were printed across the top in black block letters. Below these words was the following message: just a warning-but please read and heed!
You have been observed breaking one or more traffic laws. The citing officer has elected to “let you off with a warning” this time, but he has recorded the make, model, and license number of your car, and next time you will be charged. Please remember that traffic laws are for EVERYBODY.
Drive defensively!
Arrive alive!
Your Local Police Department thanks you!
Below the sermon was a series of blanks labelled MAKE, MODEL, and LIC. #. Printed on the slip in the first two blanks were the words Cadillac and Seville. Neatly printed in the blank for LIC. # was this:
Most of the slip was taken up by a checklist of common traffic violations such as failure to signal, failure to stop, and illegal parking.
None of them was checked. Toward the bottom were the words OTHER VIOLATION(S), followed by two blank lines. OTHER VIOLATION(S) had been checked. The message on the lines provided to describe the violation was also neatly printed in small block capitals. It read:
BEING THE BIGGEST COCKSUCKER IN CASTLE ROCK.
At the bottom was a line with the words CITING OFFICER printed under it. The rubber-stamp signature on this line was Norris Ridgewick.
Slowly, very slowly, Keeton clenched his fist on the pink slip.
It crackled and bent and crumpled. At last it disappeared between Keeton’s big knuckles. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking around at all the other pink slips. A vein beat time in the center of his forehead.
“I’ll kill him,” Keeton whispered. “I swear to God and all the saints I’ll kill that skinny little fuck.”
13
When Nettle arrived home it was only twenty past one, but it felt to her as if she had been gone for months, maybe even years. As she walked up the cement path to her door, her terrors slipped from her shoulders like invisible weights. Her head still ached from the tumble she had taken, but she thought a headache was a very small price to pay for being allowed to arrive back at her own little house safe and undetected.
She still had her own key; that was in the pocket of her dress.
She took it out and put it in the lock. “Raider?” she called as she turned it. “Raider, I’m home!”
She opened the door.
“Where’s Mummy’s wittle boy, hmmm? Where is urns? Izzum hungwy?”
The hallway was dark, and at first she did not see the small bundle lying on the floor. She took her key out of the lock and stepped in.
“Is Mummy’s wittle boy awful hungwy? Izzum just sooo hung-” Her foot struck something which was both stiff and yielding, and her voice halted in mid- simper. She looked down and saw Raider.
At first she tried to tell herself she wasn’t seeing what her eyes told her she was seeing-wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t. That wasn’t Raider on the floor with something sticking out of his chest-how could it be?
She closed the door and beat frantically at the wall-switch with one hand. At last the hall light jumped on and she saw. Raider was lying on the floor. He was lying on his back the way he did when he wanted to be scratched, and there was something red jutting out of him, something that looked like… looked like…
Nettle uttered a high, wailing scream-it was so high it sounded like the whine of some huge mosquito-and fell on her knees beside her dog.
“Raider! Oh jesus Savior meek and mild! Oh my God, Raider, you ain’t dead, are you? You ain’t dead?”
Her hand-her cold, cold hand-beat at the red thing sticking out of Raider’s chest the way it had beat at the light-switch a few seconds before. At last it caught hold and she tore it free, using a strength drawn from the deepest wells of her grief and horror. The corkscrew came out with a thick ripping sound, pulling chunks of flesh, small clots of blood, and tangles of hair with it. It left a ragged dark hole the size of a four-ten slug. Nettle shrieked. She dropped the gory corkscrew and gathered the small, stiff body in her arms.
“Raider!” she cried. “Oh my little doggy! No! Oh no!” She rocked him back and forth against her breast, trying to bring him back to life with her warmth, but it seemed she had no warmth to give.
She was cold. Cold.
Some time later she put his body down on the hall floor again and fumbled around with her hand until she found the Swiss Army knife with the murdering corkscrew jutting out of its handle. She picked it up dully, but some of that dullness left her when she saw that a note had been impaled upon the murder weapon. She pulled it off with numb fingers and held it up close in front of her. The paper was stiff with her poor little dog’s blood, but she could still read the words scrawled on it:
NOBODY SLINGS MUD AT MY CLEAN SHEETS! I TOLD YOU I’D GET YOU!
The look of distracted grief and horror slowly left Nettle’s eyes.
It was replaced with a gruesome sort of intelligence that sparkled there like tarnished silver. Her cheeks, which had gone as pale as milk when she finally understood what had happened here, began to fill with dark red color. Her lips peeled slowly back from her teeth. She bared them at the note. Two harsh words slid out of her open mouth, hot and hoarse and rasping: “You… bitch!”
She crumpled the paper in her fist and threw it against the wall.
It bounced back and landed near Raider’s body. Nettle pounced upon it, picked it up, and spat on it. Then she threw it away again.
She got up and walked slowly down to the kitchen, her hands opening, snapping shut into fists, then springing open only to snap shut again.
14
Wilma jerzyck drove her little yellow Yugo into her driveway, got out, and walked briskly toward the front door, digging in her purse for her housekey. She was humming “Love Makes the World Go Round” under her breath. She found the key, put it in the lock… and then paused as some random movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked to her right, and gaped at what she saw.
The living-room curtains were fluttering in the brisk afternoon wind. They were fluttering outside the house. And the reason they were fluttering outside the house was that the big picture window, which had cost the Clooneys four hundred dollars to replace when their idiot son had broken it with a baseball three years ago, was shattered.
Long arrows of glass pointed inward from the frame toward the central hole.
“What the fuck?” Wilma cried, and turned the key in the lock so hard she almost broke it off.
She rushed indoors, grabbing the door to slam it shut behind her, and then froze in place. For the first time in her adult life, Wilma Wadlowski jerzyck was shocked to complete immobility.
The living room was a shambles. The TV-their beautiful bigscreen TV on which they still owed eleven payments-was shattered. The innards were black and smoking. The picture-tube lay in a thousand shiny fragments on the carpet. Across the room, a huge hole had been knocked in one of the living-room walls. A large package, shaped like a loaf, lay below this hole. Another lay in the doorway to the kitchen.
She closed the door and approached the object in the doorway.
One part of her mind, not quite coherent, told her to be very careful-it might be a bomb. As she passed the TV, she caught a hot, unpleasant aroma-a cross between singed insulation and burned bacon.
She squatted down by the package in the doorway and saw it wasn’t a package at all-at least, not in any ordinary sense. It was a rock with a piece of lined notebook paper wrapped around it and held in place with a rubber band. She pulled the paper out and read this message: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING When she had read it twice, she looked at the other rock. She went over to it and pulled off the sheet of paper rubber-banded to it.
Identical paper, identical message. She stood up, holding one wrinkled sheet in each hand, looking from one to the other again and again, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a hotly contested Ping-Pong match. Finally she spoke three words: “Nettle. That cunt.”
She walked into the kitchen and drew in breath over her teeth in a harsh, whistling gasp. She cut her hand on a sliver of glass taking the rock out of the microwave and picked the splinter absently out of her palm before removing the paper banded to the rock. It bore the same message.
Wilma walked quickly through the other rooms downstairs and observed more damage. She took all the notes. They were all the same.
Then she walked back to the kitchen. She looked at the damage unbelievingly.
“Nettle,” she said again.
At last the iceberg of shock around her was beginning to melt.
The first emotion to replace it was not anger but incredulity.
My, she thought, that woman really must be crazy. She really must, if she thought she could do something like this to me-to me!-and live to see the sun go down. Who did she think she was dealing with here, Rebecca of Fuckybrook Farm?
Wilma’s hand closed on the notes in a spasm. She bent over and rubbed the crumpled carnation of paper sticking out of her fist briskly over her wide bottom.
