crapper.
Why?
Why?
He didn't know, but he decided when he found the person who had done this, he would ask. Just before he tore his head right off his shoulders. It couldn't hurt.

His own three-gram stash was intact. He carried it out of the bathroom and then stopped again as a fresh shock struck his eyes. He hadn't seen this particular abomination as he crossed the bedroom from the hall, but from this angle it was impossible to miss.

He stood where he was for a long moment, eyes wide with amazed horror, his throat working convulsively. The nests of veins at his temples beat rapidly, like the wings of small birds. He finally managed to produce one small, strangled word:

“. . . . . . mom . . . . . . !”

Downstairs, behind George T. Nelson's oatmeal-colored sofa, Frank Jewett slept on.

The bystanders on Lower Main, who had been called out to the sidewalk by the yelling and the gunshot, were now being entertained by a new novelty: the slow-motion escape of their Head Selectman.

Buster leaned as far into his Cadillac as he could and turned the ignition switch to the
ON
position. He then pushed the button that lowered the power window on the driver's side. He closed the door again and carefully began to wriggle in through the window.

He was still sticking out from the knees down, his left arm pulled back behind him at a severe angle by the handcuff around the doorhandle, the chain lying across his large left thigh, when Scott Garson came up.

“Uh, Danforth,” the banker said hesitantly, “I don't think you're supposed to do that. I believe you're arrested.”

Buster looked under his right armpit, smelling his own aroma—quite spicy by now, quite spicy indeed—and saw Garson upside down. He was standing directly behind Buster. He looked as if he might be planning to try to haul Buster back out of his own car.

Buster pulled his legs up as much as he could and then shot them out, hard, like a pony kicking up dickens in the pasture. The heels of his shoes struck Garson's face with a smack which Buster found entirely satisfying. Garson's gold-rimmed spectacles shattered. He howled, reeled backward with his bleeding face in his hands, and fell on his back in Main Street.

“Hah!” Buster grunted. “Didn't expect that, did you? Didn't expect that at
all,
you persecuting son of a bitch, did you?”

He wriggled the rest of the way into his car. There was just enough chain. His shoulder-joint creaked alarmingly and then rotated enough in its socket to allow him
to wriggle under his own arm and scoot his ass back along the seat. Now he was sitting behind the wheel with his cuffed arm out the window. He started the car.

Scott Garson sat up in time to see the Cadillac bearing down on him. Its grille seemed to leer at him, a vast chrome mountain which was going to crush him.

He rolled frantically to the left, avoiding death by less than a second. One of the Cadillac's large front tires rolled over his right hand, squashing it pretty efficiently. Then the rear tire rolled over it, finishing the job. Garson lay on his back, looking at his grotesquely mashed fingers, which were now roughly the size of putty-knives, and began to scream up into the hot blue sky.

“TAMMMEEEEE FAYYYYE!”

This shriek hauled Frank Jewett out of his deepening doze. He had absolutely no idea where he was in those first confused seconds—only that it was some tight, close place. An
unpleasant
place. There was something in his hand, too . . . what was it?

He raised his right hand and almost poked out his own eye with the steak-knife.

“Oooooohhhh, noooooooh!
TAMMEEEEEEE FAYYYYE!”

It came back to him all at once. He was behind the couch of his good old “friend,” George T. Nelson, and that was George T. Nelson himself, in the flesh, noisily mourning his dead parakeet. Along with this realization, everything else returned to Frank: the magazines scattered all over the office, the blackmail note, the possible (no, probable—the more he thought about it, the more probable it seemed) ruin of his career and his life.

Now, incredibly, he could hear George T. Nelson sobbing. Sobbing over a goddam flying shithouse. Well, Frank thought, I'm going to put you out of your misery, George. Who knows—maybe you'll even wind up in bird heaven.

The sobs were approaching the sofa. Better and better. He would jump up—surprise, George!—and the bastard
would be dead before he had any idea of what was up. Frank was on the verge of making his spring when George T. Nelson, still sobbing as if his heart would break, seat-dropped onto his sofa. He was a heavy man, and his weight drove the sofa back smartly toward the wall. He did not hear the surprised, breathless “Oooof!” from behind him; his own sobs covered it. He fumbled for the telephone, dialed through a shimmer of tears and got (almost miraculously) Fred Rubin on the first ring.

“Fred!” he cried. “Fred, something terrible has happened! Maybe it's still happening! Oh Jesus, Fred! Oh Jesus!”

Below and behind him, Frank Jewett was struggling for breath. Edgar Allan Poe stories he'd read as a kid, stories about being buried alive, raced through his head. His face was slowly turning the color of old brick. The heavy wooden leg which had been forced against his chest when George T. Nelson collapsed onto the sofa felt like a bar of lead. The back of the sofa lay against his shoulder and the side of his face.

Above him, George T. Nelson was spilling a garbled description of what he'd found when he finally got home into Fred Rubin's ear. At last he paused for a moment and then cried out, “I don't
care
if I shouldn't be talking about it on the phone—
HOW CAN I CARE WHEN HE KILLED TAMMY FAYE? THE BASTARD KILLED TAMMY FAYE!
Who could have done it, Fred?
Who?
You have to help me!”

Another pause as George T. Nelson listened, and Frank realized with growing panic that he was soon going to pass out. He suddenly understood what he had to do—use the Llama automatic to shoot up through the sofa. He might not kill George T. Nelson, he might not even
hit
George T. Nelson, but he could sure as hell get George T. Nelson's
attention,
and once he did that he thought the odds were good that George T. Nelson would get his fat ass off this sofa before Frank died down here with his nose squashed against the baseboard heating unit.

Frank opened the hand holding the steak-knife and tried to reach for the pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants. Dreamlike horror washed through him as he realized he couldn't get it—his fingers were opening and
closing two full inches above the gun's ivory-inlaid handle. He tried with all his remaining strength to get the hand down lower, but his pinned shoulder would not move at all; the big sofa—and George T. Nelson's considerable weight—held it firmly against the wall. It might have been nailed there.

Black roses—harbingers of approaching asphyxiation—began to bloom before Frank's bulging eyes.

As from some impossible distance, he heard his old “friend” screaming at Fred Rubin, who undoubtedly had been George T. Nelson's partner in the cocaine deal. “What are you
talking
about? I call to tell you I've been violated and you tell me to go see the new guy downstreet? I don't need knick-knacks, Fred, I need—”

He broke off, got up, and paced across the room. With what was literally the last of his strength, Frank managed to push the sofa a few inches away from the wall. It wasn't much, but he was able to take small sips of incredibly wonderful air.

“He sells
what?”
George T. Nelson shouted. “Well, Jesus! Jesus H. Christ! Why didn't you say so in the first place?”

Silence again. Frank lay behind the sofa like a beached whale, sipping air and hoping his monstrously pounding head would not explode. In a moment he would arise and blow his old “friend” George T. Nelson's oysters off. In a moment. When he got his breath back. And when the big black flowers currently filling his sight shrank back into nothing. In a moment. Two at the most.

“Okay,” George T. Nelson said. “I'll go see him. I doubt if he's the miracle-worker you think he is, but any goddam port in a storm, right? I have to tell you something, though—I don't give much of a shit if he's dealing or not. I'm going to find the son of a bitch who did this—that's the first goddam order of business—and I'm going to nail him to the nearest wall. Have you got that?”

I
got it, Frank thought, but just who nails who to that fabled wall still remains to be seen, my dear old party-buddy.

“Yes, I
did
get the name!” George T. Nelson screamed into the phone. “Gaunt, Gaunt, fucking
Gaunt!”

He slammed the phone down, then must have thrown
it across the room—Frank heard the shatter of breaking glass. Seconds later, George T. Nelson uttered a final oath and stormed out of the house. The engine of his Iroc-Z raved to life. Frank heard him backing down the driveway as he himself slowly pushed the sofa away from the wall. Rubber screamed against pavement outside and then Frank's old “friend” George T. Nelson was gone.

Two minutes later, a pair of hands rose into view and clutched the back of the oatmeal-colored sofa. A moment after that, the face of Frank M. Jewett—pale and crazed, the rimless Mr. Weatherbee glasses sitting askew on his small pug nose and one lens cracked—appeared between the hands. The sofa-back had left a red, stippled pattern on his right cheek. A few dust-bunnies danced in his thinning hair.

Slowly, like a bloated corpse rising from the bed of a river until it floats just below the surface, the grin reappeared on Frank's face. He had missed his old “friend” George T. Nelson this time, but George T. Nelson had no plans to leave town. His phone conversation had made that quite clear. Frank would find him before the day was over. In a town the size of Castle Rock, how could he miss?

Sean Rusk stood in the kitchen doorway of his house, looking anxiously out at the garage. Five minutes before, his older brother had gone out there—Sean had been looking out of his bedroom window and had just happened to see him. Brian had been holding something in one hand. The distance had been too great for Sean to see what it was, but he didn't
need
to see. He knew. It was the new baseball card, the one Brian kept creeping upstairs to look at. Brian didn't know Sean knew about that card, but Sean did. He even knew who was on it, because he'd gotten home much earlier from school today than Brian, and he had sneaked into Brian's room to look at it. He didn't have the slightest idea why Brian cared about it so much; it was old, dirty, dog-eared, and faded. Also, the player was
somebody Sean had never heard of—a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Sammy Koberg, lifetime record one win, three losses. The guy had never even spent a whole year in the majors. Why would Brian care about a worthless card like that?

Sean didn't know. He only knew two things for sure: Brian
did
care, and the way Brian had been acting for the last week or so was scary. It was like those TV ads you saw about kids on drugs. But Brian wouldn't use drugs . . . would he?

Something about Brian's face when he went out to the garage had scared Sean so badly he had gone to tell his mother. He wasn't sure exactly what to say, and it turned out not to matter because he didn't get a chance to say anything. She was mooning around in the bedroom, wearing her bathrobe and those stupid sunglasses from the new store downtown.

“Mom, Brian's—” he began, and that was as far as he got.

“Go away, Sean. Mommy's busy right now.”

“But Mom—”

“Go
away,
I said!”

And before he had a chance to go on his own, he'd found himself hustled unceremoniously out of the bedroom. Her bathrobe fell open as she pushed him, and before he could look away, he saw that she was wearing nothing beneath it, not even a nightgown.

She had slammed the door behind him. And locked it.

Now he stood in the kitchen doorway, waiting anxiously for Brian to come back out of the garage . . . but Brian didn't.

His unease had grown in some stealthy way until it was barely controlled terror. Sean went out the kitchen door, trotted through the breezeway, and entered the garage.

It was dark and oily-smelling and explosively hot inside. For a moment he didn't see his brother in the shadows and thought he must have gone out through the back door into the yard. Then his eyes adjusted, and he uttered a small, whimpery gasp.

Brian was sitting against the rear wall, next to the
Lawnboy. He had gotten Daddy's rifle. The butt was propped on the floor. The muzzle was pointed at his own face. Brian was supporting the barrel with one hand while the other clutched the dirty old baseball card which had somehow gained such a hold over his life this last week.

“Brian!” Sean cried. “What are you doing?”

“Don't come any closer, Sean, you'll get the mess on you.”

“Brian, don't!” Sean cried, beginning to weep. “Don't be such a wussy! You're . . . you're scaring me!”

“I want you to promise me something,” Brian said. He had taken off his socks and sneakers, and now he wriggled one of his big toes inside the Remington's trigger-guard.