The explosions meant nothing to him. The jagged, burning hole in the line of buildings on the far side of Main Street meant nothing to him.
The rubble of wood and glass and brick in the street meant nothing to him. Castle Rock and all the people who lived there, Polly Chalmers among them, meant nothing to him. He had an errand to do in Mechanic Falls, thirty miles from here. That meant something. In fact, it meant everything.
Alan strode around to the driver’s side of the station wagon.
He tossed his gun, his flashlight, and the joke can of nuts on the seat. In his mind, his hands were already around Ace Merrill’s throat and starting to squeeze.
5
“HALT!” Norris screamed again. “HALT RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!”
He was thinking it was a most incredibly lucky break. He was less than sixty yards from the holding cell where he intended to store Dan Keeton for safekeeping. As for the other fellow… well, that would depend on what the two of them had been up to, wouldn’t it? They weren’t exactly wearing the expressions of men who have been ministering to the sick and comforting the griefstricken.
Trooper Price looked from Norris to the men standing by the old-fashioned board sign which read CASTLE COUNTY COURTHOUSE. Then he looked back at Norris again. Ace and Zippy’s Dad looked at each other.
Then both of them eased their hands downward, toward the butts of the guns which protruded over the waistbands of their pants.
Norris had pointed the barrel of his revolver skyward, as he had been taught to do in situations like this. Now, still following procedure, he clasped his right wrist in his left fist and levelled the revolver. If the books were right, they would not realize that the muzzle was pointed directly between them; each would believe Norris was aiming at him. “Move your hands away from your weapons, my friends.
Do it now!”
Buster and his companion exchanged another glance and dropped their hands to their sides.
Norris snapped a look at the Trooper. “You,” he said. “Price.
Want to give me a little help here? If you’re not too tired, that is.”
“What are you doing?” Price asked. He sounded worried and unwilling to pitch in. The night’s activities, with the hammering demolition of the bridge to cap them, had reduced him to bystander status. He apparently felt uncomfortable about stepping back into a more active role. Things had gotten too big too fast.
“Arresting these two boogers,” Norris snapped. “What in the hell does it look like?”
“Arrest this, fellow,” Ace said, and flipped Norris the bird.
Buster uttered a high, yodelling laugh.
Price looked at them nervously and then returned his troubled gaze to Norris. “Uh… on what charge?”
Buster’s friend laughed.
Norris directed his full attention back to the two men, and was alarmed to see their positions relative to each other had changed.
When he had thrown down on them, they had been almost shoulder to shoulder. Now they were almost five feet apart, and still sidling.
“Standstill!” he bawled. They stopped and exchanged another glance. “Move back together!”
They only stood there in the pouring rain, hands dangling, looking at him.
“I’m arresting them on an illegal-weapons charge to start with!”
Norris yelled furiously to Trooper Joe Price. “Now get your thumb out of your butt and give me a help!”
This shocked Price into action. He tried to take his own revolver out of its holster, discovered the safety strap was still on, and began fumbling with it. He was still fumbling when the barber shop and the funeral home blew up.
Buster, Norris, and Trooper Price all looked upstreet. Ace did not. He had been waiting for just this golden moment. He pulled the automatic from his belt with the speed of a Western quick-draw artist and fired. The bullet took Norris high in the left shoulder, clipping his lung and smashing his collarbone. Norris had taken a step away from the brick wall when he noticed the two men drifting apart; now he was driven back against it. Ace fired again, chipping a crater in the brick an inch from Norris’s ear. The ricochet made a sound like a very large, very angry insect.
“oh Christ!” Trooper Price screamed, and began to labor more enthusiastically to free the safety strap over the butt of his gun.
“Burn that guy, Dad!” Ace yelled. He was grinning. He fired at Norris again, and this third bullet tore a hot groove in the skinny Deputy’s left side as he collapsed to his knees. Lightning flashed overhead. Incredibly, Norris could still hear brick and wood from the latest explosions rattling down on the street.
Trooper Price at long last managed to unsnap the strap over his gun. He was pulling it free when a bullet from the automatic Keeton held took his head off from the eyebrows on up. Price was hammered out of his boots and thrown against the brick wall of the alley.
Norris raised his own gun once more. It seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Still holding it in both hands, he aimed at Keeton.
Buster was a clearer target than his friend. More important, Buster had just killed a cop, and that shit most definitely did not go down in Castle Rock. They were hicks, maybe, but not barbarians.
Norris pulled the trigger at the same moment Ace tried to shoot him again.
The recoil of his revolver sent Norris flying backward. Ace’s bullet buzzed through empty air where his head had been half a second before. Buster Keeton also went flying backward, hands clapped to his belly. Blood poured through his fingers.
Norris lay against the brick wall near Trooper Price, panting harshly, one hand pressed against his wounded shoulder. Christ, this has been a really lousy day, he thought.
Ace levelled the automatic at him, then thought better of itat least for the time being. He went to Buster instead and dropped on one knee beside him. North of them, the bank went up in a roar of fire and pulverized granite. Ace didn’t even look in that direction. He moved old Dad’s hands to get a better look at the wound. He was sorry this had happened. He had been getting to like old Dad pretty well.
Buster screamed. “Oh, it hurts! Oh, it hurrrrts!”
Ace just bet it did. Old Dad had taken a.45 slug just above his belly-button. The entrance hole was the size of a headbolt. Ace didn’t have to roll him over to know the exit hole would be the size of a coffee cup, probably with chunks of old Dad’s spine sticking out of it like bloody candy-canes.
“It hurrrts! HURRRRRRTS!” Buster screamed up into the rain.
“Yeah.” Ace put the muzzle of the automatic against Buster’s temple. “Tough luck, Dad. I’m going to give you some painkiller.”
He pulled the trigger three times. Buster’s body jumped and was still.
Ace got to his feet, meaning to finish the goddam Deputy-if there was anything left to finish-when a gun roared and a bullet whined through the windy air less than a foot over his head. Ace ’de the Slier’if’s looked up and saw another cop standing just outsi Office door to the parking lot. This one looked older than God.
He was shooting at Ace with one hand while the other pressed against his chest above his heart.
Seat Thomas’s second try plowed into the earth right next to Ace, splashing muddy water on the toes of his engineer boots. The old buzzard couldn’t shoot for shit, but Ace suddenly realized he had to get the hell out of here, anyway. They had put enough dynamite in the courthouse to blow the whole building sky-high, they had set the timer for five minutes, and here he was, all but leaning against it while fucking Methuselah took potshots at him.