It occurred to him that if he had gotten the shotgun and)just kept rolling, he might have ended this day not behind his bar but behind those of the holding cell in the Sheriff's Office. He loved his T-Bird a lot, but he began to realize he didn't love it enough to go to prison for it. He could replace the tires, and the scratch down the side would eventually buff out. As for Hugh Priest, let the law take care of him.
He finished the drink and stood up.
"You still goin after him, Mr. Beaufort?" Billy asked apprehensively.
"I wouldn't waste my time," Henry said, and Billy breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm going to let Alan Pangborn take care of him.
Isn't that what I pay my taxes for, Billy?"
"I guess so." Billy looked out the window and brightened a little more. A rusty old car, a car which had once been white but was now a faded no-color-call it Dirt Road Gray-was coming up the hill toward The Mellow Tiger, spreading a thick blue fog of exhaust behind it. "Look!
It's old Lenny! I ain't seen him in a coon's age!"
"Well, we still don't open until five," Henry said. He went behind the bar to use the telephone. The box containing the sawedoff shotgun was still on the bar. I think I was planning to use that, he mused. I think I really was. What the hell gets into peoplesome kind of poison?
Billy walked toward the door as Lenny's old car pulled into the parking lot.
"Lester-" John LaPointe began, and that was when a fist almost as large as a Daisy canned ham-but much harder-collided with the center of his face. There was a dirty crunching sound as his nose broke in a burst of horrible pain. John's eyes squeezed shut and brightly colored sparks of light fountained up in the darkness. He went reeling and flailing across the room, waving his arms, fighting a losing battle to stay on his feet. Blood was pouring out of his nose and over his mouth. He struck the bulletin board and knocked it off the wall.
Lester began to walk toward him again, his brow wrinkled into a beetling frown of concentration below his screaming haircut.
In the dispatcher's office, Sheila got on the radio and began yelling for Alan.
Frank Jewett was on the verge of leaving the home of his good old "friend" George T. Nelson when he had a sudden cautionary thought.
10
This thought was that, when George T. Nelson arrived home to find his bedroom trashed, his coke flushed, and the likeness of his mother beshitted, he might come looking for his old partybuddy. Frank decided it would be nuts to leave without finishing what he had started... and if finishing what he had started meant blowing the blackmailing bastard's oysters off, so be it. There was a gun cabinet downstairs, and the idea of doing the job with one of George T. Nelson's own guns felt like poetic justice to Frank.
If he was unable to unlock the gun cabinet, or force the door, he would help himself to one of his old party-buddy's steak-knives and do the job with that. He would stand behind the front door, and when George T. Nelson came in, Frank would either blow his motherfucking oysters off or grab him by the hair and cut his motherfucking throat.
The gun would probably be the safer of the two options, but the more Frank thought of the hot blood jetting from George T. Nelson's slit neck and splashing all over his hands, the more fitting it seemed.
Et tu, Georgia. Et tu, you blackmailing f**k.
Frank's reflections were disturbed at this point by George T.
Nelson's parakeet, Tammy Faye, who had picked the most inauspicious moment of its small avian life to burst into song. As Frank listened, a peculiar and terribly unpleasant smile began to surface on his face. How did I miss that goddam bird the first time?
he asked himself as he strode into the kitchen.
He found the drawer with the sharp knives in it after a little exploration and spent the next fifteen minutes poking it through the bars of Tammy Faye's cage, forcing the small bird into a fluttery, feather-shedding panic before growing bored with the game and skewering it. Then he went downstairs to see what he could do with the gun cabinet. The lock turned out to be easy, and as Frank climbed the stairs to the first floor again, he burst into an unseasonal but nonetheless cheery song: Ohh... you better not fight, you better not cry, You better not pout, I'm telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town!
He sees you when you're sleeping!
He knows when you're awake!
He knows if you've been bad or good, So you better be good for goodness' sake!
Frank, who had never failed to watch Lawrence Welk every Saturday night with his own beloved mother, sang the last line in a low Larry Hooper basso. Gosh, he felt good! How could he have ever believed, only an hour or so earlier, that his life was at an end?
This wasn't the end; it was the beginning! Out with the oldespecially dear old "friends" like George T. Nelson-and in with the new!
11
Frank settled in behind the door. He was pretty well loaded for bear; there was a Winchester shotgun leaning against the wall, a Llama.32 automatic stuffed into his belt, and a Sheffington steakknife in his hand. From where he stood he could see the heap of yellow feathers that had been Tammy Faye. A small grin twitched Frank's Mr.
Weatherbee mouth and his eyes-utterly mad eyes now-rolled ceaselessly back and forth behind his round rimless Mr. Weatherbee spectacles.
"You better be good for goodness' sake!" he admonished under his breath. He sang this line several times as he stood there, and several more times after he had made himself more comfortable, sitting behind the door with his legs crossed, his back propped against the wall, and his weapons in his lap.
He began to feel alarmed at how sleepy he was becoming. It seemed nuts to be on the verge of dozing off when he was waiting to cut a man's throat, but that didn't change the fact. He thought he had read someplace (perhaps in one of his classes at the University of Maine at Farmington, a cow college from which he had graduated with absolutely no honors at all) that a severe shock to the nervous system sometimes had that very effect... and he'd suffered a severe shock, all right. It was a wonder his heart hadn't blown like an old tire when he saw those magazines scattered all over his office.
Frank decided it would be unwise to take chances. He moved George
T. Nelson's long, oatmeal-colored sofa away from the wall a little bit, crawled behind it, and lay down on his back with the shotgun by his left hand. His right hand, still curled around the handle of the steak-knife, lay on his chest. There. Much better.
George T. Nelson's deep-pile carpeting was actually quite comfortable.
"You better be good for goodness' sake," Frank sang under his breath. He was still singing in a low, snory voice ten minutes later, when he finally dozed off.
12
"Unit One!" Sheila screamed from the radio slung under the dash as Alan crossed the Tin Bridge on his way back into town. "Come in, Unit One! Come in right now!"
Alan felt a sickening lift-drop in his stomach. Clut had run into a hornet's nest up at Hugh Priest's house on Castle Hill Road-he was sure of it. Why in Christ's name hadn't he told Clut to rendezvous with John before bracing Hugh?
You know why-because not all your attention was on your job when you were giving orders. If something's happened to Clut because of that, you'll have to face it and own the part of it that's yours. But that comes later. Your job right now is to do your job.
So do it, Alan-forget about Polly and do your damned job.
He snatched the microphone off its prongs. "Unit One, come back?"
Someone's beating John up!" she screamed. "Come quick, Alan, he's hurting him bad!"
This information was so completely at odds with what Alan had expected that he was utterly flummoxed for a moment.
"What? Who? There?"
"Hurry up, he's killing him!"
All at once it clicked home. It was Hugh Priest, of course. For some reason Hugh had come to the Sheriff's Office, had arrived before John could get rolling for Castle Hill, and had started swinging. It wasjohn LaPointe, not Andy Clutterbuck, who was in danger.
Alan grabbed the dash-flash, turned it on, and stuck it on the roof. When he reached the town side of the bridge he offered the old station wagon a silent apology and floored the accelerator.
13
Clut began to suspect Hugh wasn't home when he saw that all the tires on the man's car were not just flat but cut to pieces. He was about to approach the house anyway when he finally heard thin cries for help.
He stood where he was for a moment, undecided, then hurried back down the driveway. This time he saw Lenny lying on the side of the road and ran, holster flapping, to where the old man lay.
"Help me!" Lenny wheezed as Clut knelt by him. "Hugh Priest's gone crazy, tarnal fool's busted me right to Christ up!"
"Where you hurt, Lenny?" Clut asked. He touched the old man's shoulder. Lenny let out a shriek. it was as good an answer as any.
Clut stood up, unsure of exactly what to do next. Too many things had gotten crammed up in his mind. All he knew for sure was that he desperately did not want to f**k this up.
"Don't move," he said at last. "I'm going to go call Medical Assistance."
"I ain't got no plans to get up and do the tango, y'goddam fool," Lenny said. He was crying and snarling with pain. He looked like an old bloodhound with a broken leg.
"Right," Clut said. He started to run back to his cruiser, then returned to Lenny again. "He took your car, right?"
"No!" Lenny gasped, holding his hands against his broken ribs.