“You want the money, Daddy-O?” Ace asked in a soft, musing voice.
“Okay. That’s okay. No problem. No… fucking… problem.”
He got to his feet and began walking back toward the car in a stiff, staggering version of his usual hood strut.
By the time he got there, he was almost running.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1
By quarter to six, a weird twilight had begun to creep over Castle Rock; thunderheads were stacking up on the southern horizon. Low, distant boomings muttered over the woods and fields from that direction. The clouds were moving toward town, growing as they came.
The streetlights, governed by a master photoelectric cell, came on a full half hour earlier than they usually did at that time of year.
Lower Main Street was a crowded confusion. It had been overrun by State Police vehicles and TV newsvans. Radio calls crackled and entwined in the hot, still air. TV technicians paid out cable and yelled at the people-kids, mostly-who tripped over the loose lengths of it before they could anchor it temporarily to the pavement with duct tape. Photographers from four daily papers stood outside the barricades in front of the Municipal Building and took stills which would appear on front pages the following day. A few localssurprisingly few, if anyone had bothered to notice such thingsrubbernecked. A TV correspondent stood in the glare of a hiintensity lamp and taped his report with the Municipal Building in the background. “A senseless wave of violence swished through Castle Rock this afternoon,” he began, then stopped. “Swished?”
he asked himself disgustedly. “Shit, let’s take it again from the top.”
To his left, a TV-dude from another station was watching his crew prepare for what would be a live feed in less than twenty minutes.
More of the onlookers had been drawn to the familiar faces of the TV correspondents than to the barricades, where there had been nothing to see since two orderlies from Medical Assistance had brought out the unfortunate Lester Pratt in a black plastic bag, loaded him into the back of their ambulance, and driven away.
Upper Main, away from the blue strobes of the State Police cruisers and the bright pools of the TV lights, was almost entirely deserted.
Almost.
Every now and then a car or a pick-up truck would park in one of the slant spaces in front of Needful Things. Every now and then a pedestrian would saunter up to the new shop, where the display lights were off and the shade was pulled down on the door under the canopy.
Every now and then one of the rubberneckers on Lower Main would break away from the shifting knot of onlookers and walk up the street, past the vacant lot where the Emporium Galorium had once stood, past You Sew and Sew, closed and dark, to the new store.
No one noticed this trickle of visitors-not the police, not the camera crews, not the correspondents, not the majority of the bystanders. They were looking at THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, and their backs were turned to the place where, less than three hundred yards away, the crime was still going on.
If some disinterested observer had been keeping an eye on Needful Things, he or she would have quickly detected a pattern.
The visitors approached. The visitors saw the sign in the window which read
The visitors stepped back, identical expressions of frustration and distress on their faces-they looked like hurting junkies who had discovered the pusherman wasn’t where he’d promised to be. What do I do now? their faces said. Most stepped forward to read the sign again, as if a second, closer scrutiny would somehow change the message.
A few got into their cars and left or wandered down toward the Municipal Building to stare at the free show for awhile, looking dazed and vaguely disappointed. On the faces of most, however, an expression of sudden comprehension dawned. They had the look of people suddenly understanding some basic concept, like how to diagram simple sentences or reduce a pair of fractions to their lowest common denominator.
These people walked around the corner to the service alley which ran behind the business buildings on Main Street-the alley where Ace had parked the Tucker Talisman the night before.
Forty feet down, an oblong of yellow light fell out of an open door and across the patched concrete. This light grew slowly brighter as day slipped into evening. A shadow lay in the center of the oblong, like a silhouette cut from mourner’s crepe. The shadow belonged, of course, to Leland Gaunt.
He had placed a table in the doorway. On it was a Roi-Tan cigar box. He put the money which his customers tendered into this box and made change from it. These patrons approached hesitantly, even fearfully in some cases, but all of them had one thing in common: they were angry people with heavy grudges to tote. A few-not many-turned away before they reached Mr. Gaunt’s makeshift counter. Some went running, with the wide eyes of men and women who have glimpsed a frightful fiend licking its chops in the shadows.
Most, however, stayed to do business. And as Mr. Gaunt bantered with them, treating this odd back-door commerce as an amusing diversion at the end of a long day, they relaxed.
Mr. Gaunt had enjoyed his shop, but he never felt so comfortable behind plate-glass and under a roof as he did here, on the edge of the air, with the first breezes of the coming storm stirring his hair. The shop, with its clever display lights on ceiling-mounted tracks, was all right… but this was better. This was always better.
He had begun business many years ago-as a wandering peddler on the blind face of a distant land, a peddler who carried his wares on his back, a peddler who usually came at the fall of darkness and was always gone the next morning, leaving bloodshed, horror, and unhappiness behind him. Years later, in Europe, as the Plague raged and the deadcarts rolled, he had gone from town to town and country to country in a wagon drawn by a slat-thin white horse with terrible burning eyes and a tongue as black as a killer’s heart. He had sold his wares from the back of the wagon… and was gone before his customers, who paid with small, ragged coins or even in barter, could discover what they had really bought.
Times changed; methods changed; faces, too. But when the faces were needful they were always the same, the faces of sheep who have lost their shepherd, and it was with this sort of commerce that he felt most at home, most like that wandering peddler of old, standing not behind a fancy counter with a Sweda cash register nearby but behind a plain wooden table, making change out of a cigar-box and selling them the same item over and over and over again.
The goods which had so attracted the residents of Castle Rockthe black pearls, the holy relics, the carnival glass, the pipes, the old comic books, the baseball cards, the antique kaleidoscopeswere all gone. Mr. Gaunt had gotten down to his real business, and at the end of things, the real business was always the same. The ultimate item had changed with the years, just like everything else, but such changes were surface things, frosting of different flavors on the same dark and bitter cake.
At the end, Mr. Gaunt always sold them weapons… and they always bought.
“Why, thank you, Mr. Warburton!” Mr. Gaunt said, taking a five-dollar bill from the black janitor. He handed him back a single and one of the automatic pistols Ace had brought from Boston.
“Thank you, Miss Milliken!” He took ten and gave back eight.
He charged them what they could afford-not a penny more or a penny less. Each according to his means was Mr. Gaunt’s motto, and never mind each according to his needs, because they were all needful things, and he had come here to fill their emptiness and end their aches.