The Dark Half (55 page)

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.

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 he 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.

Not even a hint of these thoughts showed in his voice as he answered.

“This is Alan Pangborn,” he said crisply. “Sheriff, Castle County. I was calling for Thad Beaumont. To whom am I speaking?”

There was a pause. Then the voice replied, “This is Steve Harrison, Sheriff. Maine State Police. I was going to call you. Should have done it at least an hour ago. But things here . . . things here are fucked all the way to the ionosphere. Can I ask why you called?”

Without a pause for thought—that would certainly have changed his response—Alan lied. He did it without asking himself why he was doing it. That would come later.

“I called to check in with Thad,” he said. “It's been awhile, and I wanted to know how they're doing. I gather there's been trouble. ”

“Trouble so big you wouldn't believe it,” Harrison said grimly. “Two of my men are dead. We're pretty sure Beaumont did it. ”

Alan felt
déjà vu
not just stealing into his mind but marching over his whole body like an invading army. Thad, it always came back to Thad. Of course. He was intelligent, he was peculiar, and he was, by his own admission, suffering from symptoms which suggested a brain tumor.

“What happened?” he asked Trooper Harrison.

“He cut Tom Chatterton and Jack Eddings damned near to pieces, that's what happened!” Harrison shouted, startling Alan with the depth of his fury. “He's got his family with him, and I
want
that son of a bitch!”

“What . . . how did he get away?”

“I don't have the time to go into it,” Harrison said. “It's a sorry fucking story, Sheriff. He was driving a red-and-gray Chevrolet Suburban, a goddamn whale on wheels, but we think he must have ditched it someplace and switched. He's got a summer place down there. You know the locale and the layout, right?”

“Yes,” Alan said. His mind was racing. He looked at the dock on the wall and saw it was a minute or so shy of three-forty. Time. It all came back to time. And he realized he hadn't asked Fuzzy Martin what time it had been when he saw the Toronado rolling out of his barn. It hadn't seemed important at the moment. Now it did. “What time did you lose him, Trooper Harrison?”

He thought he could feel Harrison fuming at that, but when he answered, he did so without anger or defensiveness. “Around twelve-thirty. He must have taken awhile to switch cars, if that's what he did, and then he went to his house in Ludlow—”

“Where was he when you lost him? How far away from his house?”

“Sheriff, I'd like to answer all your questions, but there's no time. The point is, if he's headed for his place down there—it seems unlikely, but the guy's crazy, so you never know—he won't have arrived yet, but he'll be there soon. Him and his whole fam' damly. It would be very nice if you and a couple of your men were there to greet him. If something pops, you radio Henry Payton at the Oxford State Police Barracks and we'll send more back-up than you've ever seen in your life.
Don't try to apprehend him yourself under any circumstances.
We're assuming the wife's been taken hostage, if she's not dead already, and that goes double for the kids. ”

“Yes, he'd have to have taken his wife by force if he killed the Troopers on duty, wouldn't he?” Alan agreed, and found himself thinking,
But you'd make them part of it if you could, wouldn't you? Because your mind is made up and you're not going to change it
.
Hell, man, you're not even going to think, straight or otherwise, until the
blood
dries
on your friends.

There were a dozen questions he wanted to ask, and the answers to those would probably produce another four dozen—but Harrison was right about one thing. There wasn't time.

He hesitated for a moment, wanting very badly to ask Harrison about the most important thing of all, wanting to ask the jackpot question: was Harrison sure Thad had had
time
to get to his house, kill the men on guard there, and spirit his family away, all before the first reinforcements arrived? But to ask the question would be to claw at the painful wound this Harrison was trying to deal with right now, because buried in the question was that condemning, irrefutable judgment:
You lost him. Somehow you lost him. You had a job to do and you fucked it up.

“Can I depend on you, Sheriff?” Harrison asked, and now his voice didn't sound angry, only tired and harried, and Alan's heart went out to him.

“Yes. I'll have the place covered almost immediately. ”

“Good man. And you'll liaise with the Oxford Barracks?”

“Affirmative. Henry Payton's a friend. ”

“Beaumont is dangerous, Sheriff.
Extremely
dangerous. If he does show up, you watch your ass. ”

“I will. ”

“And keep me informed.” Harrison broke the connection without saying goodbye.

His mind—the part of it that busied itself with protocol, anyway—awoke and started asking questions . . . or trying to. Alan decided he didn't have time for protocol. Not in any of its forms. He was simply going to keep all possible circuits open and proceed. He had a feeling things had reached the point where some of those circuits would soon begin to dose of their own accord.

But he didn't think he was ready to do that, either. Norris Ridgewick, the one he would have called, was off duty and out of town. John LaPointe was still laid up with poison ivy. Seat Thomas was out on patrol. Andy Clutterbuck was here, but Clut was a rookie and this was a nasty piece of work.

He would roll this one on his own for awhile.

You're crazy!
Protocol screamed in his mind.

“I might be getting there, at that,” Alan said out loud. He looked up Albert Martin's number in the phone book and called him back to ask the questions he should have asked the first time.

“What time did you see the Toronado backing out of your barn, Fuzzy?” he asked when Martin answered, and thought:
He won't know. Hell, I'm not entirely sure he knows how to tell time.

But Fuzzy promptly proved him a liar. “Just a cunt's hair past three Chief.” Then after a considering pause: “ 'Scuse my Fran-kais. ”

“You didn't call until—” Alan glanced at the day-sheet, where he had logged Fuzzy's call without even thinking about it. “Until three-twenty-eight. ”

“Had to think her over,” Fuzzy said. “Man should always look before he leaps. Chief, at least that's the way I see her. Before I called you, I went down to the barn to see if whoever got the car was up to any other ructions in there. ”

Ructions,
Alan thought, bemused.
Probably checked the bale of pot in the loft while you were at it, didn't you, Fuzzy?

“Had he been?”

“Been what?”

“Up to any other ructions. ”

“Nope. Don't believe so. ”

“What condition was the lock in?”

“Open,” Fuzzy said pithily.

“Smashed?”

“Nope. Just hangin in the hasp with the arm popped up. ”

“Key, do you think?”

“Don't know where the sonofawhore could've come by one. I think he picked it. ”

“Was he alone in the car?” Alan asked. “Could you tell that?”

Fuzzy paused, thinking it over. “I couldn't tell for sure,” he said at last. “I know what you're thinkin, Chief—if I could make out the breed o' plate and read that smart-ass sticker, I ought to been able to make out how many folks was in it. But the sun was on the glass, and I don't think it was ordinary glass, either. I think it had some tint to it. Not a whole lot, but some. ”

“Okay, Fuzzy. Thanks. We'll check it out. ”

“Well, he's gone from here,” Fuzzy said, and then added in a lightning flash of deduction: “But he must be
somewhere. ”

“That's very true,” Alan said. He promised to tell Fuzzy “how it all warshed out” and hung up. He pushed away from his desk and looked at the clock.

Three,
Fuzzy had said.
Just a cunt's hair past three. 'Scuse my Fran-kais.

Alan didn't think there was any way Thad could have gotten from Ludlow to Castle Rock in three hours short of rocket travel, not with a side-trip back to his house thrown in for good measure—a little side-trip during which, incidentally, he had kidnapped his wife and kids and killed a couple of State Troopers. Maybe if it had been a straight shot right from Ludlow, but to come from someplace else, stop in Ludlow, and then get here in time to pick a lock and drive away in a Toronado he just happened to have conveniently stashed in Fuzzy Martin's barn? No way.

But suppose someone
else
had killed the Troopers at the Beaumont house and snatched Thad's people? Someone who didn't have to mess around losing a police escort, switching vehicles, and making side-trips? Someone who had simply piled Liz Beaumont and her twins into a car and headed for Castle Rock? Alan thought
they
could have gotten here in time for Fuzzy Martin to have seen them at just past three. They could have done it without even breathing hard.

The police—read Trooper Harrison, at least for the time being—thought it had to be Thad, but Harrison and his
compadres
didn't know about the Toronado.

Mississippi plates, Fuzzy had said.

Mississippi was George Stark's home state, according to Thad's fictional biography of the man. If Thad was schizo enough to think he was Stark, at least some of the time, he might well have provided himself with a black Toronado to enhance the illusion, or fantasy, or whatever it was . . . but in order to get plates, he'd not only have to have visited Mississippi, he'd have to claim residency there.

But it wasn't Thad's car. Couldn't have been. Liz would have known, wouldn't she?

Then there was the locked door. How could Thad have gotten into the barn without breaking the lock? He was a writer and a teacher, not a cracksman.

Duplicate
key
, his mind. whispered, but Alan didn't mink so. If Fuzzy
was
storing wacky tobaccy in there from time to time, Alan thought Fuzzy would be pretty careful of where he left his keys lying around, no matter how careless he was of his cigarette ends.

And one final question, the killer: How come Fuzzy had never seen that black Toronado before, if it had been in his barn all along? How could that be?

Try
this,
a voice in the back of his mind whispered as he grabbed his hat and left the office.
This is a pretty
funny idea, Alan. You'll laugh. You'll laugh like hell. Suppose Thad Beaumont was right all the way from the jump? Suppose there really is a monster named George Stark running around out there . . . and the elements of his life, the elements Thad created, come into being when he needs them? WHEN he needs them, but not always WHERE he needs them. Because they'd always show up at places connected to the primary creator's life. So Stark would have to get his car out of storage where Thad stores his, just like he had to start from the graveyard where Thad symbolically buried him. Don't you love it? Isn't it a scream?

He didn't love it. It wasn't a scream. It wasn't even remotely funny. It drew an ugly scratch not just across everything he believed but across the way he had been taught to
think.

He found himself remembering something Thad had said.
I don't know who I am when I'm writing.
That wasn't exact, but it was close.
And what's even more amazing, it never occurred to me to wonder until now.