He walked up the block and around the corner, not noticing the bright yellow van parked twenty or thirty yards farther up, or the man who sat inside it (Buster had moved to the passenger seat now), watching him.
As he entered the alley, he bumped into a man who was wearing a tweed cap pulled low over his forehead.
“Ace said.
“Hey, watch where you’re going, Daddy-o, The man in the tweed cap raised his head, bared his teeth at Ace, and snarled. At the same moment he pulled an automatic from his pocket and pointed it in Ace’s general direction. “Don’t fuck with me, my friend, unless you want some, too.”
Ace raised his hands and stepped back. He was not afraid; he was utterly astonished. “Not me, Mr. Nelson,” he said. “Leave me out of it.”
“Right,” the man in the tweed cap said. “Have you seen that cocksucker jewett?”
“Uh… the one from the Junior high?”
“The Middle School, right-are there any otherjewetts in town?
Get real, for Christ’s sake!”
“I just got here,” Ace said cautiously. “I really haven’t seen anyone, Mr. Nelson.”
“Well, I’m going to find him, and he’s going to be one sorry sack of shit when I do. He killed my parakeet and shit on my mother.”
George T. Nelson narrowed his eyes and added: “This is a good night to stay out of my way.”
Ace didn’t argue.
Mr. Nelson stuffed the gun back into his pocket and disappeared around the corner, walking with the purposeful strides of one who is indeed highly pissed off. Ace stood right where he was for a moment, hands still raised. Mr. Nelson taught wood shop and metal shop at the high school. Ace had always believed he was one of those guys who wouldn’t have nerve enough to slap a deerfly if it lit on his eyeball, but he thought he might just have to change his opinion on that. Also, Ace had recognized the gun. He should have; he had brought a whole case of them back from Boston just the night before.
12
“Ace!” Mr. Gaunt said. “You’re just in time.”
“I need a gun,” Ace said. “Also, some more of that high-class boogerjuice, if you’ve got any.”
“Yes, yes… in time. All things in time. Help me with this table, Ace.”
“I’m going to kill Pangborn,” Ace said. “He stole my fucking treasure and I’m going to kill him.”
Mr. Gaunt looked at Ace with the flat yellow stare of a cat stalking a mouse… and in that moment, Ace felt like a mouse.
“Don’t waste my time telling me things I already know,” he said.
“If you want my help, Ace, help me.”
Ace grabbed one side of the table, and they carried it back into the storeroom. Mr. Gaunt bent down and picked up a sign which leaned against the wall.
THIS TIME I’M REALLY CLOSED, it read. He put it on the door and then shut it. He was turning the thumb-lock before Ace realized there had been nothing on the sign to hold it in place-no tack, no tape, no nothing. But it had stayed up just the same.
Then his eye fell upon the crates which had contained the automatic pistols and the clips of ammunition. There were only three guns and three clips left.
“Holy Jesus! Where’d they all go?”
“Business has been good this evening, Ace,” Mr. Gaunt said, rubbing his long-fingered hands together. “Extremely good. And it’s going to get even better. I have work for you to do.”
“I told you,” Ace said. “The Sheriff stole my-” Leland Gaunt was upon him before Ace even saw him move.
Those long, ugly hands seized him by the front of the shirt and lifted him into the air as if he were made of feathers. A startled cry fell out of his mouth. The hands which held hirri were like iron.
Mr. Gaunt lifted him high, and Ace suddenly found himself looking down into that blazing, hellish face with only the haziest idea of how he had gotten there. Even in the extremity of his sudden terror, he noticed that smoke or perhaps it was steam-was coming out of Mr. Gaunt’s ears and nostrils. He looked like a human dragon.
“You tell me NOTHING!” Mr. Gaunt screamed up at him. His tongue licked out between those jostling tombstone teeth, and Ace saw it came to a double point, like the tongue of a snake. “I tell you EVERYTHING!
Shut up when you are in the company of your elders and betters, Ace! Shut up and listen! Shut up and listen! SHUT UP AND LISTEN!”
He whirled Ace twice around his head like a carnival wrestler giving his opponent an airplane spin, and threw him against the far wall. Ace’s head connected with the plaster. A large fireworks display went off in the center of his brain. When his vision cleared, he saw Leland Gaunt bearing down on him. His face was a horror of eyes and teeth and blowing steam.
“No!” Ace shrieked. “No, Mr. Gaunt, please! NO!”
The hands had become talons, the nails grown long and sharp in a moment’s time… or were they that way all along? Ace’s mind gibbered. Maybe they were that way all along and you just didn’t see it.
They cut through the fabric of Ace’s shirt like razors, and Ace was jerked back up into that fuming face.
“Are you ready to listen, Ace?” Mr. Gaunt asked. Hot blurts of steam stung Ace’s cheeks and mouth with each word. “Are you ready, or should I just unzip your worthless guts and have done with it?”
“Yes!” he sobbed. “I mean no! I’ll listen!”
“Are you going to be a good little errand boy and follow orders?”
“Yes!”
“Do you know what will happen if you don’t?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“You’re disgusting, Ace,” Mr. Gaunt said. “I like that in a person.” He slung Ace against the wall. Ace slid down it into a loose kneeling position, gasping and sobbing. He looked down at the floor.
He was afraid to gaze directly into the monster’s face.
“If you should even think of going against my wishes, Ace, I’ll see that you get the grand tour of hell. You’ll have the Sheriff, don’t worry. For the moment, however, he is out of town. Now. Stand up.”
Ace got slowly to his feet. His head throbbed; his tee-shirt hung in ribbons.
"Let me ask you something.” Mr. Gaunt was urbane and smiling again, not a hair out of place.
"Do you like this little town? Do you love it? Do you keep snapshots of it on the walls of your shitty little shack to remind yourself of its rustic charm on those days when the bee stings and the dog bites?”
“Hell, no,” Ace said in an unsteady voice. His voice rose and fell with the pounding of his heart. He made it to his feet only with the greatest effort. His legs felt as if they were made of spaghetti.
He stood with his back to the wall, watching Mr. Gaunt warily.
“Would it appall you if I said I wanted you to blow this shitty little burg right off the face of the map while you wait for the Sheriff to come back?”
“I… I don’t know what that word means,” Ace said nervously.
“I’m not surprised. But I think you understand what I mean, Ace.
Don’t you?”
Ace thought back. He thought back all the way to a time, many years ago, when four snotnosed kids had cheated him and his friends (Ace had had friends back in those days, or at least a reasonable approximation thereof) out of something Ace had wanted. They had caught one of the snotnoses-Gordie LaChance-later on and had beaten the living shit out of him, but it hadn’t mattered. These days LaChance was a bigshot writer living in another part of the state, and he probably wiped his ass with ten-dollar bills. Somehow the snotnoses had won, and things had never been the same for Ace after that. That was when his luck had turned bad. Doors that had been open to him had begun to close, one by one. Little by little he had begun to realize that he was not a king and Castle Rock was not his kingdom. If that had ever been true, those days had begun to pass that Labor Day weekend when he was sixteen, when the snots had cheated him and his friends out of what was rightfully theirs. By the time Ace was old enough to drink legally in The Mellow Tiger, he had gone from being a king to being a soldier without a uniform, skulking through enemy territory.