by Stephen King
“So, Question 2: Could I have changed the outcome?
“Yes. I could have driven a car right through the front of the place. Or, I could have burned it down myself that afternoon.
“Question 3: What would the results of either action have been to me?
“Imprisonment, probably. If I took the car option and then lightning struck it later that night. I suppose I could have argued ... no, it doesn’t wash. Common experience may recognize some sort of psychic ability in the human mind, but the law sure as hell doesn’t. I think now, if I had it to do over again, I would do one of those things and never mind the consequences to me. Is it possible that I didn’t completely believe my own prediction?
“The matter of Stillson is horribly similar in all respects, except, thank God, that I have a lot more lead time.
“So, back to square one. I don’t want Greg Stillson to become President. How can I change that outcome?
“1 . Go back to New Hampshire and ‘jine up,’ as he puts it. Try to throw a few monkey wrenches into the America Now party. Try to sabotage him. There’s dirt enough under the rug. Maybe I could sweep some of it out.
“2 . Hire someone else to get the dirt on him. There’s enough of Roger’s money left over to hire someone good. On the other hand, I got the feeling that Lancte was pretty good. And Lancte’s dead.
“3 . Wound or cripple him. The way Arthur Bremmer crippled Wallace, the way whoever-it-was crippled Larry Flynt.
“4 . Kill him. Assassinate him.
“Now, some of the drawbacks. The first option isn’t sure enough. I could end up doing nothing more constructive than getting myself trounced, the way Hunter Thompson did when he was researching his first book, that one on the Hell’s Angels. Even worse, this fellow Elliman may be familiar with what I look like, as a result of what happened at the Trimbull rally. Isn’t it more or less S.O.P. to keep a file on people who may be dangerous to your guys? I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Stillson had one guy on his payroll whose only job was to keep updated files on weird people and kooks. Which definitely includes me.
“Then there’s the second option. Suppose all the dirt has already come out? If Stillson has already formed his higher political aspirations—and all his actions seem to point that way—he may already have cleaned up his act. And another thing: dirt under the rug is only as dirty as the press wants to make it, and the press likes Stillson. He cultivates them. In a novel I suppose I would turn private detective myself and ‘get the goods on him,’ but the sad fact is that I wouldn’t know where to begin. You could argue that my ability to ‘read’ people, to find things that have been lost (to quote Sam) would give me a boost. If I could find out something about Lancte, that would turn the trick. But isn’t it likely that Stillson delegates all that to Sonny Elliman? And I cannot even be sure, despite my suspicions, that Edgar Lancte was still on Stillson’s trail when he was murdered. It is possible that I might hang Sonny Elliman and still not finish Stillson.
“Overall, the second alternative is just not sure enough. The stakes are enormous, so much so that I don’t even dare let myself think about ‘the big picture’ very often. It brings on a very bitch-kitty of a headache every time.
“I have even considered, in my wilder moments, trying to hook him on drugs the way the character Gene Hackman played in The French Connection II was, or driving him batty with LSD slipped into his Dr Pepper or whatever it is he drinks. But all of that is cop-show make-believe. Gordon Liddy shit. The problems are so great that this ‘option’ doesn’t even bear much talking about. Maybe I could kidnap him. After all, the guy is only a U.S. representative. I wouldn’t know where to get heroin or morphine, but I could get plenty of LSD from Larry McNaughton right here in the good old Phoenix Public Works Department. He has pills for every purpose. But suppose (if we’re willing to suppose the foregoing) that he just enjoyed his trip(s)?
“Shooting and crippling him? Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t. I guess under the right circumstances, I could—like the rally in Trimbull. Suppose I did. After what happened in Laurel, George Wallace was never really a potent political force again. On the other hand, FDR campaigned from his wheelchair and even turned it into an asset.
“That leaves assassination, the Big Casino. This is the one unarguable alternative. You can’t run for president if you’re a corpse.
“If I could pull the trigger.
“And if I could, what would the results be to me?
“As Bob Dylan says ‘Honey do you have to ask me that?’ ”
There were a great many other notes and jottings, but the only other really important one was written out and neatly boxed: “Suppose outright murder does turn out to be the only alternative? And suppose it turned out that I could pull the trigger? Murder is still wrong. Murder is wrong. Murder is wrong. There may yet be an answer. Thank God there’s years of time.”
3
But for Johnny, there wasn’t.
In early December of 1978, shortly after another congressman, Leo Ryan of California, had been shot to death on a jungle airstrip in the South American country of Guayana, Johnny Smith discovered he had almost run out of time.
Chapter 26
1
At 2:30 P.M. on December 26, 1978, Bud Prescott waited on a tall and rather haggard-looking young man with graying hair and badly bloodshot eyes. Bud was one of three clerks working in the 4th Street Phoenix Sporting Goods Store on the day after Christmas, and most of the business was exchanges—but this fellow was a paying customer.
He said he wanted to buy a good rifle, light-weight, bolt-action. Bud showed him several. The day after Christmas was a slow one on the gun-counter; when men got guns for Christmas, very few of them wanted to exchange them for something else.
This fellow looked them all over carefully and finally settled on a Remington 700, .243 caliber, a very nice gun with a light kick and a flat trajectory. He signed the gunbook John Smith and Bud thought, IfI never saw me an alias before in my life, there’s one there. “John Smith” paid cash—took the twenties right out of a wallet that was bulging with them. Took the riffle right over the counter. Bud, thinking to poke him a little, told him he could have his initials burned into the stock, no extra charge. “John Smith” merely shook his head.
When “Smith” left the store, Bud noticed that he was limping noticeably. Would never be any problem identifying that guy again, he thought, not with that limp and those scars running up and down his neck.
2
At 10:30 A.M. on December 27, a thin man who walked with a limp came into Phoenix Office Supply, Inc., and approached Dean Clay, a salesman there. Clay said later that he noticed what his mother had always called a “fire-spot” in one of the man’s eyes. The customer said he wanted to buy a large attaché case, and eventually picked out a handsome cowhide item, top of the line, priced at $149.95. And the man with the limp qualified for the cash discount by paying with new twenties. The whole transaction, from looking to paying, took no more than ten minutes. The fellow walked out of the store, and turned right toward the downtown area, and Dean Clay never saw him again until he saw his picture in the Phoenix Sun.
3
Late that same afternoon a tall man with graying hair approached Bonita Alvarez’s window in the Phoenix Amtrak terminal and inquired about traveling from Phoenix to New York by train. Bonita showed him the connections. He followed them with his finger and then carefully jotted them all down. He asked Bonnie Alvarez if she could ticket him to depart on January 3. Bonnie danced her fingers over her computer console and said that she could.
“Then why don’t you ...” the tall man began, and then faltered. He put one hand up to his head.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Fireworks,” the tall man said. She told the police later on that she was quite sure that was what he said. Fireworks.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
“Headache,” he said. “Excuse me.” He tried to smile, but the eff
ort did not improve his drawn, young-old face much.
“Would you like some aspirin? I have some.”
“No, thanks. It’ll pass.”
She wrote the tickets and told him he would arrive at New York’s Grand Central Station on January 6, at midafternoon.
“How much is that?”
She told him and added: “Will that be cash or charge, Mr. Smith?”
“Cash,” he said, and pulled it right out of his wallet—a whole handful of twenties and tens.
She counted it, gave him his change, his receipt, his tickets. “Your train leaves at 10:30 A.M., Mr. Smith,” she said. “Please be here and ready to entrain at 10:10.”
“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
Bonnie gave him the big professional smile, but Mr. Smith was already turning away. His face was very pale, and to Bonnie he looked like a man who was in a great deal of pain.
She was very sure that he had said fireworks.
4
Elton Curry was a conductor on Amtrak’s Phoenix-Salt Lake run. The tall man appeared promptly at 10:00 A.M. on January 3, and Elton helped him up the steps and into the car because he was limping quite badly. He was carrying a rather old tartan traveling bag with scuffmarks and fraying edges in one hand. In the other hand he carried a brand-new cowhide attaché case. He carried the attaché case as if it were quite heavy.
“Can I help you with that, sir?” Elton asked, meaning the attaché case but it was the traveling bag that the passenger handed him, along with his ticket.
“No, I’ll take that when we’re underway, sir.”
“All right. Thank you.”
A very polite sort of fellow, Elton Curry told the FBI agents who questioned him later. And he tipped well.
5
January 6, 1979, was a gray, overcast day in New York—snow threatened but did not fall. George Clements’ taxi was parked in front of the Biltmore Hotel, across from Grand Central.
The door opened and a fellow with graying hair got in, moving carefully and a little painfully. He placed a traveling bag and an attaché case beside him on the seat, closed the door, then put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes for a moment, as if he was very, very tired.
“Where we goin, my friend?” George asked.
His fare looked at a slip of paper. “Port Authority Terminal,” he said.
George got going. “You look a little white around the gills, my friend. My brother-in-law looked like that when he was havin his gallstone attacks. You got stones?”
“No.”
“My brother-in-law, he says gallstones hurt worse than anything. Except maybe kidney stones. You know what I told him? I told him he was full of shit. Andy, I says, you’re a great guy, I love ya, but you’re full of shit. You ever had cancer, Andy? I says. I asks him that, you know, did he ever have cancer. I mean, everybody knows cancer’s the worst.” George took a long look in his rear-view mirror. “I’m asking you sincerely, my friend ... are you okay? Because, I’m telling you the truth, you look like death warmed over.”
The passenger answered, “I’m fine. I was ... thinking of another taxi ride. Several years ago.”
“Oh, right,” George said sagely, exactly as if he knew what the man was talking about. Well, New York was full of kooks, there was no denying that. And after this brief pause for reflection, he went on talking about his brother-in-law.
6
“Mommy, is that man sick?”
“Shhh.”
“Yeah, but is he?”
“Danny, be quiet.”
She smiled at the man on the other side of the Greyhound’s aisle, an apologetic, kids-will-say-anything-won’t-they smile, but the man appeared not to have heard. The poor guy did look sick. Danny was only four, but he was right about that. The man was looking listlessly out at the snow that had begun to fall shortly after they crossed the Connecticut state line. He was much too pale, much too thin, and there was a hideous Frankenstein scar running up out of his coat collar to just under his jaw. It was as if someone had tried taking his head clean off at sometime in the not-too-distant past—tried and almost succeeded.
The Greyhound was on its way to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and they would arrive at 9:30 tonight if the snow didn’t slow things down too much. Julie Brown and her son were going to see Julie’s mother-in-law, and as usual the old bitch would spoil Danny rotten—and Danny didn’t have far to go.
“I wanna go see him.”
“No, Danny.”
“I wanna see if he’s sick.”
“No!”
“Yeah, but what if he’s dine, ma?” Danny’s eyes positively glowed at this entrancing possibility. “He might be dine right now!”
“Danny, shut up.”
“Hey, mister!” Danny cried. “You dine, or anything?”
“Danny, you shut your mouth!” Julie hissed, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.
Danny began to cry then, not real crying but that snotty, I-can’ t-get-my-own-way whining that always made her want to grab him and pinch his arms until he really had something to cry about. At times like this, riding the bus into evening through another cruddy snowstorm with her son whining beside her, she wished her own mother had sterilized her several years before she had reached the age of consent.
That was when the man across the aisle turned his head and smiled at her—a tired, painful smile, but rather sweet for all that. She saw that his eyes were terribly bloodshot, as if he had been crying. She tried to smile back, but it felt false and uneasy on her lips. That red left eye—and the scar running up his neck—made that half of his face look sinister and unpleasant.
She hoped that the man across the aisle wasn’t going all the way to Portsmouth, but as it turned out, he was. She caught sight of him in the terminal as Danny’s gram swept the boy, giggling happily, into her arms. She saw him limping toward the terminal doors, a scuffed traveling bag in one hand, a new attaché case in the other. And for just a moment, she felt a terrible chill cross her back. It was really worse than a limp—it was very nearly a headlong lurch. But there was something implacable about it, she told the New Hampshire state police later. It was as if he knew exactly where he was going and nothing was going to stop him from getting there.
Then he passed out into the darkness and she lost sight of him.
7
Timmesdale, New Hampshire, is a small town west of Durham, just inside the third congressional district. It is kept alive by the smallest of the Chatsworth Mills, which hulks like a soot-stained brick ogre on the edge of Timmesdale Stream. Its one modest claim to fame (according to the local Chamber of Commerce) is that it was the first town in New Hampshire to have electric streetlights.
One evening in early January, a young man with prematurely graying hair and a limp walked into the Timmesdale Pub, the town’s only beer joint. Dick O’Donnell, the owner, was tending the bar. The place was almost empty because it was the middle of the week and another norther was brewing. Two or three inches had piled up out there already, and more was on the way.
The man with the limp stamped off his shoes, came to the bar, and ordered a Pabst. O‘Donnell served him. The fellow had two more, making them last, watching the TV over the bar. The color was going bad, had been for a couple of months now, and The Fonz looked like an aging Rumanian ghoul. O’Donnell couldn’t remember having seen this guy around.
“Like another?” O’Donnell asked, coming back to the bar after serving the two old bags in the corner.
“One more won’t hurt,” the fellow said. He pointed to a spot above the TV. “You met him, I guess.”
It was a framed blowup of a political cartoon. It showed Greg Stillson, his construction helmet cocked back on his head throwing a fellow in a business suit down the Capitol steps. The fellow in the business suit was Louis Quinn, the congressman who had been caught taking kickbacks in the parking-lot scam some fourteen months ago. The cartoon was titled GIVING EM THE BUM’S RUSH, and across the corner it
had been signed in a scrawling hand: For Dick O’Donnell, who keeps the best damn saloon in the third district! Keep drawing them, Dick—Greg Stillson.
“Betcha butt I did,” O‘Donnell said. “He gave a speech in here the last time he canvassed for the House. Had signs out all over town, come on into the Pub at two o’clock Saturday afternoon and have one on Greg. That was the best damn day’s business I’ve ever done. People was only supposed to have one on him, but he ended up grabbing the whole tab Can’t do much better than that, can you?”
“Sounds like you think he’s one hell of a guy.”
“Yeah, I do,” O’Donnell said. “I’d be tempted to put my bare knuckles on anyone who said the other way.”
“Well, I won’t try you.” The fellow put down three quarters. “Have one on me.”
“Well, okay. Don’t mind if I do. Thanks, mister ... ?”
“Johnny Smith is my name.”
“Why, pleased to meet you, Johnny. Dicky O’Donnell. that’s me.” He drew himself a beer from the tap. “Yeah, Greg’s done this part of New Hampshire a lotta good. And there’s a lotta people afraid to come right out and say it, but I’m not. I’ll say it right out loud. Some day Greg Stillson’s apt to be president.”