Needful Things (82 page)

Most dedicated cocaine users are also dedicated nail-biters and Ace was no exception. He had no fingernails to pry with and he couldn't get the lid off. The paint around the rim had dried to an obstinate glue. With a grunt of frustration and rage, Ace pulled out his pocket-knife, got the blade under the can's rim, and levered the cover off. He peered in eagerly.

Bills!

Sheafs and sheafs of bills!

With a cry he seized them, pulled them out . . . and saw that his eagerness had deceived him. It was only more trading stamps. Red Ball Stamps this time, a kind which had been redeemable only south of the Mason-Dixon line . . . and there only until 1964, when the company had gone out of business.

“Shit fire and save matches!”
Ace cried. He threw the stamps aside. They unfolded and began to tumble away in the light, hot breeze that had sprung up. Some of them caught and fluttered from the weeds like dusty banners.
“Cunt! Bastard! Sonofawhore!”

He rooted in the can, even turned it over to see if there was anything taped to the bottom, and found nothing. He threw it away, stared at it for a moment, then rushed over and booted it like a soccer ball.

He felt in his pocket for the map again. There was one panicky second when he was afraid it wasn't there, that he had lost it somehow, but he had only pushed it all the way down to the bottom in his eagerness to get cracking. He yanked it out and looked at it. The other cross was out behind the barn . . . and suddenly a wonderful idea came into Ace's mind, lighting up the angry darkness in there like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July.

The can he had just dug up was a blind! Pop might have thought someone would tumble to the fact that he had marked his various stashes with flat rocks. Thus, he had practiced a little of the old bait-and-switch out here at the Camber place. Just to be safe. A hunter who found one useless treasure-trove would never guess that there was
another
stash,
right here on this same property but in a more out-of-the-way place . . .

“Unless they had the map,” Ace whispered. “Like
I
do.”

He grabbed the pick and shovel and raced for the barn, eyes wide, sweaty, graying hair matted to the sides of his head.

He saw the old Air-Flow trailer and ran toward it. He was almost there when his foot struck something and he fell sprawling to the ground. He was up in a moment, looking around. He saw what he had stumbled over at once.

It was a shovel. One with fresh dirt on the blade.

A bad feeling began to creep over Ace; a very bad feeling indeed. It began in his belly, then spread upward to his chest and down to his balls. His lips peeled back from his teeth, very slowly, in an ugly snarl.

He got to his feet and saw the rock marker lying nearby, dirt side up. It had been thrown aside. Someone had been here first . . . and not long ago, from the look. Someone had beaten him to the treasure.

“No,” he whispered. The word fell from his snarling mouth like a drop of tainted blood or infected saliva.
“No!”

Not far from the shovel and the uprooted rock, Ace saw a pile of loose dirt which had been scraped indifferently back into a hole. Ignoring both his own tools and the shovel which the thief had left behind, Ace fell on his knees again and began pawing dirt out of the hole. In no time at all, he had found the Crisco can.

He brought it out and pried off the lid.

There was nothing inside but a white envelope.

Ace took it out and tore it open. Two things fluttered out: a sheet of folded paper and a smaller envelope. Ace ignored the second envelope for the time being and unfolded the paper. It was a typed note. His mouth dropped open as he read his own name at the top of the sheet.

Dear Ace,

I can't be sure you'll find this, but there's no law against hoping. Sending you to Shawshank was fun, but this has been better. I wish I could see your face when you finish reading this!

Not long after I sent you up, I went to see Pop. I saw him pretty often—once a month, in fact. We had an arrangement: he gave me a hundred a month and I let him go on making his illegal loans. All very civilized. Halfway through this particular meeting, he excused himself to use the toilet—“something he et,” he said. Ha-ha! I took the opportunity to peek in his desk, which he had left unlocked. Such carelessness was not like him, but I think he was afraid he might load his pants if he didn't go “to visit his Uncle John” right away. Ha!

I only found one item of interest, but that one was a corker. It looked like a map. There were lots of crosses on it, but one of the crosses—the one marking this spot—was marked in red. I put the map back before Pop returned. He never knew I looked at it. I came out here right after he died and dug up this Crisco can. There was better than two hundred thousand dollars in it, Ace. Don't worry, though—I decided to “share and share alike” and am going to leave you exactly what you deserve.

Welcome back to town, Ace-Hole!

Yours sincerely,

Alan Pangborn

Castle County Sheriff

P.S.: A word to the wise, Ace: now that you know, “take your lumps” and forget the whole thing. You know the old saying—finders keepers. If you ever try to brace me about your uncle's money, I will tear you a new asshole and stuff your head into it.

Trust me on this.

A.P.

Ace let the sheet of paper slide from his numb fingers and opened the second envelope.

A single one-dollar bill fell out of it.

I decided to “share and share alike” and am going to leave you exactly what you deserve.

“You crab-infested
bastard,”
Ace whispered, and picked up the dollar bill with shaking fingers.

Welcome back to town, Ace-Hole!

“You
SONOFAWHORE!”
Ace screamed so loudly that he felt something in his throat strain and almost rupture. The echo came back dimly: . . .
whore . . . whore . . . whore . . .

He began to tear the dollar up, then forced his fingers to relax.

Huh-uh. No way, José.

He was going to save this. The son of a bitch had wanted Pop's money, had he? He had stolen what rightfully belonged to Pop's last living relative, had he? Well, all right. Good.
Fine.
But he should have
all
of it. And Ace intended to see that the Sheriff had just that. So, after he removed Pusbag's testicles with his pocketknife, he intended to stuff this dollar bill into the bloody hole where they had been.

“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.

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 locals—surprisingly few, if anyone had bothered to notice such things—rubbernecked. A TV correspondent stood in the glare of a hi-intensity 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

CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

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 a while, 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 Rock—the black pearls, the holy relics, the carnival glass, the pipes, the old comic books, the baseball cards, the antique kaleidoscopes—were 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.