Cujo

Well, that's wonderful, isn't it? Roscoe Fisher thought sourly. For this I got a four-buck cleaning bill, and if I do have to stop a speeder, the guy's going to think I got so excited at the prospect of a collar that I pissed myself.

'Ten-four and time out,' Roscoe said, starting his cruiser. 'Over.'

'I make it twelve thirty-four A.M.,' Billy said. 'There's a key hanging on a nail under the front porch eave, unit three. Mr. Trenton would like you to go right on inside and look around if the premises appear deserted. Over.'

'Roger, base. Over and out.'

'Out.'

Roscoe popped on his headlights and cruised down Castle Rock's deserted Main Street, past the Common and the bandstand with its conical green roof. He went up the hill and turned right on Larch Street near the top. The Trentons' was the second house from the corner, and he saw that in the daytime they would have a nice view of the town below. He pulled the Sheriff's Department Fury III up to the curb and got out, closing the door quietly. The street was dark, fast asleep.

He paused for a moment, pulling the wet cloth of his uniform trousers away from his crotch (grimacing as he did it), and then went up the driveway. The driveway was empty, and so was the small one-car garage at the end of it. He saw a Big Wheels trike parked inside. It was just like the one his own son had. He closed the garage door and went around to the front porch. He saw that this week's copy of the Call was leaning against the porch door. Roscoe picked it up and tried the door. It was unlocked. He went onto the porch, feeling like an intruder. He tossed the paper on the porch glider and pushed the bell beside the inner door. Chimes went off in the house, but no one came. He rang twice more over a space of about three minutes, allowing for the time it would take the lady to wake up, put on a robe, and come downstairs ... if the lady was there.

When there was still no answer, he tried the door. It was locked.

Husband's away and she's probably staying over with friends, he thought - but the fact that she hadn't notified her husband also struck Roscoe Fisher as mildly strange.

He felt under the peaked eave, and his fingers knocked off the key Vic had hung up there not long after the Trentons had moved in. He took it down and unlocked the front door - if he had tried the kitchen door as Steve Kemp had that afternoon, he could have walked right in. Like most people in Castle Rock, Donna was slipshod about buttoning up when she went out.

Roscoe went in. He had his flashlight, but he preferred not to use it. That would have made him feel even more like an unlawful intruder - a burglar with a large coffee stain on his crotch. He felt for a switchplate and eventually found one with two switches. The top one turned on the porch light, and he turned that one off quickly. The bottom one turned on the living-room light.

He looked around for a long moment, doubting what he was seeing - at first he thought it must be some trick of his eyes, that they had not adjusted to the light or something. But nothing changed, and his heart began to pump quickly.

Musn't touch anything, he thought. Can't balls this up.

He had forgotten about the wet coffee splotch on his pants, and he had forgotten about feeling like an intruder. He was scared and excited.

Something had happened here, all right. The living room had been turned topsy-turvy. There was shattered glass from a knickknack shelf all over the floor. The furniture had been overturned, the books had been scattered every whichway. The big mirror over the fireplace was also broken - seven years' bad luck for somebody, Roscoe thought, and found himself thinking suddenly and for no reason about Frank Dodd, with whom he had often shared a cruiser. Frank Dodd, the friendly small-town cop who had just happened to also be a psycho who murdered women and little children. Roscoe's arms broke out in gooseflesh suddenly. This was no place to be thinking about Frank.

He went into the kitchen through the dining room, where everything had been swept off the table - he skirted that mess carefully. The kitchen was worse. He felt a fresh chill creep down his spine. Someone had gone absolutely crazy in here. The doors to the bar cabinet stood open, and someone had used the length of the kitchen like a Pitch-Til-U-Win alley at a county fair. Pots were everywhere, and white stuff that looked like snow but had to be soap powder.

Written on the message board in large and hurried block letters was this:

I LEFT SOMETHING UPSTAIRS FOR YOU, BABY.

Suddenly Roscoe Fisher didn't want to go upstairs. More than anything else, he didn't want to go up there. He had helped clean up three of the messes Frank Dodd had left behind him, including the body of Mary Kate Hendrasen, who had been raped and murdered on the Castle Rock bandstand in the Common. He never wanted to see anything like that again ... and suppose the woman was up there, shot or slashed or strangled? Roscoe had seen plenty of mayhem on the roads and had even got used to it, after a fashion. Two summers ago he and Billy and Sheriff

Bannerman had pulled a man out of a potato-grading machine in pieces, and that had been one to tell your grandchildren about. But he had not seen a homicide since the Hendrasen girl, and he did not want to see one now.

He didn't know whether to be relieved or disgusted by what he found on the Trentons' bedspread.

He went back to his car and called in.

When the telephone rang, Vic and Roger were both up, sitting in front of the TV, not talking much, smoking their heads off. Frankenstein, the original film, was on. It was twenty minutes after one.

Vic grabbed the phone before it had completed its first ring. 'Hello? Donna? Is that -'

'Is this Mr. Trenton?' A man's voice.

'Yes?'

'This is Sheriff Bannerman, Mr. Trenton. I'm afraid I have some rather upsetting information for you. I'm sor -'

'Are they dead?' Vic asked. Suddenly he felt totally unreal and two-dimensional, no more real than the face of an extra glimpsed in the background of an old movie such as the one he and Roger had been watching. The question came out in a perfectly conversational tone of voice. From the corner of his eye he saw Roger's shadow move as he stood up quickly. It didn't matter. Nothing else did, either. In the space of the few seconds that had passed since he had answered the phone, he had had a chance to get a good look behind his life and had seen it was all stage scenery and false fronts.

'Mr. Trenton, Officer Fisher was dispatched -'

'Dispense with the official bullshit and answer my question. Are they dead?' He turned to Roger. Roger's face was gray and wondering. Behind him, on the TV, a phony windmill turned against a phony sky. 'Rog, got a cigarette?.' Roger handed him one.

'Mr. Trenton, are you still there?' 'Yes. Are they dead?'

'We have no idea where your wife and son are as of right now,' Bannerman said, and Vic suddenly felt all of his guts drop back into place. The world took on a little of its former color. He began to tremble. The unlit cigarette jittered between his lips.

'What's going on? What do you know? You're Bannerman, you said?'

'Castle County Sheriff, that's right. And I'll try to put you in the picture, if you'll give me a minute.'

'Yes, okay.' Now he was afraid; everything seemed to be going too fast.

'Officer Fisher was dispatched to your home at Eightythree Larch Street as per your request at twelve thirty-four this morning. He ascertained that there was no car in the driveway or in the garage. He rang the front doorbell