Look."
She slowly rolled her fingers into loose fists. Then she opened them again, using the same care. "It's been at least a month since I've been able to do that." The truth, Polly knew, was a little more extreme; she hadn't been able to make fists without suffering serious pain since April or May.
"Wow!yl "So I feel better," Polly said. "Now if Nettle were here to share it, that would make things just about perfect."
The door at the front of the shop opened.
"Will you see who that is?" Polly asked. "I want to finish sewing this sleeve."
"You bet." Rosalie started off, then stopped for a moment and looked back. "Nettle wouldn't mind you feeling good, you know."
Polly nodded. "I do know," she said gravely.
Rosalie went out front to wait on the customer. When she was gone, Polly's left hand went to her chest and touched the small bulge, not much bigger than an acorn, that rested under her pink sweater and between her br**sts.
Azka-what a wonderful word, she thought, and began to run the sewing machine again, turning the fabric of the dress-her first original since last summer-back and forth under the jittery silver blur of the needle.
She wondered idly how much Mr. Gaunt would want for the amulet.
Whatever he wants, she told herself, it won't be enough. I won't-I can't-think that way when it comes time to dicker, but it's the simple truth. Whatever he wants for it will be a bargain.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1
The Castle Rock selectmen (and selectwoman) shared a single fulltime secretary, a young woman with the exotic name of Ariadne St.
Claire. She was a happy young woman, not overburdened with intelligence but tireless and pleasing to look at. She had large br**sts which rose in soft, steep hills beneath an apparently endless supply of angora sweaters, and lovely skin. She also had very bad eyes.
They swam, brown and enlarged, behind the thick lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles. Buster liked her. He considered her too dumb to be one of Them.
Ariadne poked her head into his office at quarter to four. "Deke Bradford came by, Mr. Keeton. He needs a signature on a fundrelease form. Can you do it?"
"Well, let's see what it is," Buster said, slipping that day's sports section of the Lewiston Daily Sun, folded to the racing card, deftly into his desk drawer.
He felt better today; purposeful and alert. Those wretched pink slips had been burned in the kitchen stove, Myrtle had stopped sidling away like a singed cat when he approached (he no longer cared much for Myrtle, but it was still annoying to live with a woman who thought you were the Boston Strangler), and he expected to clear another large bundle of cash at the Raceway that night. Because of the holiday, the crowds (not to mention the payoffs) would be bigger.
He had, in fact, started to think in terms of quinellas and trifectas.
As for Deputy Dickface and Sheriff Shithead and all the rest of their merry crew... well, he and Mr. Gaunt knew about Them, and Buster believed the two of them were going to make one hell of a team.
For all these reasons he was able to welcome Ariadne into his office with equanimity-he was even able to take some of his old pleasure in observing the gentle way her bosom swayed within its no doubt formidable harness.
She put a fund-release form on his desk. Buster picked it up and leaned back in his swivel chair to look it over. The amount requested was noted in a box at the top-nine hundred and forty dollars. The payee was to be Case Construction and Supply in Lewiston. In the space reserved for Goods and/or Services to Be Supplied, Deke had printed 16 CASES OF DYNAMITE. Below, in the CommentslExplanations section, he had written: We've finally come up against that granite ridge at the gravel pi't out on Town Road #5, the one the state geologist warned us about back i'n '87 (see my report for details). Anyway, there is plenty more gravel beyond it, but we'll have to blow out the rock to get at i't.
This should be done before it gets cold and the winter snowfall starts.
If we have to buy a winter's worth of gravel over. n Norway, the taxpayers are going to howl blue murder. Two or three bangs should take care of it, and Case has a hig supply of Taggart Hi'-Impact on hand-I checked. We can have it by noon tomorrow, if we want, and start blasting on Wednesday. I have the spots marked if anyone from the Selectmen's Office wants to come out and take a look.
Below this, Deke had scrawled his signature.
Buster read Deke's note twice, tapping his front teeth thoughtfully as Ariadne stood waiting. At last he rocked forward in his chair, made a change, added a sentence, initialed both the change and the addition, then signed his own name below Deke's with a flourish. When he handed the pink sheet of paper back to Ariadne, he was smiling.
"There!" he said. "And everyone thinks I'm such a skinflint!"
Ariadne looked at the form. Buster had changed the amount from nine hundred and forty dollars to fourteen hundred dollars.
Below Deke's explanation of what he wanted the dy***ite for, Buster had added this: Better get at least twenty cases while the supply I. s good.
"Will you want to go out and look at the gravel pit, Mr. Keeton?"
"Nope, nope, won't be necessary." Buster leaned back in his chair again and locked his hands together behind his neck. "But ask Deke to give me a call when the stuff arrives. That's a lot of bang. We wouldn't want it to fall into the wrong hands, would we?"
"No indeed," Ariadne said, and went out. She was glad to go.
There was something in Mr. Keeton's smile which she found... well, a little creepy.
Buster, meanwhile, had swivelled his chair around so he could look out at Main Street, which was a good deal busier than it had been when he had looked out over the town with such despair on Saturday morning.
A lot had happened since then, and he suspected that a lot more would happen in the next couple of days. Why, with twenty cases of Taggart HI-Impact Dynamite stored in the town's Public Works shed-a shed to which he, of course, had a keyalmost anything could happen.
Anything at all.
2
Ace Merrill crossed the Tobin Bridge and entered Boston at four o'clock that afternoon, but it was well past five before he finally reached what he hoped was his destination. It was in a strange, mostly deserted slum section of Cambridge, near the center of a meandering snarl of streets. Half of them seemed to be posted oneway; the other half were dead ends. The ruined buildings of this decayed area were throwing long shadows over the streets when Ace stopped in front of a stark one-story cinderblock building on Whipple Street. It stood in the center of a weedy vacant lot.
There was a chainlink fence around the property, but it presented no problem; the gate had been stolen. Only the hinges remained. Ace could see what were probably bolt-cutter scars on them. He eased the Challenger through the gap where the gate had been and drove slowly toward the cinderblock building.
Its walls were blank and windowless. The rutted track he was on led to a closed garage door in the side of the building which faced the River Charles. There were no windows in the garage door, either. The Challenger rocked on its springs and bounced unhappily through holes in what might once have been an asphalt surface. He passed an abandoned baby carriage sitting in a strew of broken glass. A decayed doll with half a face reclined inside, staring at him with one moldy blue eye as he passed. He parked in front of the closed garage door. What the hell was he supposed to do now? The cinderblock building had the look of a place which had been deserted since 1945 or so.
Ace got out of the car. He took a scrap of paper from his breast pocket. Written on it was the address of the place where Gaunt's car was supposed to be stored. He looked doubtfully at it again.
The last few numbers he had passed suggested that this was probably 85 Whipple Street, but who the f**k could tell for sure?
Places like this never had street numbers, and there didn't seem to be anyone around he could ask. In fact, this whole section of town had a deserted, creepy feel Ace didn't much like. Vacant lots. Stripped cars which had been looted of every useful part and every centimeter of copper wire. Empty tenements waiting for the politicians to get their kickbacks straight before they fell under the wrecking ball. Twisty side-streets that dead-ended in dirty courtyards and trashy cul-de-sacs. It had taken him an hour to find Whipple Street, and now that he had, he almost wished it had stayed lost. This was the part of town where the cops sometimes found the bodies of infants stuffed into rusty garbage cans and discarded refrigerators.
He walked over to the garage door and looked for a push-bell.
There was none. He leaned the side of his head against the rusty metal and listened for the sounds of someone inside. It could be a chop-shop, he supposed; a dude with a supply of high-tension coke like the stuff Gaunt had laid on him might very well know the sort of people who sold Porsches and Lamborghinis for cash after the sun went down.
He heard nothing but silence.
Probably not even the right place, he thought, but he had been up and down the goddam street and it was the only place on it big enough-and strong enough-to store a classic car in. Unless he had f**ked up royally and come to the wrong part of town. The idea made him nervous. I want you back by midnight, Mr. Gaunt had said. If you're not back by midnight, I will be unhappy. When I'm unhappy, I sometimes lose my temper.
Mellow out, Ace told himself uneasily. He's just some old dude with a bad set of false teeth. Probably a fag.
But he couldn't mellow out, and he didn't really think Mr. Leland Gaunt was just some old dude with a bad set of false teeth. He also thought he didn't want to find out for sure one way or the other.