Ace had no comment on that. He was happy just knowing that he would be seeing another weekend.
“November first is the deadline,” Dave said. “You bring us our money by November first and then we all go after Ducky. If you don’t, we’re going to see how many pieces of you we can cut off before you finally give up and die.”
8
When the balloon went up, Ace had been holding about a dozen assorted heavy-caliber weapons of both the automatic and semiautomatic varieties. He spent most of his grace period trying to turn these weapons into cash. Once he did that, he could turn cash back into coke. You couldn’t have a better asset than cocaine when you needed to turn some big bucks in a hurry.
But the market for guns was temporarily in the horse latitudes.
He sold half his stock-none of the big guns-and that was it.
During the second week in September he had met a promising prospect at the Piece of Work Pub in Lewiston. The prospect had hinted in every way it was possible to hint that he would like to buy at least six and perhaps as many as ten automatic weapons, if the name of a reliable ammunition dealer went with the shooting irons. Ace could do that; the Flying Corson Brothers were the most reliable ammo dealers he knew.
Ace went into the grimy bathroom to do a couple of lines before hammering the deal home. He was suffused with the happy, relieved glow which has bedevilled a number of American Presidents; he believed he saw light at the end of the tunnel.
He laid the small mirror he carried in his shirt pocket on the toilet tank and was spooning coke onto it when a voice spoke from the urinal nearest the stall Ace was in. Ace never found out who the voice belonged to; he only knew that its owner might well have saved him fifteen years in a Federal penitentiary.
“Man you be talking to wearin a wire,” the voice from the urinal said, and when Ace left the bathroom he went out the back door.
9
Following that near miss (it never occurred to him that his unseen informant might just have been amusing himself), an odd kind of paralysis settled over Ace. He became afraid to do anything but buy a little coke now and then for his own personal use. He had never experienced such a sensation of dead stop before. He hated it, but didn’t know what to do about it. The first thing he did every day was look at the calendar. November seemed to be rushing toward him.
Then, this morning, he had awakened before dawn with a thought blazing in his mind like strange blue light: he had to go home. He had to go back to Castle Rock. That was where the answer was. Going home felt right… but even if it turned out to be wrong, the change of scenery might break the strange vaporlock in his head.
In Mechanic Falls he was just john Merrill, an ex-con who lived in a shack with plastic on the windows and cardboard on the door.
In Castle Rock he had always been Ace Merrill, the ogre who strode through the nightmares of a whole generation of little kids. In Mechanic Falls he was poor-white back-road trash, a guy who had a custom Dodge but no garage to put it in. In Castle Rock he had been, at least for a little while, something like a king.
So he had come back, and here he was, and what now?
Ace didn’t know. The town looked smaller, grimier, and emptier than he remembered. He supposed Pangborn was around someplace, and pretty soon old Bill Fullerton would get him on the honker and tell him who was back in town. Then Pangborn would find him and ask him what he thought he was doing here. He would ask if Ace had a job. He didn’t, and he couldn’t even claim he had come back to visit his unc, because Pop had been in his junkshop when the place burned down. Okay then, Ace, Pangborn would say, why don’t you just jump back into your street machine and cruise on out of here?
And what was he going to say to that?
Ace didn’t know-he only knew that the flash of dark-blue light with which he had awakened was still glimmering somewhere inside him.
The lot where the Emporium Galorium had stood was still vacant, he saw. Nothing there but weeds, a few charred board-ends, and some road-litter. Broken glass twinkled back the sun in eyewatering shards of hot light. There was nothing there to look at, but Ace wanted to look, anyway. He started across the street. He had almost reached the far side when the green awning two storefronts up caught his eye.
the side of the awning read. Now what kind of name for a store was that? Ace walked up the street to see. He could look at the vacant lot where his uncle’s tourist-trap had stood later on; he didn’t think anyone was going to move it.
The first thing to catch his eye was the
sign. He paid it little attention. He didn’t know what he had come back to Castle Rock for, but a stockboy job wasn’t it.
There were a number of rather classy-looking items in the window-the sort of stuff he would have taken away if he were doing a little nightwork in some rich guy’s house. A chess set with carved jungle animals for pieces. A necklace of black pearls-it looked valuable to Ace, but he supposed the pearls were probably artificial.
Surely no one in this dipshit burg could afford a string of genuine black pearls. Good job, though; they looked real enough to him.
AndAce looked at the book behind the pearls with narrowed eyes.
It had been set up on its spine so someone looking in the window could easily see the cover, which depicted the silhouettes of two men standing on a ridge at night. One had a pick, the other a shovel.
They appeared to be digging a hole. The title of the book was Lost and Buried Treasures of New England. The author’s name was printed below the picture in small white letters.
It was Reginald Merrill.
Ace went to the door and tried the knob. It turned easily. The bell overhead jingled. Ace Merrill entered Needful Things.
“No,” Ace said, looking at the book Mr. Gaunt had taken from the window display and put into his hands. “This isn’t the one I want.
You must have gotten the wrong one.”
“It’s the only book in the show window, I assure you,” Mr.
Gaunt said in a mildly puzzled voice. “You can look for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
For a moment Ace did almost that, and then he let out an exasperated little sigh. “No, that’s okay,” he said.
The book the shopkeeper had handed him was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. What had happened was clear enoughhe’d had Pop on his mind, and he’d made a mistake. The real mistake, though, had been coming back to Castle Rock in the first place. Why in the fuck had he done it?
“Listen, this is a very interesting place you’ve got here, but I ought to get a move on. I’ll see you another time, Mr.-”
“Gaunt,” the shopkeeper said, putting out his hand. “Leland Gaunt.”
Ace put his own hand out and it was swallowed up. A great, galvanizing power seemed to rush through him at the moment of contact.
His mind was filled with that dark-blue light again: a huge, sheeting flare of it this time.
He took his hand back, dazed and weak-kneed.
“What was that?” he whispered.
“I believe they call it’an attention-getter,’ “Mr. Gaunt said.
He spoke with quiet composure. “You’ll want to pay attention to me, Mr. Merrill.”
“How did you know my name? I didn’t tell you my name.”
“Oh, I know who you are,” Mr. Gaunt said with a little laugh.
“I’ve been expecting you.”
“How could you be expecting me? I didn’t even know I was coming until I got in the damn car.”
“Excuse me for a moment, please.”
Gaunt stepped back toward the window, bent, and picked up a sign which was leaning against the wall. Then he leaned into the window, removed
and put up
in its place.
“Why’d you do that?” Ace felt like a man who has stumbled into a wire fence with a moderate electric charge running through it.
“It’s customary for shopkeepers to remove help-wanted signs when they have filled the vacant position,” Mr. Gaunt said, a little severely. “My business in Castle Rock has grown at a very satisfying rate, and I now find I need a strong back and an extra pair of hands.
I tire so easily these days.”
