He left the office in a slow walk, head down. Deke was padlocking the door of the dynamite shack, and when he turned to Alan, his face was long and unhappy. “There was a good man somewhere inside of Hugh Priest, Alan. I swear to God there was. A lot of times that man comes out. I seen it happen before. More often than most people’d believe.
With Hugh. He shrugged.
“Huh-uh. No soap.”
Alan nodded.
“Are you okay, Alan? You look like you come over funny.”
“I’m fine,” Alan said, smiling a little. But it was the truth; he had come over funny. Polly, too. And Hugh. And Brian Rusk. It seemed as if everyone had come over funny today.
“Want a glass of water or cold tea? I got some.”
“Thanks, but I better get going.”
“All right. Let me know how it turns out.”
That was something Alan couldn’t promise to do, but he had a sickening little feeling in the pit of his stomach that Deke would be able to read all about it for himself in a day or two. Or watch it on TV.
7
Lenny Partridge’s old Chevy Bel-Air pulled into one of the slant parking spaces in front of Needful Things shortly before four, and the man of the hour got out. Hugh’s fly was still unzipped, and he was still wearing the fox-tail around his neck. He crossed the sidewalk, his bare feet slapping on the hot concrete, and opened the door. The small silver bell overhead jingled.
The only person who saw him go in was Charlie Fortin. He was standing in the doorway of the Western Auto and smoking one of his stinky home-rolled cigarettes. “Old Hugh finally flipped,” Charlie said to no one in particular.
Inside, Mr. Gaunt looked at old Hugh with a pleasant, expectant little smile… as if barefooted, bare-chested men wearing motheaten fox-tails around their necks showed up in his shop every day.
He made a small check-mark on the sheet beside the cash register.
The last check-mark.
“I’m in trouble,” Hugh said, advancing on Mr. Gaunt. His eyes rolled from side to side in their sockets like pinballs. “I’m in a real mess this time.”
“I know,” Mr. Gaunt said in his most soothing voice.
“This seemed like the right place to come. I dunno-I keep dreaming about you. I… I didn’t know where else to turn.”
“This is the right place, Hugh.”
“He cut my tires Hugh whispered. “Beaufort, the bastard who owns The Mellow Tiger. He left a note. ’You know what I’ll come after next time Hubert,’ it said. I know what that means. You bet I do.” One of Hugh’s grubby, large-fingered hands caressed the mangy fur, and an expression of adoration spread across his face.
It would have been sappy if it had not been so clearly genuine.
“My beautiful, beautiful fox-tail.”
“Perhaps you ought to take care of him,” Mr. Gaunt suggested thoughtfully, “before he can take care of you. I know that sounds a little… well… extreme… but when you consider-”
“Yes! Yes!
That’s just what I want to do!”
“I think I have just the thing,” Mr. Gaunt said. He bent down, and when he straightened up he had an automatic pistol in his left hand. He pushed it across the glass top of the case. “Fully loaded.”
Hugh picked it up. His confusion seemed to blow away like smoke as the gun’s solid weight filled his hand. He could smell gungrease, low and fragrant.
“I… I left my wallet at home,” he said.
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that,” Mr. Gaunt told him.
“At Needful Things, Hugh, we insure the things we sell.” Suddenly his face hardened. His lips peeled back from his teeth and his eyes blazed. “Go get him!” he cried in a low, harsh voice. “Go get the bastard that wants to destroy what is yours! Go get him, Hugh!
Protect yourself! Protect your property!”
Hugh grinned suddenly. “Thanks, Mr. Gaunt. Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t mention it,” Mr. Gaunt said, dropping immediately back into his normal tone of voice, but the small silver bell was already jangling as Hugh went back out, stuffing the automatic into the sagging waistband of his trousers as he walked.
Mr. Gaunt went to the window and watched Hugh get behind the wheel of the tired Chevy and back it into the street. A Budweiser truck rolling slowly down Main Street blared its horn and swerved to avoid him.
“Go get him, Hugh,” Mr. Gaunt said in a low voice. Small wisps of smoke began to rise from his ears and his hair; thicker threads emerged from his nostrils and from between the square white tombstones of his teeth. “Get all of them you can. Party down, big fella.”
Mr. Gaunt threw back his head and began to laugh.
8
John LaPointe hurried toward the side door of the Sheriff’s Office, the one that gave on the Municipal Building parking lot. He was excited. Armed and dangerous. It wasn’t often that you got to assist in arresting an armed and dangerous suspect. Not in a sleepy little town like Castle Rock, anyway. He had forgotten all about his missing wallet (at least for the time being), and Sally Ratcliffe was even further from his mind.
He reached for the door just as someone opened it from the other side. All at once John was facing two hundred and twenty pounds of angry Phys Ed coach.
“Just the man I wanted to see,” Lester Pratt said in his new soft and silky voice. He held up a black leather wallet. “Lose something, you ugly two-timing gambling godless son of a bitch?”
John didn’t have the slightest idea what Lester Pratt was doing here, or how he could have found his lost wallet. He only knew that he was Clut’s designated backup and he had to get going right away.
“Whatever it is, I’ll talk to you about it later, Lester,” John said, and reached for his wallet. When Lester first pulled it back out of his reach and then brought it down hard, smacking him in the center of the face with it, John was more astounded than angry.
“Oh, I don’t want to talk,” Lester said in his new soft and silky voice. “I wouldn’t waste my time.” He dropped the wallet, grabbed John by the shoulders, picked him up, and threw him back into the Sheriff’s Office. Deputy LaPointe flew six feet through the air and landed on top of Norris Ridgewick’s desk. His butt skated across it, plowing a path through the heaped paperwork and knocking Norris’s IN/OUT basket onto the floor. John followed, landing on his back with a painful thump.
Sheila Brigham was staring through the dispatcher’s window, her mouth wide open.
John began to pick himself up. He was shaken and dazed, without the slightest clue as to what was going on here.
Lester was walking toward him in a fighting strut. His fists were held up in an old-fashioned John L. Sullivan pose that should have been comic but wasn’t. “I’m going to learn you a lesson,” Lester said in his new soft and silky voice. “I’m going to teach you what happens to Catholic fellows who steal Baptist fellows’ girls. I’m going to teach you all about it, and when I’m done, you’ll have it so right you’ll never forget it.”
Lester Pratt closed in to teaching distance.
9
Billy Tupper might not have been an intellectual, but he was a sympathetic ear, and a sympathetic ear was the best medicine for Henry Beaufort’s rage that afternoon. Henry drank his drink and told Billy what had happened… and as he talked, he felt himself calming down.
It occurred to him that if he had gotten the shotgun and)just kept rolling, he might have ended this day not behind his bar but behind those of the holding cell in the Sheriff’s Office. He loved his T-Bird a lot, but he began to realize he didn’t love it enough to go to prison for it. He could replace the tires, and the scratch down the side would eventually buff out. As for Hugh Priest, let the law take care of him.