Needful Things (42 page)

EMBEZZLEMENT
.

FRAUD.

MISAPPROPRIATION.

BAD STEWARDSHIP
.

EMBEZZLEMENT
.

That word most of all, glaring, shouting, accusing:

OTHER VIOLATION(S): EMBEZZLEMENT
.

He thought he heard something outside and ran to the window again. Maybe it was Myrtle. Maybe it was Norris Ridgewick, come by to gloat and laugh. If so, Keeton would get his gun and shoot him. But not in the head. No. In the head would be too good, too quick, for scum like Ridgewick. Keeton would guthole him, and leave him to scream himself to death on the lawn.

But it was only the Garsons' Scout, trundling down the View toward town. Scott Garson was the town's most important banker. Keeton and his wife sometimes took dinner with the Garsons—they were nice people, and Garson himself was politically important. What would
he
think if he saw these slips? What would he think of that word,
EMBEZZLEMENT
, screaming off the pink violation slips again and again, screaming like a woman being raped in the middle of the night?

He ran back into the dining room, panting. Had he missed any? He didn't think so. He'd gotten them all, at least down he—

No! There was one! Right on the newel post of the stairway! What if he had missed that one? My God!

He ran to it, snatched it up.

MAKE: SHITMOBILE

MODEL: OLD AND WEARY

LIC. #: OLDFUCK 1

OTHER VIOLATION(S): FINANCIAL FAGGOTRY

More? Were there more? Keeton coursed through the downstairs rooms at a dead run. His shirttail had come out of his pants and his hairy belly was bobbling wildly over his beltbuckle. He saw no more . . . at least not down here.

After another quick, frantic look out the window to
make sure Myrt wasn't yet in sight, he pelted upstairs with his heart thundering in his chest.

Wilma and Nettie met on the corner of Willow and Ford. There they halted, staring at each other like gunslingers in a spaghetti Western. The wind flapped their coats briskly to and fro. The sun shuttered in and out of the clouds; their shadows came and went like fitful visitors.

No traffic moved on either of these two streets, or on the sidewalks. They owned this little corner of the autumn afternoon.

“You killed my dog, you bitch!”

“You broke my TV! You broke my windows! You broke my
microwave,
you crazy cunt!”

“I warned you!”

“Stick your warning up your old dirt road!”

“I'm going to kill you!”

“Take one step and
someone's
going to die here, all right, but it won't be me!”

Wilma spoke these words with alarm and dawning surprise; Nettie's face made her realize for the first time that the two of them might be about to engage in something a little more serious than pulling hair or ripping clothes. What was Nettie doing here in the first place? What had happened to the element of surprise? How had things come so quickly to the sticking point?

But there was a deep streak of Polish Cossack in Wilma's nature, a part that found such questions irrelevant. There was a battle to be fought here; that was the important thing.

Nettie ran at her, lifting the cleaver as she came. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and a long howl tore out of her throat.

Wilma crouched, holding her knife out like a giant switchblade. As Nettie closed with her, Wilma drove it forward. It thrust deep into Nettie's bowels and then rose, slitting her stomach open and letting out a spurt of stinking gruel. Wilma felt a moment's horror at what she had done—could
it really be Wilma Jerzyck on the other end of the steel buried in Nettie?—and her arm muscles relaxed. The knife's upward momentum died before the blade could reach Nettie's frantically pumping heart.

“OOOOH YOU BIIIITCH!”
Nettie screamed, and brought the cleaver down. It buried itself to the hilt in Wilma's shoulder, splitting the collarbone with a dull crunch.

The pain, a huge wooden plank of it, drove any objective thought from Wilma's mind. Only the raving Cossack was left. She yanked her knife free.

Nettie yanked her cleaver free. It took both hands to do it, and when she finally succeeded in wrenching it off the bone, a loose slew of guts slipped from the bloody hole in her dress and hung before her in a glistening knot.

The two women circled slowly, their feet printing tracks in their own blood. The sidewalk began to look like some weird Arthur Murray dance diagram. Nettie felt the world beginning to pulse in and out in great, slow cycles—the color would drain from things, leaving her in a blur of whiteness, and then it would slowly come back. She heard her heart in her ears, great slow snaffling thuds. She knew she was wounded but felt no pain. She thought Wilma might have cut her a little in the side, or something.

Wilma knew how badly she was hurt; was aware that she could no longer lift her right arm and that the back of her dress was drenched with blood. She had no intention of even trying to run away, however. She had never run in her life, and she wasn't going to start now.

“Hi!”
someone screamed thinly at them from across the street.
“Hi! What are you two ladies doing there? You stop it, whatever it is! You stop it right now or I'll call the police!”

Wilma turned her head in that direction. The moment her attention was diverted, Nettie stepped in and swung the cleaver in a flat, sweeping arc. It chopped into the swell of Wilma's hip and clanged off her pelvic bone, cracking it. Blood flew in a fan. Wilma screamed and flailed backward, sweeping the air in front of her with her knife. Her feet tangled together and she fell to the sidewalk with a thump.

“Hi! Hi!”
It was an old woman, standing on her stoop and clutching a mouse-colored shawl to her throat. Her eyes were magnified into watery wheels of terror by her spectacles. Now she trumpeted in her clear and piercing old-lady voice:
“Help! Police! Murder!
MURRRDURRRRR!”

The women on the corner of Willow and Ford took no notice. Wilma had fallen in a bloody heap by the stop-sign, and as Nettie staggered toward her, she pushed herself into a sitting position against its post and held the knife in her lap, pointing upward.

“Come on, you bitch,” she snarled. “Come for me, if you're coming.”

Nettie came, her mouth working. The ball of her intestines swung back and forth against her dress like a misborn fetus. Her right foot struck Wilma's outstretched left foot and she fell forward. The carving knife impaled her just below the breastbone. She grunted through a mouthful of blood, raised the cleaver, and brought it down. It buried itself in the top of Wilma Jerzyck's head with a single dull sound—
chonk!
Wilma began to convulse, her body bucking and sunfishing under Nettie's. Each buck and thrash drove the carving knife in deeper.

“Killed . . . my . . .
doggy,”
Nettie gasped, spitting a fine mist of blood into Wilma's upturned face with every word. Then she shuddered all over and went limp. Her head bonked the post of the stop-sign as it fell forward.

Wilma's jittering foot slid into the gutter. Her good black for-church shoe flew off and landed in a pile of leaves with its low heel pointing up at the bustling clouds. Her toes flexed once . . . once more . . . and then relaxed.

The two women lay draped over each other like lovers, their blood painting the cinnamon-colored leaves in the gutter.

“MURRRRRDURRRRRR!”
the old woman across the street trumpeted again, and then she rocked backward and fell full-length on her own hall floor in a faint.

Others in the neighborhood were coming to windows and opening doors now, asking each other what had happened, stepping out on stoops and lawns, first approaching the scene cautiously, then backing away in a hurry, hands
over mouths, when they saw not only what had happened, but the gory extent of it.

Eventually, someone called the Sheriff's Office.

Polly Chalmers was walking slowly up Main Street toward Needful Things with her aching hands bundled into her warmest pair of mittens when she heard the first police siren. She stopped and watched as one of the county's three brown Plymouth cruisers belted through the intersection of Main and Laurel, lights flashing and twirling. It was doing fifty already and still accelerating. It was closely followed by a second cruiser.

She watched them out of sight, frowning. Sirens and racing police cruisers were a rarity in The Rock. She wondered what had happened—something a little more serious than a cat up a tree, she supposed. Alan would tell her when he called that evening.

Polly looked up the street again and saw Leland Gaunt standing in the doorway of his shop, also watching after the cruisers with an expression of mild curiosity on his face. Well, that answered one question: he
was
in. Nettie had never called her back to let her know one way or another. This hadn't surprised Polly much; the surface of Nettie's mind was slippery, and things had a way of sliding right off.

She walked on up the street. Mr. Gaunt looked around and saw her. His face lit up in a smile.

“Ms. Chalmers! How nice that you could drop by!”

She smiled wanly. The pain, which had abated for a while that morning, was now creeping back, thrusting its network of thin, cruel wires through the flesh of her hands. “I thought we'd agreed on Polly.”

“Polly, then. Come inside—it's awfully good to see you. What's all the excitement?”

“I don't know,” she said. He held the door for her and she went past him into the shop. “I suppose someone's been hurt and needs to go to the hospital. Medical Assistance in Norway is awfully slow on the weekends.
Although why the dispatcher would send
two
cruisers . . .”

Mr. Gaunt closed the door behind them. The bell tinkled. The shade on the door was down, and with the sun now going the other way, the interior of Needful Things was gloomy . . . but, Polly thought, if gloom could ever be pleasant, this gloom was. A small reading lamp shed a golden circle on the counter by Mr. Gaunt's old-fashioned cash register. A book lay open there. It was
Treasure Island,
by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Mr. Gaunt was looking at her closely, and Polly had to smile again at the expression of concern in his eyes.

“My hands have been kicking up the very dickens these last few days,” she said. “I guess I don't exactly look like Demi Moore.”

“You look like a woman who is very tired and in quite a lot of discomfort,” he said.

The smile on her face wavered. There was understanding and deep compassion in his voice, and for a moment Polly was afraid she might burst into tears. The thought which kept the tears at bay was an odd one:
His hands. If I cry, he'll try to comfort me. He'll put his hands on me.

She buttressed the smile.

“I'll survive; I always have. Tell me—did Nettie Cobb happen to drop by?”

“Today?” He frowned. “No; not today. If she had, I would have shown her a new piece of carnival glass that came in yesterday. It's not as nice as the one I sold her last week, but I thought she might be interested. Why do you ask?”

“Oh . . . no reason,” Polly said. “She said she might, but Nettie . . . Nettie often forgets things.”

“She strikes me as a woman who has had a hard life,” Mr. Gaunt said gravely.

“Yes. Yes, she has.” Polly spoke these words slowly and mechanically. She could not seem to take her eyes from his. Then one of her hands brushed against the edge of a glass display case, and that caused her to break eye-contact. A little gasp of pain escaped her.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, fine,” Polly said, but it was a lie—she wasn't even within shouting distance of fine.

Mr. Gaunt clearly understood this. “You're not well,” he said decisively. “Therefore I'm going to dispense with the small-talk. The item which I wrote you about did come in. I'm going to give it to you and send you home.”

“
Give
it to me?”

“Oh, I'm not offering you a present,” he said as he went behind the cash register. “We hardly know each other well enough for that, do we?”

She smiled. He was clearly a kind man, a man who, naturally enough, wanted to do something nice for the first person in Castle Rock who had done something nice for him. But she was having a hard time responding—was having a hard time even following the conversation. The pain in her hands was monstrous. She now wished she hadn't come, and, kindness or no kindness, all she wanted to do was get out and go home and take a pain-pill.

“This is the sort of item a vendor
has
to offer on trial—if he's an ethical man, that is.” He produced a ring of keys, selected one, and unlocked the drawer under the cash register. “If you try it for a couple of days and discover it is worthless to you—and I have to tell you that will probably be the case—you return it to me. If, on the other hand, you find it provides you with some relief, we can talk price.” He smiled at her. “And for you, the price would be rock-bottom, I can assure you.”

She looked at him, puzzled. Relief? What was he talking about?

He brought out a small white box and set it on the counter. He took off the lid with his odd, long-fingered hands, and removed a small silver object on a fine chain from the cotton batting inside. It seemed to be a necklace of some sort, but the thing which hung down when Mr. Gaunt tented his fingers over the chain looked like a tea-ball, or an oversized thimble.

“This is Egyptian, Polly. Very old. Not as old as the Pyramids—gosh, no!—but still very old. There's something inside it. Some sort of herb, I think, although I'm not sure.” He wiggled his fingers up and down. The silver tea-ball (if that was what it was) jounced at the bottom of the chain. Something shifted inside, something which made a dusty, slithery sound. Polly found it vaguely unpleasant.