Needful Things (99 page)

What followed was a shaky, hand-held shot of a country road. In the foreground, slightly out of focus but still readable, was a road-sign. 117, it said, but Alan didn't need it. He had driven that stretch many times, and knew it well. He recognized the grove of pines just beyond the place where the road curved—it was the grove where the Scout had fetched up, its nose crumpled around the largest tree in a jagged embrace.

But the trees in this picture showed no scars of the accident, although the scars were still visible, if you went out there and looked (he had, many times). Wonder and terror slipped silently into Alan's bones as he realized—not just from the unwounded surfaces of the trees and the curve in the road but from every configuration of the landscape and every intuition of his heart—that this videotape had been shot on the day Annie and Todd had died.

He was going to see it happen.

It was quite impossible, but it was true. He was going to see his wife and son smashed open before his very eyes.

Turn it off!
Brian screamed.
Turn it off, he's a poison man and he sells poison things! Turn it off before it's too late!

But Alan could have done this no more than he could have stilled his own heartbeat by thought alone. He was frozen, caught.

Now the camera panned jerkily to the left, up the road. For a moment there was nothing, and then there was a sun-twinkle of light. It was the Scout. The Scout was coming. The Scout was on its way to the pine tree where it and the people inside it would end forever. The Scout was approaching its terminal point on earth. It was not speeding; it was not moving erratically. There was no sign that Annie had lost control or was in danger of losing it.

Alan leaned forward beside the humming VCR, sweat trickling down his cheeks, blood beating heavily in his temples. He felt his gorge rising.

This isn't real. It's a put-up job. He had it made somehow. It's not them; there may be an actress and a young actor inside
pretending
to be them, but it's not them. It can't be.

Yet he knew it was. What else would you see in images transmitted by a VCR to a TV which wasn't plugged in but worked anyway? What else but the truth?

A lie!
Brian Rusk's voice cried out, but it was distant and easily ignored.
A lie, Sheriff, a lie!
A LIE!

Now he could see the license plate on the approaching Scout. 24912 V. Annie's license plate.

Suddenly, behind the Scout, Alan saw another twinkle of light. Another car, approaching fast, closing the distance.

Outside, the Tin Bridge blew up with that monstrous riflecrack sound. Alan didn't look in that direction, didn't even hear it. Every ounce of his concentration was fixed on the screen of the red Sony TV, where Annie and Todd were approaching the tree which stood between them and all the rest of their lives.

The car behind them was doing seventy, maybe eighty miles an hour. As the Scout approached the cameraman's position, this second car—of which there had never been any report—approached the Scout. Annie apparently saw it, too; the Scout began to speed up, but it was too little. And it was too late.

The second car was a lime-green Dodge Challenger, jacked in the back so the nose pointed at the road. Through the smoked-glass windows, one could dimly make out the roll-bar arching across the roof inside. The rear end was covered with stickers:
HEARST, FUELLY, FRAM, QUAKER STATE
 . . . Although the tape was silent, Alan could almost hear the blast and crackle of exhaust through the straight-pipes.

“Ace!”
he cried out in agonized comprehension. Ace! Ace Merrill! Revenge! Of course! Why had he never thought of it before?

The Scout passed in front of the camera, which panned right to follow. Alan had one moment when he could see inside and yes; it was Annie, the paisley scarf she had been wearing that day tied in her hair, and Todd, in his
Star Trek
tee-shirt. Todd was looking back at the car behind him. Annie was looking up into the rearview mirror. He could not see her face, but her body was leaning tensely forward in the seat, pulling her shoulder-harness taut. He had that one brief last look at them—his wife and his son—
and part of him realized he did not want to see them this way if there was no hope of changing the result: he did not want to see the terror of their last moments.

But there was no going back now.

The Challenger bumped the Scout. It wasn't a hard hit, but Annie had sped up and it was hard enough. The Scout missed the curve and veered off the road and toward the grove of trees where the large pine waited.

“NO!”
Alan shouted.

The Scout jounced into the ditch and out of it. It rocked up on two wheels, came back down, and smashed into the bole of the pine tree with a soundless crunch. A rag doll with a paisley scarf in its hair flew through the windshield, struck a tree, and bounced into the underbrush.

The lime-green Challenger stopped at the edge of the road.

The driver's door opened.

Ace Merrill got out.

He was looking toward the wreck of the Scout, now barely visible in the steam escaping its ruptured radiator, and he was laughing.

“NO!”
Alan screamed again, and pushed the VCR over the side of the glass case with both hands. It struck the floor but didn't break and the coaxial cord was just a little too long to pull out. A line of static ran across the TV screen, but that was all. Alan could see Ace getting back into his car, still laughing, and then he grabbed the red TV, lifted it above his head as he executed a half-turn, and threw it against the wall. There was a flash of light, a hollow bang, and then nothing but the hum of the VCR with the tape still running inside. Alan dealt it a kick and it fell mercifully silent.

Get him. He lives in Mechanic Falls.

This was a new voice. It was cold and it was insane but it had its own merciless rationality. The voice of Brian Rusk was gone; now there was only this one voice, repeating the same two things over and over.

Get him. He lives in Mechanic Falls. Get him. He lives in Mechanic Falls. Get him. Get him. Get him.

Across the street there were two more of those monstrous rifleshot explosions as the barber shop and The Samuels
Funeral Home blew up at almost the same instant, belching glass and fiery debris into the sky and the street. Alan took no notice.

Get him. He lives in Mechanic Falls.

He picked up the Tastee-Munch can without a thought, grabbing it only because it was something he had brought in and thus was something he should take back out. He crossed to the door, scuffing his previous trail of footprints to incomprehensibility, and left Needful Things. The explosions meant nothing to him. The jagged, burning hole in the line of buildings on the far side of Main Street meant nothing to him. The rubble of wood and glass and brick in the street meant nothing to him. Castle Rock and all the people who lived there, Polly Chalmers among them, meant nothing to him. He had an errand to do in Mechanic Falls, thirty miles from here.
That
meant something. In fact, it meant
everything.

Alan strode around to the driver's side of the station wagon. He tossed his gun, his flashlight, and the joke can of nuts on the seat. In his mind, his hands were already around Ace Merrill's throat and starting to squeeze.

“HALT!”
Norris screamed again.
“HALT RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!”

He was thinking it was a most incredibly lucky break. He was less than sixty yards from the holding cell where he intended to store Dan Keeton for safekeeping. As for the other fellow . . . well, that would depend on what the two of them had been up to, wouldn't it? They weren't exactly wearing the expressions of men who have been ministering to the sick and comforting the grief-stricken.

Trooper Price looked from Norris to the men standing by the old-fashioned board sign which read
CASTLE COUNTY COURTHOUSE
. Then he looked back at Norris again. Ace and Zippy's Dad looked at each other. Then both of them eased their hands downward, toward the butts of the guns which protruded over the waistbands of their pants.

Norris had pointed the barrel of his revolver skyward, as he had been taught to do in situations like this. Now, still following procedure, he clasped his right wrist in his left fist and levelled the revolver. If the books were right, they would not realize that the muzzle was pointed directly between them; each would believe Norris was aiming at him. “Move your hands away from your weapons, my friends. Do it
now!”

Buster and his companion exchanged another glance and dropped their hands to their sides.

Norris snapped a look at the Trooper. “You,” he said. “Price. Want to give me a little help here? If you're not too tired, that is.”

“What are you
doing?”
Price asked. He sounded worried and unwilling to pitch in. The night's activities, with the hammering demolition of the bridge to cap them, had reduced him to bystander status. He apparently felt uncomfortable about stepping back into a more active role. Things had gotten too big too fast.

“Arresting these two boogers,” Norris snapped. “What in the hell does it look like?”

“Arrest this, fellow,” Ace said, and flipped Norris the bird. Buster uttered a high, yodelling laugh.

Price looked at them nervously and then returned his troubled gaze to Norris. “Uh . . . on what charge?”

Buster's friend laughed.

Norris directed his full attention back to the two men, and was alarmed to see their positions relative to each other had changed. When he had thrown down on them, they had been almost shoulder to shoulder. Now they were almost five feet apart, and still sidling.

“Stand still!”
he bawled. They stopped and exchanged another glance.
“Move back together!”

They only stood there in the pouring rain, hands dangling, looking at him.

“I'm arresting them on an illegal-weapons charge to start with!”
Norris yelled furiously to Trooper Joe Price.
“Now get your thumb out of your butt and give me a help!”

This shocked Price into action. He tried to take his own revolver out of its holster, discovered the safety strap was still on, and began fumbling with it. He was still fumbling
when the barber shop and the funeral home blew up.

Buster, Norris, and Trooper Price all looked upstreet. Ace did not. He had been waiting for just this golden moment. He pulled the automatic from his belt with the speed of a Western quick-draw artist and fired. The bullet took Norris high in the left shoulder, clipping his lung and smashing his collarbone. Norris had taken a step away from the brick wall when he noticed the two men drifting apart; now he was driven back against it. Ace fired again, chipping a crater in the brick an inch from Norris's ear. The ricochet made a sound like a very large, very angry insect.

“Oh Christ!”
Trooper Price screamed, and began to labor more enthusiastically to free the safety strap over the butt of his gun.

“Burn that guy, Dad!”
Ace yelled. He was grinning. He fired at Norris again, and this third bullet tore a hot groove in the skinny Deputy's left side as he collapsed to his knees. Lightning flashed overhead. Incredibly, Norris could still hear brick and wood from the latest explosions rattling down on the street.

Trooper Price at long last managed to unsnap the strap over his gun. He was pulling it free when a bullet from the automatic Keeton held took his head off from the eyebrows on up. Price was hammered out of his boots and thrown against the brick wall of the alley.

Norris raised his own gun once more. It seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Still holding it in both hands, he aimed at Keeton. Buster was a clearer target than his friend. More important, Buster had just killed a cop, and that shit most definitely did not go down in Castle Rock. They were hicks, maybe, but not
barbarians.
Norris pulled the trigger at the same moment Ace tried to shoot him again.

The recoil of his revolver sent Norris flying backward. Ace's bullet buzzed through empty air where his head had been half a second before. Buster Keeton also went flying backward, hands clapped to his belly. Blood poured through his fingers.

Norris lay against the brick wall near Trooper Price, panting harshly, one hand pressed against his wounded
shoulder.
Christ, this has been a really lousy day,
he thought.

Ace levelled the automatic at him, then thought better of it—at least for the time being. He went to Buster instead and dropped on one knee beside him. North of them, the bank went up in a roar of fire and pulverized granite. Ace didn't even look in that direction. He moved old Dad's hands to get a better look at the wound. He was sorry this had happened. He had been getting to like old Dad pretty well.

Buster screamed.
“Oh, it hurts! Oh, it hurrrrts!”

Ace just bet it did. Old Dad had taken a .45 slug just above his belly-button. The entrance hole was the size of a headbolt. Ace didn't have to roll him over to know the exit hole would be the size of a coffee cup, probably with chunks of old Dad's spine sticking out of it like bloody candy-canes.

“It hurrrts!
HURRRRRRTS!”
Buster screamed up into the rain.

“Yeah.” Ace put the muzzle of the automatic against Buster's temple. “Tough luck, Dad. I'm going to give you some painkiller.”

He pulled the trigger three times. Buster's body jumped and was still.

Ace got to his feet, meaning to finish the goddam Deputy—if there was anything left to finish—when a gun roared and a bullet whined through the windy air less than a foot over his head. Ace looked up and saw another cop standing just outside the Sheriff's Office door to the parking lot. This one looked older than God. He was shooting at Ace with one hand while the other pressed against his chest above his heart.