Henry opened the box. It was lined with red velvet. He stuck his jittery, unstable hands in and pulled out the sawed-off Winchester. He started to break it, then realized there was no time.
He would just have to hope it was loaded.
He gathered his legs under him, getting ready to spring up and give Hugh what he sincerely hoped would be a big surprise.
18
Sheila realized John wasn’t going to get out from under the crazy man, who she now believed was Lester Platt or Pratt… the gym teacher at the high school, anyway. She didn’t think John could get out from under. Lester had stopped banging John’s head against the floor and had closed his big hands around John’s throat instead.
Sheila reversed the gun, locked her hands on the barrel, and cocked it back over her shoulder like Ted Williams. Then she brought it around in a hard, smooth swing.
Lester turned his head at the last moment, just in time to catch the gun’s steel-edged walnut stock between his eyes. There was a nasty crunch as the gunstock smashed a hole into Lester’s skull and turned his forebrain to jelly. It sounded as if someone had stepped very hard on a full box of popcorn. Lester Pratt was dead before he hit the floor.
Sheila Brigham looked at him and began to scream.
19
“Did you think I wouldn’t know who it was?” Buster Keeton was grunting as he dragged Norris-who was dazed but unhurt-the rest of the way out of the VW’s driver’s-side window. “Did you think I wouldn’t know, with your name right at the bottom of every goddam sheet of paper you taped up? Did you? Did you?”
He cocked one fist back to strike Norris, and Alan Pangborn slipped a handcuff around it just as neatly as you please.
“Huh!” Buster exclaimed, and wheeled ponderously around.
Inside the Municipal Building, someone started to scream.
Alan glanced in that direction, then used the cuff on the other end of the chain to pull Buster over to the open door of his own Cadillac. Buster flailed at him as he did so. Alan took several punches harmlessly on his shoulder, and snapped the free cuff around the doorhandle of the car.
He turned around and Norris was there. He had time to register the fact that Norris looked just terrible, and to dismiss it as a consequence of being rammed amidships by the Head Selectman.
“Come on,” he said to Norris. “We’ve got trouble.”
But Norris ignored him, at least for the moment. He brushed past
Alan and punched Buster Keeton squarely in the eye. Buster let out a startled squawk and fell back against the door of his car.
It was still open and his weight drove it shut, catching the tail of his sweat-soaked white shirt in the latch.
“That’s for the rat-trap, you fat shit!” Norris cried.
“I’ll get you!” Buster screamed back. “Don’t think I won’t!
I’ll get All of You People!”
“Get this,” Norris growled. He was moving in again with his fists cocked at the sides of his puffed-up pigeon chest when Alan grabbed him and hauled him back.
“Quit it!” he shouted into Norris’s face. “We’ve got trouble inside! Bad trouble!”
The scream lifted in the air again. People were gathering on the sidewalks of Lower Main Street now. Norris looked toward them, then back at Alan. His eyes had cleared, Alan saw with relief, and he looked like himself again. More or less.
“What is it, Alan? Something to do with him?” He jerked his chin toward the Cadillac. Buster was standing there, looking sullenly at them and plucking at the handcuff on his wrist with his free hand.
He seemed not to have heard the screams at all.
“No,” Alan said. “Have you got your gun?”
Norris shook his head.
Alan unsnapped the safety-strap on his holster, drew his service.38, and handed it to Norris.
“What about you, Alan?” Norris asked.
“I want my hands free. Come on, let’s go. Hugh Priest is in the office, and he’s gone crazy.”
20
Hugh Priest had gone crazy, all right-not much doubt about that but he was a good three miles from the Castle Rock Municipal Building.
“Let’s talk about-” he began, and that was when Henry Beaufort leaped up from behind the bar like a jack-in-the-box, blood soaking the right side of his shirt, the shotgun levelled.
Henry and Hugh fired at the same time. The crack of the automatic pistol was lost in the shotgun’s blurred, primal roar. Smoke and fire leaped from the truncated barrel. Hugh was lifted off his feet and driven across the room, bare heels dragging, his chest a disintegrating swamp of red muck. The gun flew out of his hand.
The ends of the fox-tail were burning.
Henry was thrown against the backbar as Hugh’s bullet punctured his right lung. Bottles tumbled and crashed all around him.
A large numbness swarmed through his chest. He dropped the shotgun and staggered toward the telephone. The air was full of crazy perfume: spilled booze and burning fox-hair. Henry tried to draw in breath, and although his chest heaved, he seemed to get no air. There was a thin, shrill sound as the hole in his chest sucked wind.
The telephone seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, but he finally got it up to his ear and pressed the button which automatically dialed the Sheriff’s Office.
Ring… ring… ring…
“What the fuck’s the matter with you people?” Henry gasped raggedly. “I’m dying up here! Answer the goddam telephone!”
But the telephone just went on ringing.
21
Norris caught up with Alan halfway down the alley and they walked side by side into the Municipal Building’s small parking lot. Norris was holding Alan’s service revolver with his finger curled around the trigger guard and the stubby barrel pointed up into the hot October sky. Sheila Brigham’s Saab was in the lot along with Unit 4, John LaPointe’s cruiser, but that was all. Alan wondered briefly where Hugh’s car was, and then the side door to the Sheriff’s Office burst open. Someone carrying the shotgun from Alan’s office in a pair of bloody hands bolted out. Norris levelled the short-barrelled.38 and slid his finger inside the trigger-guard.
Alan registered two things at once. The first was that Norris was going to shoot. The second was that the screaming person with the gun was not Hugh Priest but Sheila Brigham.
Alan Pangborn’s almost heavenly reflexes saved Sheila’s life that afternoon, but it was a very close thing. He didn’t bother trying to shout or even using his hand to deflect the pistol barrel. Neither would have stood much chance of success. He stuck out his elbow instead, then jerked it up like a man doing an enthusiastic buckand-wing at a country dance. It struck Norris’s gun-hand an instant before Norris fired, driving the barrel upward. The pistol-shot was an amplified whipcrack in the enclosed courtyard. A window in the Town Services Office on the second floor shattered.
Then Sheila dropped the shotgun she had used to brain Lester Pratt and was running toward them, screaming and weeping.
“Jesus,” Norris said in a small, shocked voice. His face was as pale as paper as he thrust the pistol, butt first, toward Alan. “I almost shot Sheila-oh dear Jesus Christ.”
“Alan!” Sheila was crying. “Thank God!”
She ran into him without slowing, almost knocking him over.
He holstered his revolver and then put his arms around her. She was trembling like an electric wire with too much current running through it. Alan suspected he was trembling pretty badly himself, and he had come close to wetting his pants. She was hysterical, blind with panic, and that was probably a blessing: he didn’t think she had the slightest idea how close she had come to taking a round.