The Dark Half (54 page)

Alan knotted his hands tightly, extended his pinkie fingers, and sent a much smaller bird flying across the sunny wall. A sparrow.

Hugh Pritchard had mentioned the early onset of puberty.

Alan Pangborn suddenly found himself wondering if the growth of that alien tissue coincided with something else.

He wondered if it had begun to grow at the same time Thad Beaumont began to write.

The intercom on his desk beeped, startling him. It was Sheila again. “Fuzzy Martin's on line one, Alan. He wants to talk to you. ”

“Fuzzy?
What in hell's name does he want?”

“I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. ”

“Jesus,” Alan said. “That's all I need today. ”

Fuzzy had a large chunk of property out on Town Road #2, about four miles from Castle Lake. The Martin place had once been a prosperous dairy farm, but that had been in the days when Fuzzy had been known by his proper Christian name, Albert, and was still holding the whiskey jug instead of the other way around. His kids were grown, his wife had given him up as a bad job ten years ago, and now Fuzzy presided alone over twenty-seven acres of fields which were going slowly but steadily back to the wild. On the west side of his property, where Town Road #2 wound by on its way to the lake, the house and barn stood. The barn, which had once been home to forty cows, was a huge building, its roof now deeply swaybacked, its paint peeling, most of the windows blocked with squares of cardboard. Alan and Trevor Hartland, the Castle Rock Fire Chief, had been waiting for the Martin house, the Martin barn, or the Martin both to burn down for the last four years or so.

“Do you want me to tell him you're not here?” Sheila asked. “Clut just came in—I could give it to him. ”

Alan actually considered this for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. “I'll talk to him, Sheila. Thanks.” He picked up the telephone and cocked it between his ear and his shoulder.

“Chief Pangborn?”

“This is the Sheriff, yes. ”

“This is Fuzzy Martin, out on Number Two. Might have a problem out here, Chief. ”

“Oh?” Alan drew the second telephone on the desk closer to him. This was a direct line to the other offices in the Municipal Building. The tip of his finger skated around the square keypad with the number 4 stamped on it. All he had to do was pick up the receiver and push the button to get Trevor Hartland. “What kind of problem is that?”

“Well, Chief, I'll be dipped in shit if I edzackly know. I'd call it Grand Car Thievery, if it was a car I knew. But t‘wasn't. Never seen it before in m'life. But it came out of my barn just the same.” Fuzzy spoke with that deep and somehow satiric Maine accent that turned a simple word like
barn
into something that sounded almost like a bray of laughter:
baaa'n
.

Alan pushed the inter-office telephone back to its normal place. God favored fools and drunks—a fact he had learned well in his many years of police work—and it seemed that Fuzzy's house and barn were still standing in spite of his habit of flicking live cigarette butts here, there, and everywhere while he was drunk.
Now
all
I
have
to do, Alan thought, is sit
here until he unravels whatever the problem is. Then I can figure out—or try to—if it's in the real world or only inside whatever is left of Fuzzy's mind.

He caught his hands flying another sparrow across the wall and made them stop.

“What car was it that came out of your barn, Albert?” Alan asked patiently. Almost everyone in The Rock (including the man himself) called Albert Fuzzy, and Alan might try it himself after he'd been in town another ten years. Or maybe twenty.

“Just told you I never seen it before,” Fuzzy Martin said in a tone that said oh you damned fool so dearly he might as well have spoken it. “That's why I'm callin you, Chief. Sure wasn't one of mine. ”

A picture at last began to form in Alan's mind. With his cows, his kids, and his wife gone, Fuzzy Martin didn't need a whole lot of hard cash—the land had been his free and dear, except for taxes, when he inherited it from his dad. What money Fuzzy did see came from various odd sources. Alan believed, almost knew, in fact, that a bale or two of marijuana joined the hay in Fuzzy's barn loft every couple of months or so, and that was just one of Fuzzy's little scams. He had thought from time to time that he ought to make a serious effort to bust Fuzzy for possession with intent to sell, but he doubted if Fuzzy even smoked the stuff, let alone had brains enough to sell it. Most likely he just collected a hundred or two hundred dollars every now and again for providing storage space. And even in a little burg like Castle Rock, there were more important things to do than busting drunks for holding weed.

Another of Fuzzy's storage services—this a legal one, at least—was keeping cars in his barn for summer people. When Alan first came to town, Fuzzy's barn had been a regular parking garage. You could go in there and see as many as fifteen cars—most of them summer cars owned by people who had places on the lake—stored where the cows used to spend their winters. Fuzzy had knocked out the partitions to make one big garage and there the summer cars waited out the long months of fall and winter in the sweet hay-smelling shadows, their bright surfaces dulled by the steady fall of old chaff from the loft, parked bumper to bumper and side to side.

Over the years, Fuzzy's car-storage business had fallen off radically. Alan supposed that word of his careless smoking habits had gotten around and that had done it. No one wants to lose their car in a barn-fire, even if it's just an old lag you kept around to run errands when summer came. The last time he had been out to Fuzzy‘s, Alan had seen only two can in the barn: Ossie Brannigan's'59 T-Bird—a car which would have been a classic if it hadn't been so rusted out and beat-to-shit—and Thad Beaumont's old Ford Woody wagon.

Thad again.

Today it seemed that all roads led back to Thad Beaumont.

Alan sat up straighter in his chair, unconsciously pulling the telephone closer to him.

“It wasn't Thad Beaumont's old Ford?” he asked Fuzzy now. “You're sure?”

“ '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 how I don't store no car like that.
Second
thing I thought of was how anybody got it in there in the tint 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 ole 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 chowing 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?

“I 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.

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 be was afraid they would clabber it. He was not a rube; he was not susceptible to the blandishments of city slickers 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.

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.