Over the years, Fuzzy's car-storage business had fallen off radically. Alan supposed that word of his careless smoking habits had gotten around and that had done it. No one wants to lose their car in a barn-fire, even if it's just an old lag you kept around to run errands when summer came. The last time he had been out to Fuzzy's, Alan had seen only two can in the barn: Ossie Brannigan's'59 T-Bird--a car which would have been a classic if it hadn't been so rusted out and beat-to-shit--and Thad Beaumont's old Ford Woody wagon.
Thad again.
Today it seemed that all roads led back to Thad Beaumont.
Alan sat up straighter in his chair, unconsciously pulling the telephone closer to him.
"It wasn't Thad Beaumont's old Ford?" he asked Fuzzy now. "You're sure?"
" 'Course I'm sure. This wasn't no Ford, and it sure as hell wasn't any Woody wagon. It was a black Toronado. "
Another flare went off in Alan's mind . . . but he wasn't quite sure why. Someone had said something to him about a black Toronado, and not long ago. He couldn't think just who or when, not now . . . but it would come to him.
"I just happened to be in the kitchen, gettin myself a cool drink of lemonade," Fuzzy was going on, "when I seen that car backin out of the barn. First thing I thought of was how I don't store no car like that. Second thing I thought of was how anybody got it in there in the tint place, when there's a big old Kreig padlock on the barn door and I got the only key to it on my ring. "
"What about the people with cars stored in there? They don't have keys?"
"No, sir!" Fuzzy seemed offended by the very idea.
"You didn't happen to get the license plate number, did you?"
"You're damn tooting I got it!" Fuzzy cried. "Got the goddam ole Jeezly b'noc'lars right there on the kitchen windowsill, ain't I?"
Alan, who had been in the barn on inspection tours with Trevor Hartland but never in Fuzzy's kitchen (and had no plans to make such a trip soon, thanks), said: "Oh, yeah. The binoculars. I forgot about them. "
"Well, I didn't!" Fuzzy said with happy truculence. "You got a pencil?"
"I sure do, Albert. "
"Chief, why don't you just call me Fuzzy, like everyone else?"
Alan sighed. "Okay, Fuzzy. And while we're at it, why don't you just call me Sheriff?"
"Whatever you say. Now do you want this plate number or not?"
"Shoot. "
"First off, it was a Mississippi plate," Fuzzy said with something like triumph in his voice. "What the hell do you think of that?"
Alan didn't know exactly what he thought of it . . . except a third flare had gone off in his head, this one even brighter than the others. A Toronado. And Mississippi. Something about Mississippi. And a town. Oxford? Was it Oxford? Like the one two towns over from here?
"I don't know," Alan said, and then, supposing it was the thing Fuzzy wanted to hear: "It sounds pretty suspicious. "
"Ain't you Christing right!" Fuzzy crowed. Then he cleared his throat and became businesslike. "Okay. Miss'ippi plate 62284. You got that, Chief?"
"62284. "
"62284, ayuh, you can take that to the fuckin bank. Suspicious! Oh, ayuh! That's just what I thought! Jesus ate a can of beans!"
At the image of Jesus chowing down on a can of B&M beans, Alan had to cover the telephone for another brief moment.
"So," Fuzzy said, "what action you gonna take, Chief?"
I am going to try and get out of this conversation with my sanity intact, Alan thought. That's the first thing I'm going to do. And I'm going to try and remember who mentioned--
Then it came to him in a flash of cold radiance that made his arms crown with gooseflesh and stretched the flesh on the back of his neck as tight as a drumhead.
On the phone with Thad. Not long after the psycho called from Miriam Cowley's apartment. The night the killing-spree had really started.
He heard Thad saying, He moved from New Hampshire to Oxford, Mississippi with his mother . . . he's lost all but a trace of his Southern accent.
What else had Thad said when he had been describing George Stark over the telephone?
Final thing: he may be driving a black Toronado. I don't know what year. One of the old ones with a lot of blasting powder under the hood, anyway. Black. It could have Mississippi plates, but he's undoubtedly switched them.
"I guess he was a little too busy to do that," Alan muttered. The gooseflesh was still crawling over his body with its thousand tiny feet.
"What was that, Chief?"
"Nothing, Albert. Talking to myself. "
"My mom useta say that meant you was gonna get some money. Maybe I ought to start doin it myself. "
Alan suddenly remembered that Thad had added something else--one final detail.
"Albert--"
"Call me Fuzzy, Chief. Told you. "
"Fuzzy, was there a bumper sticker on the car you saw? Did you maybe notice--"
"How the hell did you know about that? You got a hot-sheet on that motor, Chief?" Fuzzy asked eagerly.
"Never mind the questions, Fuzzy. This is police business. Did you see what it said?"
" 'Course I did," Fuzzy Martin said. "HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH, that's what it said. Can you believe that?"
Alan hung up the phone slowly, believing it, but telling himself it proved nothing, nothing at all . . . except that maybe Thad Beaumont was as crazy as a bedbug. It would just be plain stupid to think that what Fuzzy had seen proved anything . . . well, anything supernatural, for want of a better word . . . was going on.
Then he thought of the voice-prints and the fingerprints, he thought of hundreds of sparrows crashing into the windows of Bergenfield County Hospital, and he was overcome with a fit of violent shivering that lasted almost a full minute.
3
Alan Pangborn was neither a coward nor a superstitious countryman who forked the sign of the evil eye at crows and kept his pregnant womenfolk away from the fresh milk because be was afraid they would clabber it. He was not a rube; he was not susceptible to the blandishments of city slickers who wanted to sell famous bridges cheap; he had not been born yesterday. He believed in logic and reasonable explanations. So he waited out his flock of shivers and then he pulled his Rolodex over in front of him and found Thad's telephone number. He observed with wry amusement that the number on the card and the one in his head matched. Apparently Castle Rock's distinguished "writer fella" had remained even more firmly fixed in his mind--some part of it, anyway--than he had thought.
It has to have been Thad in that car. If you eliminate the nutty stuff, what other alternative is there? He described it. What was the old radio quiz show? Name It and Claim It.
Bergenfield County Hospital was, in fact, attacked by sparrows.
And there were other questions--far too many.
Thad and his family were under protection from the Maine State Police. If they had decided to pack up and come down here for the weekend, the State boys should have given him a call--partially to alert him, partially as a gesture of courtesy. But the State Police would have tried to dissuade Thad from making such a trip, now that they had their protective surveillance down to routine up there in Ludlow. And if the trip had been of the spur-of-the-moment kind, their efforts to change his mind would have been even more strenuous.
Then there was what Fuzzy had not seen--namely, the back-up car or cars that would have been assigned the Beaumonts if they decided to put on their travelling shoes anyway . . . as they could have done; they weren't, after all, prisoners.
People with brain tumors often do very peculiar things.
If it was Thad's Toronado, and if he had been out at Fuzzy's to get it, and if he had been alone, that led to a conclusion Alan found very unpalatable, because he had taken a qualified liking to Thad. That conclusion was that he had deliberately ditched both his family and his protectors.
The State Police still should have called me, if that was the case. They'd put out an APB, and they'd know damned well this is one of the pl
aces he'd be likely to come.
He dialed the Beaumont number. It was picked up on the first ring. A voice he didn't know answered. Which was only to say he could not put a name to the voice. That he was speaking to an officer of the law was something he knew from the first syllable.
"Hello, Beaumont residence. "
Guarded. Ready to drive a wedge of questions into the next gap if the voice happened to be the right one . . . or the wrong one.
What's happened? Pangborn wondered, and on the heels of that: They're dead. Whoever's out there has killed he whole family, as quickly, effortlessly, and with as little mercy as he showed the others. The protection, the interrogations, the traceback equipment . . . it was all for nothing.
Not even a hint of these thoughts showed in his voice as he answered.
"This is Alan Pangborn," he said crisply. "Sheriff, Castle County. I was calling for Thad Beaumont. To whom am I speaking?"
There was a pause. Then the voice replied, "This is Steve Harrison, Sheriff. Maine State Police. I was going to call you. Should have done it at least an hour ago. But things here . . . things here are fucked all the way to the ionosphere. Can I ask why you called?"
Without a pause for thought--that would certainly have changed his response--Alan lied. He did it without asking himself why he was doing it. That would come later.
"I called to check in with Thad," he said. "It's been awhile, and I wanted to know how they're doing. I gather there's been trouble. "
"Trouble so big you wouldn't believe it," Harrison said grimly. "Two of my men are dead. We're pretty sure Beaumont did it. "
We're pretty sure Beaumont did it.
The peculiarity of the acts seems to rise in direct ratio to the intelligence of the man or woman so afflicted.
Alan felt deja vu not just stealing into his mind but marching over his whole body like an invading army. Thad, it always came back to Thad. Of course. He was intelligent, he was peculiar, and he was, by his own admission, suffering from symptoms which suggested a brain tumor.
The boy didn't have a brain tumor at all, you know.
If those tests showed negative, then it's because there's nothing to show.
Forget the tumor. The sparrows are what you want to be thinking about now--because the sparrows are flying again.
"What happened?" he asked Trooper Harrison.
"He cut Tom Chatterton and Jack Eddings damned near to pieces, that's what happened!" Harrison shouted, startling Alan with the depth of his fury. "He's got his family with him, and I want that son of a bitch!"
"What . . . how did he get away?"
"I don't have the time to go into it," Harrison said. "It's a sorry fucking story, Sheriff. He was driving a red-and-gray Chevrolet Suburban, a goddamn whale on wheels, but we think he must have ditched it someplace and switched. He's got a summer place down there. You know the locale and the layout, right?"
"Yes," Alan said. His mind was racing. He looked at the dock on the wall and saw it was a minute or so shy of three-forty. Time. It all came back to time. And he realized he hadn't asked Fuzzy Martin what time it had been when he saw the Toronado rolling out of his barn. It hadn't seemed important at the moment. Now it did. "What time did you lose him, Trooper Harrison?"
He thought he could feel Harrison fuming at that, but when he answered, he did so without anger or defensiveness. "Around twelve-thirty. He must have taken awhile to switch cars, if that's what he did, and then he went to his house in Ludlow--"
"Where was he when you lost him? How far away from his house?"
"Sheriff, I'd like to answer all your questions, but there's no time. The point is, if he's headed for his place down there--it seems unlikely, but the guy's crazy, so you never know--he won't have arrived yet, but he'll be there soon. Him and his whole fam' damly. It would be very nice if you and a couple of your men were there to greet him. If something pops, you radio Henry Payton at the Oxford State Police Barracks and we'll send more back-up than you've ever seen in your life. Don't try to apprehend him yourself under any circumstances. We're assuming the wife's been taken hostage, if she's not dead already, and that goes double for the kids. "
"Yes, he'd have to have taken his wife by force if he killed the Troopers on duty, wouldn't he?" Alan agreed, and found himself thinking, But you'd make them part of it if you could, wouldn't you? Because your mind is made up and you're not going to change it. Hell, man, you're not even going to think, straight or otherwise, until the blood dries on your friends.
There were a dozen questions he wanted to ask, and the answers to those would probably produce another four dozen--but Harrison was right about one thing. There wasn't time.
He hesitated for a moment, wanting very badly to ask Harrison about the most important thing of all, wanting to ask the jackpot question: was Harrison sure Thad had had time to get to his house, kill the men on guard there, and spirit his family away, all before the first reinforcements arrived? But to ask the question would be to claw at the painful wound this Harrison was trying to deal with right now, because buried in the question was that condemning, irrefutable judgment: You lost him. Somehow you lost him. You had a job to do and you fucked it up.
"Can I depend on you, Sheriff?" Harrison asked, and now his voice didn't sound angry, only tired and harried, and Alan's heart went out to him.
"Yes. I'll have the place covered almost immediately. "
"Good man. And you'll liaise with the Oxford Barracks?"
"Affirmative. Henry Payton's a friend. "
"Beaumont is dangerous, Sheriff. Extremely dangerous. If he does show up, you watch your ass. "
"I will. "
"And keep me informed." Harrison broke the connection without saying goodbye.
4
His mind--the part of it that busied itself with protocol, anyway--awoke and started asking questions . . . or trying to. Alan decided he didn't have time for protocol. Not in any of its forms. He was simply going to keep all possible circuits open and proceed. He had a feeling things had reached the point where some of those circuits would soon begin to dose of their own accord.
At least call some of your own men.
But he didn't think he was ready to do that, either. Norris Ridgewick, the one he would have called, was off duty and out of town. John LaPointe was still laid up with poison ivy. Seat Thomas was out on patrol. Andy Clutterbuck was here, but Clut was a rookie and this was a nasty piece of work.
He would roll this one on his own for awhile.
You're crazy! Protocol screamed in his mind.
"I might be getting there, at that," Alan said out loud. He looked up Albert Martin's number in the phone book and called him back to ask the questions he should have asked the first time.
5
"What time did you see the Toronado backing out of your barn, Fuzzy?" he asked when Martin answered, and thought: He won't know. Hell, I'm not entirely sure he knows how to tell time.
But Fuzzy promptly proved him a liar. "Just a cunt's hair past three Chief." Then after a considering pause: " 'Scuse my Fran-kais. "
"You didn't call until--" Alan glanced at the day-sheet, where he had logged Fuzzy's call without even thinking about it. "Until three-twenty-eight. "
"Had to think her over," Fuzzy said. "Man should always look before he leaps. Chief, at least that's the way I see her. Before I called you, I went down to the barn to see if whoever got the car was up to any other ructions in there. "
Ructions, Alan thought, bemused. Probably checked the bale of pot in the loft while you were at it, didn't you, Fuzzy?
"Had he been?"
"Been what?"
"Up to any other ructions. "
"Nope. Don't believe so. "
"What condition was the lock in?"
"Open," Fuzzy said pithily.
"Smashed?"
"Nope. Just hangin in the hasp with the arm popped up. "
"Key, do you think?"
"Don't know where the sonofawhore could've come by one
. I think he picked it. "
"Was he alone in the car?" Alan asked. "Could you tell that?"
Fuzzy paused, thinking it over. "I couldn't tell for sure," he said at last. "I know what you're thinkin, Chief--if I could make out the breed o' plate and read that smart-ass sticker, I ought to been able to make out how many folks was in it. But the sun was on the glass, and I don't think it was ordinary glass, either. I think it had some tint to it. Not a whole lot, but some. "
"Okay, Fuzzy. Thanks. We'll check it out. "
"Well, he's gone from here," Fuzzy said, and then added in a lightning flash of deduction: "But he must be somewhere. "
"That's very true," Alan said. He promised to tell Fuzzy "how it all warshed out" and hung up. He pushed away from his desk and looked at the clock.
Three, Fuzzy had said. Just a cunt's hair past three. 'Scuse my Fran-kais.
Alan didn't think there was any way Thad could have gotten from Ludlow to Castle Rock in three hours short of rocket travel, not with a side-trip back to his house thrown in for good measure--a little side-trip during which, incidentally, he had kidnapped his wife and kids and killed a couple of State Troopers. Maybe if it had been a straight shot right from Ludlow, but to come from someplace else, stop in Ludlow, and then get here in time to pick a lock and drive away in a Toronado he just happened to have conveniently stashed in Fuzzy Martin's barn? No way.
But suppose someone else had killed the Troopers at the Beaumont house and snatched Thad's people? Someone who didn't have to mess around losing a police escort, switching vehicles, and making side-trips? Someone who had simply piled Liz Beaumont and her twins into a car and headed for Castle Rock? Alan thought they could have gotten here in time for Fuzzy Martin to have seen them at just past three. They could have done it without even breathing hard.
The police--read Trooper Harrison, at least for the time being--thought it had to be Thad, but Harrison and his compadres didn't know about the Toronado.
Mississippi plates, Fuzzy had said.