It was still open and his weight drove it shut, catching the tail of his sweat-soaked white shirt in the latch.
“That’s for the rat-trap, you fat shit!” Norris cried.
“I’ll get you!” Buster screamed back. “Don’t think I won’t!
I’ll get All of You People!”
“Get this,” Norris growled. He was moving in again with his fists cocked at the sides of his puffed-up pigeon chest when Alan grabbed him and hauled him back.
“Quit it!” he shouted into Norris’s face. “We’ve got trouble inside! Bad trouble!”
The scream lifted in the air again. People were gathering on the sidewalks of Lower Main Street now. Norris looked toward them, then back at Alan. His eyes had cleared, Alan saw with relief, and he looked like himself again. More or less.
“What is it, Alan? Something to do with him?” He jerked his chin toward the Cadillac. Buster was standing there, looking sullenly at them and plucking at the handcuff on his wrist with his free hand.
He seemed not to have heard the screams at all.
“No,” Alan said. “Have you got your gun?”
Norris shook his head.
Alan unsnapped the safety-strap on his holster, drew his service.38, and handed it to Norris.
“What about you, Alan?” Norris asked.
“I want my hands free. Come on, let’s go. Hugh Priest is in the office, and he’s gone crazy.”
20
Hugh Priest had gone crazy, all right-not much doubt about that but he was a good three miles from the Castle Rock Municipal Building.
“Let’s talk about-” he began, and that was when Henry Beaufort leaped up from behind the bar like a jack-in-the-box, blood soaking the right side of his shirt, the shotgun levelled.
Henry and Hugh fired at the same time. The crack of the automatic pistol was lost in the shotgun’s blurred, primal roar. Smoke and fire leaped from the truncated barrel. Hugh was lifted off his feet and driven across the room, bare heels dragging, his chest a disintegrating swamp of red muck. The gun flew out of his hand.
The ends of the fox-tail were burning.
Henry was thrown against the backbar as Hugh’s bullet punctured his right lung. Bottles tumbled and crashed all around him.
A large numbness swarmed through his chest. He dropped the shotgun and staggered toward the telephone. The air was full of crazy perfume: spilled booze and burning fox-hair. Henry tried to draw in breath, and although his chest heaved, he seemed to get no air. There was a thin, shrill sound as the hole in his chest sucked wind.
The telephone seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, but he finally got it up to his ear and pressed the button which automatically dialed the Sheriff’s Office.
Ring… ring… ring…
“What the fuck’s the matter with you people?” Henry gasped raggedly. “I’m dying up here! Answer the goddam telephone!”
But the telephone just went on ringing.
21
Norris caught up with Alan halfway down the alley and they walked side by side into the Municipal Building’s small parking lot. Norris was holding Alan’s service revolver with his finger curled around the trigger guard and the stubby barrel pointed up into the hot October sky. Sheila Brigham’s Saab was in the lot along with Unit 4, John LaPointe’s cruiser, but that was all. Alan wondered briefly where Hugh’s car was, and then the side door to the Sheriff’s Office burst open. Someone carrying the shotgun from Alan’s office in a pair of bloody hands bolted out. Norris levelled the short-barrelled.38 and slid his finger inside the trigger-guard.
Alan registered two things at once. The first was that Norris was going to shoot. The second was that the screaming person with the gun was not Hugh Priest but Sheila Brigham.
Alan Pangborn’s almost heavenly reflexes saved Sheila’s life that afternoon, but it was a very close thing. He didn’t bother trying to shout or even using his hand to deflect the pistol barrel. Neither would have stood much chance of success. He stuck out his elbow instead, then jerked it up like a man doing an enthusiastic buckand-wing at a country dance. It struck Norris’s gun-hand an instant before Norris fired, driving the barrel upward. The pistol-shot was an amplified whipcrack in the enclosed courtyard. A window in the Town Services Office on the second floor shattered.
Then Sheila dropped the shotgun she had used to brain Lester Pratt and was running toward them, screaming and weeping.
“Jesus,” Norris said in a small, shocked voice. His face was as pale as paper as he thrust the pistol, butt first, toward Alan. “I almost shot Sheila-oh dear Jesus Christ.”
“Alan!” Sheila was crying. “Thank God!”
She ran into him without slowing, almost knocking him over.
He holstered his revolver and then put his arms around her. She was trembling like an electric wire with too much current running through it. Alan suspected he was trembling pretty badly himself, and he had come close to wetting his pants. She was hysterical, blind with panic, and that was probably a blessing: he didn’t think she had the slightest idea how close she had come to taking a round.
“What’s going on in there, Sheila?” he asked. “Tell me quick.”
His ears were ringing so badly from the gunshot and the succeeding echo that he could almost swear he heard a telephone somewhere.
22
Henry Beaufort felt like a snowman melting in the sun. His legs were giving way beneath him. He crumpled slowly into a kneeling position with the ringing, unanswered phone still tolling in his ear.
His head swam with the mingled stench of booze and burning fur.
Another hot smell was mingling with these now. He suspected it was Hugh Priest.
He was vaguely aware that this wasn’t working and he ought to dial another number for help, but he didn’t think he could. He was beyond wringing another number out of the telephone-this was it. So he knelt behind the bar in a growing pool of his own blood, listening to the chimney-hoot of air from the hole in his chest, clinging desperately to consciousness. The Tiger didn’t open for an hour yet, Billy was dead, and if no one answered this telephone soon, he would also be dead when the first customers came trickling in for their various happy-hour potations.
“Please,” Henry whispered in a. screamy, breathless voice.
“Please answer the phone, someone please answer this fucking phone.”
23
Sheila Brigham began to regain some control, and Alan got the most important thing out of her right away: she had decommissioned Hugh with the butt of the shotgun. No one was going to try to shoot them when they went through the door.
He hoped.
“Come on,” he said to Norris, “let’s go.”
“Alan… When she came out… I thought.
“I know what you thought, but no harm was done. Forget it, Norris. John’s inside. Come on.”
They went to the door and stood on either side of it. Alan looked at Norris. “Go in low,” he said.
Norris nodded his head.
Alan grabbed the doorknob, jerked the door open, and lunged inside. Norris went in under him in a crouch.
John had managed to find his feet and stagger most of the way to the door. Alan and Norris hit him like the front line of the old Pittsburgh Steelers and John suffered a final painful indignity: he was knocked flat by his colleagues and sent skidding across the tiled floor like one of the weights in a barroom bowling game. He struck the far wall with a thud and let out a scream of pain which was both surprised and somehow weary.
“Jesus, that’s john!” Norris cried. “What a French fire-drill!”
“Help me with him,” Alan said.
