The Dark Half

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    ''Course I'm sure. This wasn't no Ford, and it sure as hell wasn't any Woody wagon. It was a black Toronado.'

  Another flare went off in Alan's mind . . . but he wasn't quite sure why. Someone had said something to him about a black Toronado, and not long ago. He couldn't think just who or when, not now . . . but it would come to him.

    'I just happened to be in the kitchen, gettin myself a cool drink of lemonade,' Fuzzy was going on, 'when I seen that car backin out of the barn. First thing I thought of was bow I don't store no car like that. Second thing I thought of was how anybody got it in there in the first place, when there's a big old Kreig padlock on the barn door and I got the only key to it on my ring.'

  'What about the people with cars stored in there? They don't have keys?'

  'No, sir!' Fuzzy seemed offended by the very idea.

  'You didn't happen to get the license plate number, did you?'

    'You're damn tooting I got it!' Fuzzy cried. 'Got the goddam ote jeezly b'noc'lars right there on the kitchen windowsill, ain't I?'

    Alan, who had been in the barn on inspection tours with Trevor Hartland but never in Fuzzy's kitchen (and had no plans to make such a trip soon, thanks), said: 'Oh, yeah. The binoculars. I forgot about them.'

  'Well, I didn't!' Fuzzy said with happy truculence. 'You got a pencil?'

  'I sure do, Albert.'

  'Chief, why don't you just call me Fuzzy, like everyone else?'

  Alan sighed. 'Okay, Fuzzy. And while we're at it, why don't you just call me Sheriff?'

  'Whatever you say. Now do you want this plate number or not?'

  'Shoot.'

    'First off, it was a Mississippi plate,' Fuzzy said with something like triumph in his voice. 'What the hell do you think of that?'

   Alan didn't know exactly what he thought of it . . . except a third flare had gone off in his head, this one even brighter than the others. A Toronado. And Mississippi. Something about Mississippi. And a town. Oxford? Was it Oxford? Like the one two towns over from here?

    'I don't know,' Alan said, and then, supposing it was the thing Fuzzy wanted to hear: 'It sounds pretty suspicious.'

  'Ain't you Christing right!' Fuzzy crowed. Then he cleared his throat and became businesslike. 'Okay. Miss'ippi plate 62284. You got that, Chief?'

  '62284.'

  '62284, ayuh, you can take that to the fuckin bank. Suspicious! Oh, ayuh! That's just what I thought! Jesus ate a can of beans!'

   At the image of Jesus chewing down on a can of B & M beans, Alan had to cover the telephone for another brief moment.

  'So,' Fuzzy said, 'what action you gonna take, Chief?'

  I am going to try and get out of this conversation with my sanity intact, Alan thought. That's the first thing I'm going to do. And I'm going to try and remember who mentioned —

    Then it came to him in a flash of cold radiance that made his arms crown with gooseflesh and stretched the flesh on the back of his neck as tight as a drumhead.

  On the phone with Thad. Not long after the psycho called from Miriam Cowley's apartment. The night the killing—spree had really started.

  He heard Thad saying, He moved from New Hampshire to Oxford, Mississippi, with his mother . . . he's lost all but a trace of his Southern accent.

What else had Thad said when he had been describing George Stark over the telephone?

  Final thing: he may be driving a black Toronado. I don't know what year. One of the old ones with a lot of blasting powder under the hood, anyway. Black. It could have Mississippi plates, but he's undoubtedly switched them.

  'f guess he was a little too busy to do that,' Alan muttered. The gooseflesh was still crawling over his body with its thousand tiny feet.

  'What was that, Chief?'

  'Nothing, Albert. Talking to myself.'

    'My mom useta say that meant you was gonna get some money. Maybe I ought to start doin it myself.'

  Alan suddenly remembered that Thad had added something else — one final detail.

  'Albert — '

  'Call me Fuzzy, Chief. Told you.'

  'Fuzzy, was there a bumper sticker on the car you saw? Did you maybe notice — ?'

   'How the hell did you know about that? You got a hot-sheet on that motor, Chief?' Fuzzy asked eagerly.

'Never mind the questions, Fuzzy. This is police business. Did you see what it said?'

   ''Course I did,' Fuzzy Martin said. 'HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH, that's what it said. Can you believe that?'

  Alan hung up the phone slowly, believing it, but telling himself it proved nothing, nothing at all . . . except that maybe Thad Beaumont was as crazy as a bedbug. It would just be plain stupid to think that what Fuzzy had seen proved anything — well, anything supernatural, for want of a better word . . . was going on.

  Then he thought of the voice-prints and the fingerprints, he thought of hundreds of sparrows crashing into the windows of Bergenfield County Hospital, and he was overcome with a fit of violent shivering that lasted almost a full minute.

3

Alan Pangborn was neither a coward nor a superstitious countryman who forked the sign of the evil eye at crows and kept his pregnant womenfolk away from the fresh milk because he was afraid they would clabber it. He was not a rube; he was not susceptible to the blandishments of city stickers who wanted to sell famous bridges cheap; he had not been born yesterday. He believed in logic and reasonable explanations. So he waited out his flock of shivers and then he pulled his Rolodex over in front of him and found Thad's telephone number. He observed with wry amusement that the number on the card and the one in his head matched. Apparently Castle Rock's distinguished 'writer fella' had remained even more firmly fixed in his mind — some part of it, anyway — than he had thought.

  It has to have been Thad in that car. If you eliminate the nutty stuff, what other alternative is there? He described it. What was the old radio quiz show? Name It and Claim It.

  Bergenfield County Hospital was, in fact, attacked by sparrows.

  And there were other questions — far too many.

    Thad and his family were under protection from the Maine State Police. If they had decided to pack up and come down here for the weekend, the State boys should have given him a call — partially to alert him, partially as a gesture of courtesy. But the state police would have tried to dissuade Thad from making such a trip, now that they had their protective surveillance down to routine up there in Ludlow. And if the trip had been of the spur-of-the-moment kind, their efforts to change his mind would have been even more strenuous.

   Then there was what Fuzzy had not seen — namely, the back-up car or cars that would have been assigned the Beaumonts if they decided to put on their travelling shoes anyway . . . as they could have done; they weren't, after all, prisoners.

People with brain tumors often do very peculiar things.

   If it was Thad's Toronado, and if he had been out at Fuzzy's to get it, and if he had been alone, that led to a conclusion Alan found very unpalatable, because he had taken a qualified liking to Thad. That conclusion was that he had deliberately ditched both his family and his protectors.

  The state police still should have called me, if that was the case. They'd put out an APB, and they'd know damned well this is one of the places he'd be likely to come.

  He dialed the Beaumont number. It was picked up on the first ring. A voice he didn't know answered. Which was only to say he could not put a name to the voice. That he was speaking to an officer of the law was something he knew from the first syllable.

  'Hello, Beaumont residence.'

   Guarded. Ready to drive a wedge of questions into the next gap if the voice happened to be the right one . . . or the wrong one.

  What's happened? Pangborn wondered, and on the heels of that: They're dead. Whoever's out there has killed the whole family, as quickly, effortlessly, and with as little mercy as he showed the others. The protection, the interrogations, the traceback equipment . . . it was all for nothing.