Текст книги "Salem's Lot"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“In an era of Watergate and oil depletion, she’s an exception,” Jimmy said.

They drove the rest of the way without conversation. Green’s Mortuary was at the north end of Cumberland, and two hearses were parked around back, between the rear door of the nondenominational chapel and a high board fence. Jimmy turned off the ignition and looked at Ben. “Ready?”

“I guess.”

They got out.

EIGHT

The rebellion had been growing in her all afternoon, and around two o’clock it burst its bonds. They were going at it stupidly, taking the long way around the barn to prove something that was (sorry, Mr Burke) probably a lot of horseshit anyway. Susan decided to go up to the Marsten House now, this afternoon.

She went downstairs and picked up her pocketbook. Ann Norton was baking cookies and her father was in the living room, watching the Packers-Patriots game.

“Where are you going?” Mrs Norton asked.

“For a drive.”

“Supper’s at six. See if you can be back on time.”

“Five at the latest.”

She went out and got into her car, which was her proudest possession—not because it was the first one she’d ever owned outright (although it was), but because she had paid for it (almost, she amended; there were six payments left) from her own work, her own talent. It was a Vega hatchback, now almost two years old. She backed it carefully out of the garage and lifted a hand briefly to her mother, who was looking out the kitchen window at her. The break was still between them, not spoken of, not healed. The other quarrels, no matter how bitter, had always knit up in time; life simply went on, burying the hurts under a bandage of days, not ripped off again until the next quarrel, when all the old grudges and grievances would be brought out and counted up like high-scoring cribbage hands. But this one seemed complete, it had been a total war. The wounds were beyond bandaging. Only amputation remained. She had already packed most of her things, and it felt right. This had been long overdue.

She drove out along Brock Street, feeling a growing sense of pleasure and purpose (and a not unpleasant underlayer of absurdity) as the house dropped behind her. She was going to take positive action, and the thought was a tonic to her. She was a forthright girl, and the events of the weekend had bewildered her, left her drifting at sea. Now she would row!

She pulled over onto the soft shoulder outside the village limits, and walked out into Carl Smith’s west pasture to where a roll of red-painted snow fence was curled up, waiting for winter. The sense of absurdity was magnified now, and she couldn’t help grinning as she bent one of the pickets back and forth until the flexible wire holding it to the others snapped. The picket formed a natural stake, about three feet long, tapering to a point. She carried it back to the car and put it in the backseat, knowing intellectually what it was for (she had seen enough Hammer films at the drive-in on double dates to know you had to pound a stake into a vampire’s heart), but never pausing to wonder if she would be able to hammer it through a man’s chest if the situation called for it.

She drove on, past the town limits and into Cumberland. On the left was a small country store that stayed open on Sundays, where her father got the Sunday Times. Susan remembered a small display case of junk jewelry beside the counter.

She bought the Times, and then picked out a small gold crucifix. Her purchases came to four-fifty, and were rung up by a fat counterman who hardly turned from the TV, where Jim Plunkett was being thrown for a loss.

She turned north on the County Road, a newly surfaced stretch of two-lane blacktop. Everything seemed fresh and crisp and alive in the sunny afternoon, and life seemed very dear. Her thoughts jumped from that to Ben. It was a short jump.

The sun came out from behind a slowly moving cumulus cloud, flooding the road with brilliant patches of dark and light as it streamed through the overhanging trees. On a day like this, she thought, it was possible to believe there would be happy endings all around.

About five miles up County, she turned off onto the Brooks Road, which was unpaved once she recrossed the town line into ’salem’s Lot. The road rose and fell and wound through the heavily wooded area northwest of the village, and much of the bright afternoon sunlight was cut off. There were no houses or trailers out here. Most of the land was owned by a paper company most renowned for asking patrons not to squeeze their toilet paper. The verge of the road was marked every one hundred feet with no-hunting and no-trespassing signs. As she passed the turnoff which led to the dump, a ripple of unease went through her. On this gloomy stretch of road, nebulous possibilities seemed more real. She found herself wondering—not for the first time—why any normal man would buy the wreck of a suicide’s house and then keep the windows shuttered against the sunlight.

The road dipped sharply and then rose steeply up the western flank of Marsten’s Hill. She could make out the peak of the Marsten House roof through the trees.

She parked at the head of a disused wood-road at the bottom of the dip and got out of the car. After a moment’s hesitation, she took the stake and hung the crucifix around her neck. She still felt absurd, but not half so absurd as she was going to feel if someone she knew happened to drive by and see her marching up the road with a snow-fence picket in her hand.

Hi, Suze, where you headed?

Oh, just up to the old Marsten place to kill a vampire. But I have to hurry because supper’s at six.

She decided to cut through the woods.

She stepped carefully over a ruinous rock wall at the foot of the road’s ditch, and was glad she had worn slacks. Very much haute couturefor fearless vampire killers. There were nasty brambles and deadfalls before the woods actually started.

In the pines it was at least ten degrees cooler, and gloomier still. The ground was carpeted with old needles, and the wind hissed through the trees. Somewhere, some small animal crashed off through the underbrush. She suddenly realized that if she turned to her left, a walk of no more than half a mile would bring her into the Harmony Hill Cemetery, if she were agile enough to scale the back wall.

She toiled steadily upward, going as quietly as possible. As she neared the brow of the hill, she began to catch glimpses of the house through the steadily thinning screen of branches—the blind side of the house in relation to the village below. And she began to be afraid. She could not put her finger on any precise reason, and in that way it was like the fear she had felt (but had already largely forgotten) at Matt Burke’s house. She was fairly sure that no one could hear her, and it was broad daylight—but the fear was there, a steadily oppressive weight. It seemed to be welling into her consciousness from a part of her brain that was usually silent and probably as obsolete as her appendix. Her pleasure in the day was gone. The sense that she was playing was gone. The feeling of decisiveness was gone. She found herself thinking of those same drive-in horror movie epics where the heroine goes venturing up the narrow attic stairs to see what’s frightened poor old Mrs Cobham so, or down into some dark, cobwebby cellar where the walls are rough, sweating stone—symbolic womb—and she, with her date’s arm comfortably around her, thinking: What a silly bitch…I’d never do that!And here she was, doing it, and she began to grasp how deep the division between the human cerebrum and the human midbrain had become; how the cerebrum can force one on and on in spite of the warnings given by that instinctive part, which is so similar in physical construction to the brain of the alligator. The cerebrum could force one on and on, until the attic door was flung open in the face of some grinning horror or one looked into a half-bricked alcove in the cellar and saw—

STOP!

She threw the thoughts off and found that she was sweating. All at the sight of an ordinary house with its shutters closed. You’ve got to stop being stupid, she told herself. You’re going to go up there and spy the place out, that’s all. From the front yard you can see your own house. Now, what in God’s name could happen to you in sight of your own house?

Nonetheless, she bent over slightly and took a tighter grip on the stake, and when the screening trees became too thin to offer much protection, she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled. Three or four minutes later, she had come as far as it was possible without breaking cover. From her spot behind a final stand of pines and a spray of junipers, she could see the west side of the house and the creepered tangle of honeysuckle, now autumn-barren. The grass of summer was yellow but still knee-high. No effort had been made to cut it.

A motor roared suddenly in the stillness, making her heart rise into her throat. She controlled herself by hooking her fingers into the ground and biting hard on her lower lip. A moment later an old black car backed into sight, paused at the head of the driveway, and then turned out onto the road and started away toward town. Before it drew out of sight, she saw the man quite clearly: large bald head, eyes sunken so deeply you could really see nothing of them but the sockets, and the lapels and collar of a dark suit. Straker. On his way in to Crossen’s store, perhaps.

She could see that most of the shutters had broken slats. All right, then. She would creep up and peek through and see what there was to see. Probably nothing but a house in the first stages of a long renovation process, new plastering under way, new papering perhaps, tools and ladders and buckets. All about as romantic and supernatural as a TV football game.

But still: the fear.

It rose suddenly, emotion overspilling logic and the bright Formica reason of the cerebrum, filling her mouth with a taste like black copper.

And she knew someone was behind her even before the hand fell on her shoulder.

NINE

It was almost dark.

Ben got up from the wooden folding chair, walked over to the window that looked out on the funeral parlor’s back lawn, and saw nothing in particular. It was quarter to seven, and evening’s shadows were very long. The grass was still green despite the lateness of the year, and he supposed that the thoughtful mortician would endeavor to keep it so until snow covered it. A symbol of continuing life in the midst of the death of the year. He found the thought inordinately depressing and turned from the view.

“I wish I had a cigarette,” he said.

“They’re killers,” Jimmy told him without turning around. He was watching a Sunday night wildlife program on Maury Green’s small Sony. “Actually, so do I. I quit when the surgeon general did his number on cigarettes ten years ago. Bad P.R. not to. But I always wake up grabbing for the pack on the nightstand.”

“I thought you quit.”

“I keep it there for the same reason some alcoholics keep a bottle of scotch on the kitchen shelf. Willpower, son.”

Ben looked at the clock: 6:47. Maury Green’s Sunday paper said sundown would officially arrive at 7:02 EST.

Jimmy had handled everything quite neatly. Maury Green was a small man who had answered the door in an unbuttoned black vest and an open-collar white shirt. His sober, inquiring expression had changed to a broad smile of welcome.

“ Shalom, Jimmy!” he cried. “It’s good to see you! Where you been keeping yourself?”

“Saving the world from the common cold,” Jimmy said, smiling, as Green wrung his hand. “I want you to meet a very good friend of mine. Maury Green, Ben Mears.”

Ben’s hand was enveloped in both of Maury’s. His eyes glistened behind the black-rimmed glasses he wore. “ Shalom, also. Any friend of Jimmy’s, and so on. Come on in, both of you. I could call Rachel—”

“Please don’t,” Jimmy said. “We’ve come to ask a favor. A rather large one.”

Green glanced more closely at Jimmy’s face. “‘A rather large one,’” he jeered softly. “And why? What have you ever done for me, that my son should graduate third in his class from Northwestern? Anything, Jimmy.”

Jimmy blushed. “I did what anyone would have done, Maury.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Green said. “Ask. What is it that has you and Mr Mears so worried? Have you been in an accident?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

He had taken them into a small kitchenette behind the chapel, and as they talked, he brewed coffee in a battered old pot that sat on a hot plate.

“Has Norbert come after Mrs Glick yet?” Jimmy asked.

“No, and not a sign of him,” Maury said, putting sugar and cream on the table. “That one will come by at eleven tonight and wonder why I’m not here to let him in.” He sighed. “Poor lady. Such tragedy in one family. And she looks so sweet, Jimmy. That old poop Reardon brought her in. She was your patient?”

“No,” Jimmy said. “But Ben and I…we’d like to sit up with her this evening, Maury. Right downstairs.”

Green paused in the act of reaching for the coffeepot. “Sit up with her? Examine her, you mean?”

“No,” Jimmy said steadily. “Just sit up with her.”

“You’re joking?” He looked at them closely. “No, I see you’re not. Why would you want to do that?”

“I can’t tell you that, Maury.”

“Oh.” He poured the coffee, sat down with them, and sipped. “Not too strong. Very nice. Has she got something? Something infectious?”

Jimmy and Ben exchanged a glance.

“Not in the accepted sense of the word,” Jimmy said finally.

“You’d like me to keep my mouth shut about this, eh?”

“Yes.”

“And if Norbert comes?”

“I can handle Norbert,” Jimmy said. “I’ll tell him Reardon asked me to check her for infectious encephalitis. He’ll never check.”

Green nodded. “Norbert doesn’t know enough to check his watch, unless someone asks him.”

“Is it okay, Maury?”

“Sure, sure. I thought you said a big favor.”

“It’s bigger than you think, maybe.”

“When I finish my coffee, I’ll go home and see what horror Rachel has produced for my Sunday dinner. Here is the key. Lock up when you go, Jimmy.”

Jimmy tucked it away in his pocket. “I will. Thanks again, Maury.”

“Anything. Just do me one favor in return.”

“Sure. What?”

“If she says anything, write it down for posterity.” He began to chuckle, saw the identical look on their faces, and stopped.

TEN

It was five to seven. Ben felt tension begin to seep into his body.

“Might as well stop staring at the clock,” Jimmy said. “You can’t make it go any faster by looking at it.”

Ben started guiltily.

“I doubt very much that vampires—if they exist at all—rise at almanac sunset,” Jimmy said. “It’s never full dark.”

Nonetheless he got up and shut off the TV, catching a wood duck in mid-squawk.

Silence descended on the room like a blanket. They were in Green’s workroom, and the body of Marjorie Glick was on a stainless-steel table equipped with gutters and foot stirrups that could be raised or depressed. It reminded Ben of the tables in hospital delivery rooms.

Jimmy had turned back the sheet that covered her body when they entered and had made a brief examination. Mrs Glick was wearing a burgundy-colored quilted housecoat and knitted slippers. There was a Band-Aid on her left shin, perhaps covering a shaving nick. Ben looked away from it, but his eyes were drawn back again and again.

“What do you think?” Ben had asked.

“I’m not going to commit myself when another three hours will probably decide one way or the other. But her condition is strikingly similar to that of Mike Ryerson—no surface lividity, no sign of rigor or incipient rigor.” And he had pulled the sheet back and would say no more.

It was 7:02.

Jimmy suddenly said, “Where’s your cross?”

Ben started. “Cross? Jesus, I don’t have one!”

“You were never a Boy Scout,” Jimmy said, and opened his bag. “I, however, always come prepared.”

He brought out two tongue depressors, stripped off the protective cellophane, and bound them together at right angles with a twist of Red Cross tape.

“Bless it,” he said to Ben.

“What? I can’t…I don’t know how.”

“Then make it up,” Jimmy said, and his pleasant face suddenly appeared strained. “You’re the writer; you’ll have to be the metaphysician. For Christ’s sake, hurry. I think something is going to happen. Can’t you feel it?”

And Ben could. Something seemed to be gathering in the slow purple twilight, unseen as yet, but heavy and electric. His mouth had gone dry, and he had to wet his lips before he could speak.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Then he added, as an afterthought: “In the name of the Virgin Mary, too. Bless this cross and…and…”

Words rose to his lips with sudden, eerie surety.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he spoke, and the words fell into the shadowy room as stones would have fallen into a deep lake, sinking out of sight without a ripple. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”

Jimmy’s voice joined his own, chanting.

“He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil—”

It seemed hard to breathe properly. Ben found that his whole body had crawled into goose flesh, and the short hairs on the nape of his neck had begun to prickle, as if they were rising into hackles.

“Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall—”

The sheet covering Marjorie Glick’s body had begun to tremble. A hand fell out below the sheet and the fingers began to dance jaggedly on the air, twisting and turning.

“My Christ, am I seeingthis?” Jimmy whispered. His face had gone pale and his freckles stood out like spatters on a windowpane.

“—follow me all the days of my life,” Ben finished. “Jimmy, look at the cross.”

The cross was glowing. The light spilled over his hand in an elvish flood.

A slow, choked voice spoke in the stillness, as grating as shards of broken crockery: “ Danny?”

Ben felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. The form under the sheet was sitting up. Shadows in the darkening room moved and slithered.

“Danny, where are you, darling?”

The sheet fell from her face and crumpled in her lap.

The face of Marjorie Glick was a pallid, moonlike circle in the semi-dark, punched only by the black holes of her eyes. She saw them, and her mouth juddered open in an awful, cheated snarl. The fading glow of daylight flashed against her teeth.

She swung her legs over the side of the table; one of the slippers fell off and lay unheeded.

“Sit right there!” Jimmy told her. “Don’t try to move.”

Her answer was a snarl, a dark silver sound, doglike. She slid off the table, staggered, and walked toward them. Ben caught himself looking into those punched eyes and wrenched his gaze away. There were black galaxies shot with red in there. You could see yourself, drowning and liking it.

“Don’t look in her face,” he told Jimmy.

They were retreating from her without thought, allowing her to force them toward the narrow hall which led to the stairs.

“Try the cross, Ben.”

He had almost forgotten he had it. Now he held it up, and the cross seemed to flash with brilliance. He had to squint against it. Mrs Glick made a hissing, dismayed noise and threw her hands up in front of her face. Her features seemed to draw together, twitching and writhing like a nest of snakes. She tottered a step backward.

“That’s got her!” Jimmy yelled.

Ben advanced on her, holding the cross out before him. She hooked one hand into a claw and made a swipe at it. Ben dipped it below her hand and then thrust it at her. A ululating scream came from her throat.

For Ben, the rest took on the maroon tones of nightmare. Although worse horrors were to come, the dreams of the following days and nights were always of driving Marjorie Glick back toward that mortician’s table, where the sheet that had covered her lay crumpled beside one knitted slipper.

She retreated unwillingly, her eyes alternating between the hateful cross and an area on Ben’s neck to the right of the chin. The sounds that were wrenched out of her were inhuman gibberings and hissings and glottals, and there was something so blindly reluctant in her withdrawal that she began to seem like some giant, lumbering insect. Ben thought: If I didn’t have this cross out front, she would rip my throat open with her nails and gulp down the blood that spurted out of the jugular and carotid like a man just out of the desert and dying of thirst. She would bathe in it.

Jimmy had cut away from his side, and was circling her to the left. She didn’t see him. Her eyes were fixed only on Ben, dark and filled with hatred…filled with fear.

Jimmy circled the mortician’s table, and when she backed around it, he threw both arms around her neck with a convulsive yell.

She gave a high, whistling cry and twisted in his grip. Ben saw Jimmy’s nails pull away a flap of her skin at the shoulder, and nothing welled out—the cut was like a lipless mouth. And then, incredibly, she threw him across the room. Jimmy crashed into the corner, knocking Maury Green’s portable TV off its stand.

She was on him in a flash, moving in a hunched, scrabbling run that was nearly spiderlike. Ben caught a shadow-scrawled glimpse of her falling on top of him, ripping at his collar, and then the sideward predatory lunge of her head, the yawning of her jaws, as she battened on him.

Jimmy Cody screamed—the high, despairing scream of the utterly damned.

Ben threw himself at her, stumbling and nearly falling over the shattered television on the floor. He could hear her harsh breathing, like the rattle of straw, and below that, the revolting sound of smacking, champing lips.

He grabbed her by the collar of her housecoat and yanked her upward, forgetting the cross momentarily. Her head came around with frightening swiftness. Her eyes were dilated and glittering, her lips and chin slicked with blood that was black in this near-total darkness.

Her breath in his face was foul beyond measure, the breath of tombs. As if in slow motion, he could see her tongue lick across her teeth.

He brought the cross up just as she jerked him forward into her embrace, her strength making him feel like something made of rags. The rounded point of the tongue depressor that formed the cross’s down-stroke struck her under the chin—and then continued upward with no fleshy resistance. Ben’s eyes were stunned by a flash of not-light that happened not before his eyes but seemingly behind them. There was the hot and porcine smell of burning flesh. Her scream this time was full-throated and agonized. He sensed rather than saw her throw herself backward, stumble over the television, and fall on the floor, one white arm thrown outward to break her fall. She was up again with wolflike agility, her eyes narrowed in pain, yet still filled with her insane hunger. The flesh of her lower jaw was smoking and black. She was snarling at him.

“Come on, you bitch,” he panted. “Come on, come on.”

He held the cross out before him again, and backed her into the corner at the far left of the room. When he got her there, he was going to jam the cross through her forehead.

But even as her back pressed the narrowing walls, she uttered a high, squealing giggle that made him wince. It was like the sound of a fork being dragged across a porcelain sink.

“Even now one laughs! Even now your circle is smaller!”

And before his eyes her body seemed to elongate and become translucent. For a moment he thought she was still there, laughing at him, and then the white glow of the streetlamp outside was shining on bare wall, and there was only a fleeting sensation on his nerve endings, which seemed to be reporting that she had seeped into the very pores of the wall, like smoke.

She was gone.

And Jimmy was screaming.

ELEVEN

He flicked on the overhead bar of fluorescents and turned to look at Jimmy, but Jimmy was already on his feet, holding his hands to the side of his neck. The fingers were sparkling scarlet.

“She bitme!” Jimmy howled. “Oh God-Jesus, she bitme!”

Ben went to him, tried to take him in his arms, and Jimmy pushed him away. His eyes rolled madly in their sockets.

“Don’t touch me. I’m unclean.”

“Jimmy—”

“Give me my bag. Jesus, Ben, I can feel it in there. I can feel it working in me. For Christ’s sake, give me my bag!”

It was in the corner. Ben got it, and Jimmy snatched it. He went to the mortician’s table and set the bag on it. His face was death pale, shining with sweat. The blood pulsed remorselessly from the torn gash in the side of his neck. He sat down on the table and opened the bag and swept through it, his breath coming in whining gasps through his open mouth.

“She bitme,” he muttered into the bag. “Her mouth…oh God, her dirty filthy mouth…”

He pulled a bottle of disinfectant out of the bag and sent the cap spinning across the tiled floor. He leaned back, supporting himself on one arm, and upended the bottle over his throat, and it splashed the wound, his slacks, the table. Blood washed away in threads. His eyes closed and he screamed once, then again. The bottle never wavered.

“Jimmy, what can I—”

“In a minute,” Jimmy muttered. “Wait. It’s better, I think. Wait, just wait—”

He tossed the bottle away and it shattered on the floor. The wound, washed clean of the tainted blood, was clearly visible. Ben saw there was not one but two puncture wounds not far from the jugular, one of them horribly mangled.

Jimmy had pulled an ampoule and a hypo from the bag. He stripped the protective covering from the needle and jabbed it through the ampoule. His hands were shaking so badly he had to make two thrusts at it. He filled the needle and held it out to Ben.

“Tetanus,” he said. “Give it to me. Here.” He held his arm out, rotated to expose the armpit.

“Jimmy, that’ll knock you out.”

“No. No, it won’t. Do it.”

Ben took the needle and looked questioningly into Jimmy’s eyes. He nodded. Ben injected the needle.

Jimmy’s body tensed like spring steel. For a moment he was a sculpture in agony, every tendon pulled out into sharp relief. Little by little he began to relax. His body shuddered in reaction, and Ben saw that tears had mixed with the sweat on his face.

“Put the cross on me,” he said. “If I’m still dirty from her, it’ll…it’ll do something to me.”

“Will it?”

“I’m sure it will. When you were going after her, I looked up and I wanted to go after you. God help me, I did. And I looked at that cross and I…my belly wanted to heave up.”

Ben put the cross on his neck. Nothing happened. Its glow—if there had been a glow at all—was entirely gone. Ben took the cross away.

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “I think that’s all we can do.” He rummaged in his bag again, found an envelope containing two pills, and crushed them into his mouth. “Dope,” he said. “Great invention. Thank God I used the john before that…before it happened. I think I pissed myself, but it only came to about six drops. Can you bandage my neck?”

“I think so,” Ben said.

Jimmy handed him gauze, adhesive tape, and a pair of surgical scissors. Bending to put the bandage on, he saw that the skin around the wounds had gone an ugly, congealed red. Jimmy flinched when he pressed the bandage gently into place.

He said: “For a couple of minutes there, I thought I was going to go nuts. Really, clinically nuts. Her lips on me…biting me…” His throat rippled as he swallowed. “And when she was doing it, I likedit, Ben. That’s the hellish part. I actually had an erection. Can you believe it? If you hadn’t been here to pull her off, I would have…would have let her…”

“Never mind,” Ben said.

“There’s one more thing I have to do that I don’t like.”

“What’s that?”

“Here. Look at me a minute.”

Ben finished the bandage and drew back a little to look at Jimmy. “What—”

And suddenly Jimmy slugged him. Stars rocketed up in his brain and he took three wandering steps backward and sat down heavily. He shook his head and saw Jimmy getting carefully down from the table and coming toward him. He groped madly for the cross, thinking: This is what’s known as an O. Henry ending, you stupid shit, you stupid, stupid—

“You all right?” Jimmy was asking him. “I’m sorry, but it’s a little easier when you don’t know it’s coming.”

“What the Christ—?”

Jimmy sat down beside him on the floor. “I’m going to tell you our story,” he said. “It’s a damned poor one, but I’m pretty sure Maury Green will back it up. It will keep my practice, and keep us both out of jail or some asylum…and at this point, I’m not so concerned about those things as I am about staying free to fight these…things, whatever you want to call them, another day. Do you understand that?”

“The thrust of it,” Ben said. He touched his jaw and winced. There was a knot to the left of his chin.

“Somebody barged in on us while I was examining Mrs Glick,” Jimmy said. “The somebody coldcocked you and then used me for a punching bag. During the struggle, the somebody bit me to make me let him go. That’s all either of us remembers. All. Understand?”

Ben nodded.

“The guy was wearing a dark CPO coat, maybe blue, maybe black, and a green or gray knitted cap. That’s all you saw. Okay?”

“Have you ever thought about giving up doctoring in favor of a career in creative writing?”

Jimmy smiled. “I’m only creative in moments of extreme self-interest. Can you remember the story?”

“Sure. And I don’t think it’s as poor as you might believe. After all, hers isn’t the first body that’s disappeared lately.”

“I’m hoping they’ll add that up. But the county sheriff is a lot more on the ball than Parkins Gillespie ever thought of being. We have to watch our step. Don’t embellish the story.”

“Do you suppose anyone in officialdom will begin to see the pattern in all this?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Not a chance in the world. We’re going to have to bumble through this on our own. And remember that from this point on, we’re criminals.”

Shortly after, he went to the phone and called Maury Green, then County Sheriff Homer McCaslin.