The Dark Half

Barracks would be here. The photographer and the technicians from the Attorney General's Capital Crimes Division probably wouldn't be — unless there happened to be a couple of them in the area already on another case — but they would arrive shortly after. By one in the afternoon, the state police's rolling lab would be here, too, complete with hot and cold running forensics experts and a guy whose job it was to mix up plaster and take moulage casts of the tire-prints Norris had either been smart enough or lucky enough not to run over with the wheels of his own cruiser (Alan opted, rather reluctantly, for lucky).

   And what would it all come to? Why, just this. A half-drunk old man had stopped to do a favor for a stranger. (Hop on up here, boy, Alan could hear him saying, I ain't going only a couple of miles, but I'll get you a little further on your way), and the stranger had responded by beating the old man to death and then stealing his truck.

   He guessed the man in the business suit had asked Homer to pull over — the most likely pretext would have been to say he needed to take a leak — and once the truck was stopped, he'd clipped the old man, dragged him out, and —

  Ah, but that was when it got bad. So very goddam bad.

  Alan looked down into the ditch one final time, to where Norris Ridgewick squatted by the bloody piece of meat that had been a man, patiently waving the flies away from what had been Homer's face with his citation clipboard, and felt his stomach turn over again.

  He was just an old man, you son of a whore — an old man who was half in the bag and only had one honest arm to boot, an old man whose one little pleasure left was his bowling league night. So why didn't you just clip him that one good one in the cab of his truck and then leave him be? It was a warm night, and even if it'd been a little chilly, he most likely would have been okay. I'd bet my watch we're going to find a whole lot of antifreeze in his system. And the truck's license plate number goes out on the wire either way. So why this? Man, I hope I get a chance to ask you.

    But did the reason matter? It sure didn't to Homer Gamache. Not anymore. Nothing was ever going to matter to Homer again. Because after clipping him that first one, the hitchhiker had pulled him out of the cab and dragged him into the ditch, probably hauling him by the armpits. Alan didn't need the boys from Capital Crimes to read the marks left by the heels of Gamache's shoes. Along the way, the hitcher had discovered Homer's disability. And at The bottom of the trench, he had wrenched the old man's prosthetic arm from his body and bludgeoned him to death with it.

Five

96529Q

'Hold it, hold it,' Connecticut State Trooper Warren Hamilton said in a loud voice, although he was the only one in the cruiser. It was the evening of June 2nd, some thirty-five hours after the discovery of Homer Gamache's body in a Maine town Trooper Hamilton had never heard of.

   He was in the lot of the Westport I-95 McDonald's (southbound). He made it a habit to swing into the lots of the food-and-gas stops when he was cruising the Interstate; if you crawled up the last row of the parking spots at night with your lights off, you sometimes made some good busts. Better than good. Awesome. When he sensed he might have come upon such an opportunity, he very often talked to himself. These soliloquies often started with Hold it, hold it, then progressed to something like Let's check this sucker out or Ask Mamma if she believes this. Trooper Hamilton was very big on asking Mamma if she believed this when he was on the scent of something juicy.

   'What have we got here?' he murmured this time, and reversed the cruiser. Past a Camaro. Past a Toyota which looked like a slowly aging horseturd in the beaten copper glare of the arc-sodium lights. And . . . ta-DA! An old GMC pick-up truck that looked orange in the glare, which meant it was — or had been — white or light gray.

   He popped his spotlight and trained it on the license plate. License plates, in Trooper Hamilton's humble opinion, were getting better. One by one, the states were putting little pictures on them. This made them easier to identify at night, when varying light conditions transformed actual colors into all sorts of fictional hues. And the worst light of all for plate ID were these goddam orange hiintensity lamps. He didn't know if they foiled rapes and muggings as they were designed to do, but he was positive they had caused hard-working cops such as himself to bugger plate IDs on stolen cars and fugitive vehicles without number.

  The little pictures went a long way toward fixing that. A Statue of Liberty was a Statue of Liberty in both bright sunlight and the steady glare of these copper-orange bastards. And no matter what the color, Lady Liberty meant New York.

  Same as that fucked-up crawdaddy he had the spot trained on right now meant Maine. You didn't have to strain your eyes for VACATIONLAND anymore, or try to figure out if what looked pink or orange or electric blue was really white. You just looked for the fucked-up crawdaddy. It was really a lobster, Hamilton knew that, but a fucked-up crawdaddy by any other name was still a fucked-up crawdaddy, and he would have gobbled shit right out of a pig's ass before he put one of those fucking crawdads in his mouth, but he was mighty glad they were there, all the same.

  Especially when he had a want on a crawdaddy license plate, as he did tonight.

  'Ask Mamma if she believes this,' he murmured, and put the cruiser in Park. He took his clipboard from the magnetized strip which held it to the center of the dash just above the driveshaft hump, flipped past the blank citation form all cops kept as a shield over the hot-sheet (no need for the general public to be gawking at the license plate numbers the cops were particularly interested in while the cop to whom the sheet belonged was grabbing a hamburger or taking an express dump at a handy filling station), and ran his thumbnail down the fist.

  And here it was. 96529Q; State of Maine; home of the fucked-up crawdaddies.

    Trooper Hamilton's initial pass had shown him no one was in the cab of the truck. There was a rifle-rack, but it was empty. It was possible — not likely, but possible — that there might be someone in the bed of the truck. It was even possible that the someone in the bed of the truck might have the rifle which belonged in the rack. More likely, the driver was either long gone or grabbing a burger inside. All the same . . .

  'Old cops, bold cops, but no old bold cops,' Trooper Hamilton said in a low voice. He snapped off the spot and slowly cruised on down the line of cars. He paused twice more, snapping the spot on both times, although he didn't even bother to look at the cars he was fighting up. There was always the possibility that Mr 96529Q had seen Hamilton spotlighting the stolen truck while on his way back from the restaurant cum dumpatorium, and if he saw the trooper car had passed on up the line and was checking other cars, he might not take off.

  'Safe is safe, sorry is sorry, and that's all I know, by the great by-Gorry!' Trooper Hamilton exclaimed. This was another of his favorites, not quite up there with asking Mamma if she believed this, but close.

    He pulled into a slot where he could observe the pick-up. He called his base, which was less than four miles up the road, and told them he had found the GMC pick-up Maine wanted in a murder case. He requested back-up units and was told they would arrive shortly.

   Hamilton observed no one approaching the pick-up, and decided it would not be over-bold to approach the vehicle with caution. In fact, he would look like a wimp if he was still sitting here in the dark, one row over, when the other units arrived.

  He got out of his cruiser, thumbing the strap off his gun but not unholstering it. He had unholstered his piece only twice while on duty, and fired it not at all. Nor did he want to do either one now. He approached the pick-up at an angle that allowed him to observe both the truck — especially the bed of the truck — and the approach from Mickey D's. He paused as a man and woman walked from the restaurant to a Ford sedan three rows closer to the restaurant, then moved on when they got in their car and headed for the exit.

   Keeping his right hand on the butt of his service revolver, Hamilton dropped his left hand to his hip. Service belts, in Hamilton's humble opinion, were also getting better. He had, both as man and boy, been a huge fan of Batman, aka the Caped Crusader he suspected, in fact, that the Batman was one of the reasons he had become a cop (this was a little factoid he hadn't bothered to put on his application). His favorite Batman accessory had not been the Batpole or the Batarang, not even the Batmobile itself, but the Caped Crusader's utility belt. That wonderful item of apparel was like a good gift shop: It had a little something for all occasions, be it a rope, a pair of nightvision goggles, or a few capsules of stun-gas. His service belt was nowhere near as good, but on the left side there were three loops holding three very useful items. One was a battery-powered cylinder marketed under the name Down, Hound! When you pressed the red button on top, Down, Hound! emitted an ultrasonic whistle that turned even raging pit-bulls into bowls of limp spaghetti. Next to it was a pressure-can of Mace (the Connecticut state police version of Batman's stun-gas), and next to the Mace was a four-cell flashlight.