"In the end they'd guthole you," he said quietly. "But the isn't the point."
"Then what is?"
"Annie, there are probably people in Sidewinder who at two and three years behind on their taxes. No one is taking their homes or auctioning their furnishings down at the town hall. The worst that happens to people like that most of the time is that they lose their town water. The Roydmans, now." He looked at her shrewdly. "You think they pay their taxes on time?"
"That white trash?" she nearly shrieked. "Hah!"
"I think they are on the prod for you, Annie." He did in fact believe this.
"I'll never go! I'll stay up here just to spite them! I'll stay up here and spit in their eye!"
"Can you come up with a hundred and six bucks to go with the four hundred in my wallet?"
"Yes." She was beginning to look cautiously relieved.
"Good enough," he said. "Then I suggest you pay their crappy tax-bill today." And while you're gone, I'll see what can do about those damned marks on the door. And when that's done, I believe I'll see if I can do anything about getting the f**k out of here, Annie. I'm a little tired of your hospitality.
He managed a smile.
"I think there must be at least seventeen cents there in the night-table," he said.
10
Annie Wilkes had her own interior set of rules; in her way she was strangely prim. She had made him drink water from a floor-bucket; had withheld his medication until he was in agony; had made him burn the only copy of his new novel; had handcuffed him and stuck a rag reeking of furniture polish in his mouth; but she would not take the money from his wallet. She brought it to him, the old scuffed Lord Buston he'd had since college, and put it in his hands.
All the ID had vanished. At that she had not scrupled. He did not ask her about it. It seemed wiser not to.
The ID was gone but the money was still there, the bills - mostly fifties - crisp and fresh. With a clarity that was both surprising and somehow ominous he saw himself pulling the Camaro up to the drive-in window of the Boulder Bank the day before he had finished Fast Cars and dropping his check for four hundred and fifty dollars, made out to cash and endorsed on the back, into the tray (perhaps even then the guys in the sweatshops had been talking vacation? - he thought it likely). The man who had done that had been free and healthy and feeling good, and had been without the wit to appreciate any of those fine things. The man who had done that had eyed the drive-up teller with a lively, interested eye - tall, blonde, wearing a purple dress that had cupped her curves with a lover's touch. And she had eyed him back... What would she think, he wondered, of that man as he looked now, forty pounds lighter and ten years older, his legs a pair of crooked useless horrors?
"Paul?"
He looked up at her, holding the money in one hand. There was four hundred and twenty, in all.
"Yes?" She was looking at him with that disconcerting expression of matemal love and tenderness - disconcerting because of the total solid blackness underlying it.
"Are you crying, Paul?" He brushed his cheek with his free hand and, yes, there was moisture there. He smiled and handed her the money. "A little. I was thinking how good you've been to me. Oh, I suppose a lot of people wouldn't understand... but I think I know." Her own eyes glistened as she leaned forward and gently touched his lips. He smelled something on her breath, something from the dark and sour chambers inside her, something that smelled like dead fish. It was a thousand times worse than the taste/smell of the dust-rag. It brought back the memory of her sour breath (!breathe goddammit BREATHE!) blowing down his throat like a dirty wind from hell. His stomach clenched, but he smiled at her.
"I love you, dear," she said.
"Would you put me in my chair before you go? I want to write."
"Of course." She hugged him. "Of course, my dear."
11
Her tenderness did not extend to leaving the bedroom door unlocked, but this presented no problem. He was not half-mad with pain and withdrawal symptoms this time. He had collected four of her bobby-pins as assiduously as a squirrel collects nuts for the winter, and had secreted them under his mattress along with the pills.
When he was sure she was really gone a not hanging around to see if he was going to "get up to didoes" (another Wilkesism for his growing lexicon), he rolled the wheelchair over to the bed and got the pins, along with the pitcher of water and the box of Kleenex from the night-table. Rolling the wheelchair with the Royal perched on the board in front of him was not very difficult - his arms had gotten a lot stronger. Annie Wilkes might be surprised to know just how strong they were now - and he sincerely hoped that someday soon she would be.
The Royal typewriter made a shitty writing machine, but as an exercise tool it was great. He had begun lifting it and setting it down whenever he was penned in the chair behind it and she was out of the room. Five lifts of six inches or so had been the best he could manage at first. Now he could do eighteen or twenty without a pause. Not bad when you considered the bastard weighed at least fifty pounds.
He worked on the lock with one of the bobby-pins, holding two spares in his mouth like a seamstress hemming a dress. He thought that the piece of bobby-pin still somewhere inside the lock might screw him up, but it didn't. He caught the rocker almost at once and pushed it up, drawing the lock's tongue along with it. He had just a moment to wonder if she might not have put a bolt on the outside of the door as well - he had tried very hard to seem weaker and sicker than he now really felt, but the suspicions of the true paranoiac spread wide and ran deep. Then the door was open.