“Oh!” Sheila sounded both alarmed and excited. “Ten-four, Sheriff.”
“I’m on my way to the town motor pool. I expect to find Hugh there. Ten-forty over and out.”
As he racked the mike (it felt as if he had been holding it for at least four years) he thought: If you’d told Polly what you just put on the air to Sheila, this situation you’ve got on your hands might be a little less nasty.
Or it might not-how could he tell such a thing when he didn’t know what the situation was? Polly had accused him of prying… of snooping. That covered a lot of territory, none of it mapped.
Besides, there was something else. Telling the dispatcher to put out a pick-up-and-hold was part of what the job was all about. So was making sure your field officers knew that the man they were after might be dangerous. Giving out the same information to your girlfriend on an open radio/telephone patch was a different matter entirely. He had done the right thing and he knew it.
This did not quiet the ache in his heart, however, and he made another effort to focus his mind on the business ahead-finding Hugh Priest, bringing him in, getting him a goddam lawyer if he wanted one, and then asking him why he had stuck a corkscrew into Nettle’s dog, Raider.
For a moment it worked, but as he started the station wagon’s engine and pulled away from the curb, it was still Polly’s face-not Hugh’s-he saw in his mind.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1
At about the same time Alan was heading across town to arrest Hugh Priest, Henry Beaufort was standing in his driveway and looking at his Thunderbird. The note he’d found under the windshield wiper was in one hand. The damage the chickenshit bastard had done to the tires was bad, but the tires could be replaced. It was the scratch he had drawn along the car’s right-hand side that really toasted Henry’s ass.
He looked at the note again and read it aloud. “Don’t you ever cut me off and then keep my car-keys you damnfrog!”
Who had he cut off lately? Oh, all kinds of people. A night when he didn’t have to cut someone off was a rare night, indeed. But cut off and car-keys kept on the board behind the bar? Only one of those just lately.
Only one.
“You motherfucker,” The Mellow Tiger’s owner and operator said in a soft, reflective voice. “You stupid crazy motherfucking sonofabitch.”
He thought about going back inside to get his deer rifle and then thought better of it. The Tiger was just up the road, and he kept a rather special box under the bar. Inside it was a doublebarrelled Winchester shotgun sawed off at the knees. He’d kept it there ever since that numb fuck Ace Merrill had tried to rob him a few years back.
It was a highly illegal weapon, and Henry had never used it.
He thought he might just use it today.
He touched the ugly scratch Hugh had laid into the side of his T-Bird, then crumpled up the note and tossed it aside. Billy Tupper would be up at the Tiger by now, sweeping the floor and swamping out the heads. Henry would get the sawed-off, then borrow Billy’s Pontiac.
It seemed he had a little asshole-hunting to do.
Henry kicked the balled-up note into the grass. “You been taking those stupid-pills again, Hugh, but you aren’t going to be taking any more after today-I guarantee it.” He touched the scratch a final time.
He had never been so angry in his whole life. “I guaranfuckin-tee it.”
Henry set off up the road toward The Mellow Tiger, walking fast.
2
In the process of tearing apart George T. Nelson’s bedroom, Frank jewett found half an ounce of coke under the mattress of the double bed. He flushed it down the john, and as he watched it swirl away, he felt a sudden cramp in his belly. He started to unbuckle his pants, then walked back into the trashed bedroom again instead.
Frank supposed he had gone utterly crazy, but he no longer cared much. Crazy people didn’t have to think about the future. To crazy people, the future was a very low priority.
One of the few undisturbed things in George T. Nelson’s bedroom was a picture on the wall. It was a picture of an old lady. It was in an expensive gold frame, and this suggested to Frank that it was a picture of George T. Nelson’s sainted mother. The cramp struck again.
Frank removed the picture from the wall and put it on the floor. Then he unbuckled his pants, squatted carefully above it, and did what came naturally.
It was the high point of what had been, up ’til then, a very bad day.
3
Lenny Partridge, Castle Rock’s oldest resident and holder of the Boston Post Cane which Aunt Evvie Chalmers had once possessed, also drove one of Castle Rock’s oldest cars. It was a 1966 Chevrolet Bel-Air which had once been white. It was now a generic smudged no-color-call it Dirt Road Gray. It wasn’t in very good shape. The glass in the back window had been replaced by a flapping sheet of all-weather plastic some years ago, the rocker panels had rusted out so badly that Lenny could view the road through a complicated lacework of rust as he drove along, and the exhaust pipe hung down like the rotted arm of a man who had died in a dry climate. Also, the oil-seals were gone. When Lenny drove the Bel-Air, he spread great clouds of fragrant blue smoke out behind him, and the fields he passed on his daily trip into town looked as if a homicidal aviator had just dusted them with paraquat. The Chevy gobbled three (sometimes four) quarts of oil a day. This gaudy consumption did not bother Lenny in the least; he bought recycled Diamond motor oil from Sonny jackett in the five-gallon economy size, and he always made sure that Sonny deducted ten per cent… his Golden Ager discount. And because he hadn’t driven the Bel-Air at a speed greater than thirty-five miles an hour in the last ten years, it would probably hold together longer than Lenny himself.
While Henry Beaufort was starting up the road to The Mellow Tiger on the other side of the Tin Bridge, almost five miles away, Lenny was guiding his rusty Bel-Air over the top of Castle Hill.
There was a man standing in the middle of the road with his arms held up in an imperial stop gesture. The man was bare-chested and barefooted. He wore only a pair of khaki pants with the fly unzipped, and, around his neck, a moth-eaten runner of fur.
Lenny’s heart took a large wheezy leap in his scrawny chest and he slammed both of his feet, clad in a pair of slowly disintegrating high-tops, down on the brake pedal. It sank almost to the floor with an unearthly moan and the Bel-Air finally stopped less than three feet from the man in the road, whom Lenny now recognized as Hugh Priest.
Hugh had not so much as flinched. When the car stopped, he strode rapidly around to where Lenny was sitting, hands pressed against the front of his thermal undershirt, trying to catch his breath and wondering if this was the final cardiac arrest.
“Hugh!” he gasped. “Why, what in the tarnal hell are you doin?
I almost run you down! I-” Hugh opened the driver’s door and leaned in. T@e fur stole he was wearing around his neck swung forward and Lenny flinched back from it. It looked like a half-rotten fox-tail with great hunks of fur missing from the hide. It smelled bad.
Hugh seized him by the straps of his overalls and hauled him out of the car. Lenny uttered a squawk of terror and outrage.
“Sorry, oldtimer,” Hugh said in the absent voice of a man who has much greater problems than this one on his mind. “I need your car.
Mine’s a little under the weather.”
“You can’t-” But Hugh most definitely could. He tossed Lenny across the road as if the old fellow were no more than a bag of rags.
When Lenny came down, there was a clear snapping sound and his squawks turned to mournful, hooting cries of pain. He had broken one collarbone and two ribs.
Ignoring him, Hugh got behind the wheel of the Chevy, pulled the door shut, and floored the accelerator. The engine let out a scream of surprise and a blue fog of oilsmoke rolled out of the sagging tailpipe.
He was rolling down the hill at better than fifty miles an hour before Lenny Partridge could even manage to thrash his way over onto his back.
4
Andy Clutterbuck swung onto Castle Hill Road at approximately 3:35 p.m. He passed Lenny Partridge’s old oil-guzzler going the other way and didn’t give it a thought; Clut’s mind was totally occupied with Hugh Priest, and the rusty old Bel-Air was just another part of the scenery.
