Thinner

by Stephen King

  'Yes.'

  'Besides, I had to go back out there anyway, you know,' Ginelli said mildly. 'And I couldn't go in the Nova.'

  'Why not? They hadn't seen it.'

  'I got to tell it in order, William. Then you'll see. Another shot?'

  Billy shook his head. Ginelli helped himself.

  'Okay. Early Tuesday morning, the dogs. Later Tuesday morning, the Nova. Tuesday night, the heavy firepower.'

  Wednesday morning, early, the second rental car. You got all this?'

  'I think so.'

  'Now we're talking about a Buick sedan. The Avis guy wanted to give me an Aries K, said it was all he had left and I was lucky to get that, but an Aries K wasn't right. Had to be a sedan. Unobtrusive, but fairly big. Took twenty bucks to change his mind, but I finally got the car I wanted. I drove it back to the Bar Harbor Motor Inn, parked it, and made a couple more calls to make sure everything was happening the way I'd set it up. Then I drove over here in the Nova. I like that Nova, Billy - it looks like a mongrel and it smells like cowshit inside, but it's got bones.

  'So I get here and finally set your mind at rest. By then I'm ready to crash again, and I'm too tired to even think about going back to Bar Harbor, and I spent the whole day in your bed.'

  'You could have called me, you know, and saved at least one trip,' Billy said quietly.

  Ginelli smiled at him. 'Yeah, I could have phoned, but fuck that. A phone call wouldn't have shown me how you were, William. You haven't been the only one worried.'

  Billy lowered his head a little and swallowed with some difficulty. Almost crying again. Lately he was always almost crying, it seemed.

  'So! Ginelli arises, refreshed and without too much of an amphetamine hangover. He showers, jumps into the Nova, which smells more like cowshit than ever after a day in the sun, and heads back to Bar Harbor. Once there, he takes the smaller packages out of the Nova's trunk and opens them in his room. There's a thirty-eight Colt Woodsman and a shoulder holster in one of them. The stuff in the other two packages fits into his sport-coat pockets. He then leaves the room and swaps the Nova for the Buick. He thinks for a minute that if there were two of him he wouldn't have had to spend half so much time shuffling cars like a parking-lot valet at a swanky Los Angeles restaurant. Then he heads out to scenic Bankerton for what he hopes will be the last fucking time. He makes just one stop along the way, at a supermarket. He goes in and buys two things: one of those Ball jars women put up preserves in and a sixteen-ounce bottle of Pepsi. He arrives in Bankerton just as twilight is starting to get really deep. He drives to the gravel pit and goes right in, knowing that being coy won't make a difference at this point - if the body has been found because of the excitement last night, he's going to be in the soup anyway. But no one is there, and there are no signs that anyone has been there. So he digs down to Spurton, feels around a little, and comes up with the prize. Just like in the Cracker Jack box.'

  Ginelli's voice was perfectly expressionless, but Billy found this part of it unreeling in his mind like a movie not a particularly pleasant one. Ginelli squatting down, pushing aside the gravel with his hands, finding Spurton's shirt ... his belt ... his pocket. Reaching in. Fumbling through sandy change that would never be spent. And underneath the pocket, chilly flesh that was stiffened into rigor mortis. At last, the keys, and the hasty reinterment.

  'Bruh,' Billy said, and shivered.

  'It is all a matter of perspective, William,' Ginelli said calmly. 'Believe me, it is.'

  I think that's what scared me about it, Billy thought, and then listened with growing amazement as Ginelli finished the tale of his remarkable adventures.

  Hertz keys in his pocket, Ginelli returned to the Avis Buick. He opened the Pepsi-Cola, poured it into the Ball jar, then closed the jar with the wire cap. That done, he drove up to the Gypsy camp.

  'I knew they'd still be there,' he said. 'Not because they wanted to still be there, but because the State Bears would have damn well told them to stay put until the investigation was over. Here's a bunch of, well, nomads, you might as well call them, strangers in a hick town like Bankerton to be sure, and some other stranger or strangers come along in the middle of the night and shoot up the place. The cops tend to get interested in stuff like that.'

  They were interested, all right. There was a Maine State Police cruiser and two unmarked Plymouths parked at the edge of the field. Ginelli parked between the Plymouths, got out of his car, and started down the hill to the camp. The dead station wagon had been hauled away, presumably to a place where the crime-lab people could go over it.

  Halfway down the hill, Ginelli met a uniformed State Bear headed back up.

  'You don't have any business here, sir,' the Bear said. 'You'll have to move along.'

  'I convinced him that I did have a spot of business there,' Ginelli told Billy, grinning.

  'How did you do that?'

  'Showed him this.'

  Ginelli reached into his back pocket and tossed Billy a leather folder. He opened it. He knew what he was looking at immediately; he had seen a couple of these in the course of his career as a lawyer. He supposed he would have seen a lot more of them if he had specialized in criminal cases. It was a laminated FBI identification card with Ginelli's picture on it. In the photo Ginelli looked five years younger. His hair was very short, almost brush-cut. The card identified him as Special Agent Ellis Stoner.

  Everything suddenly clicked together in Billy's mind.

  He looked up from the ID. 'You wanted the Buick because it looked more like -'

  'Like a government car, sure. Big unobtrusive sedan. I didn't want to show up in the rolling tuna-fish can the Avis guy tried to give me, and I surely didn't want to show up in Farmer John's drive-in fuck-machine.'

  'This - one of the things your associate brought up on his second trip?'

  'Yes.'

  Billy tossed it back. 'It looks almost real.'

  Ginelli's smile faded. 'Except for the picture,' he said softly, 'it is.'

  For a moment there was silence as Billy tried to grope his way around that one without thinking too much about what might have happened to Special Agent Stoner, and if he might have had kids.

  Finally he said, 'You parked between two police cars and flipped that ID at a state cop five minutes after you finished digging a set of car keys out of a corpse's pocket in a gravel pit.'

  'Nah,' Ginelli said, 'it was more like ten.'

  As he made his way into the camp, he could see two guys, casually dressed but obviously cops, on their knees behind the unicorn camper. Each of them had a small garden trowel. A third stood, shining down a powerful flashlight while they dug through the earth.

  'Wait, wait, here's another one,' one of them said . He picked a slug out of the dirt on his trowel and dropped it into a nearby bucket. Blonk! Two Gypsy children, obviously brothers, stood nearby watching this operation.

  Ginelli was actually glad the cops were there. No one knew what he looked like here, and Samuel Lemke had seen only a dark smear of lampblack. Also, it was entirely plausible that an FBI agent would show up as a result of a shooting incident featuring a Russian automatic weapon. But he had developed a deep respect for Taduz Lemke. It was more than that word written on Spurton's forehead; it was the way Lemke had stood his ground in the face of those .30-caliber bullets coming at him out of the dark. And, of course, there was the thing, that was happening to William. He felt it was just possible that the old man might know who he was. He might see it in Ginelli's eyes, or smell it on his skin, somehow.

  Under no circumstances did he intend to let the old man with the rotten nose touch him.

  It was the girl he wanted.

  He crossed the inner circle and knocked on the door of one cif the campers at random. He had to knock again before it was opened by a middle-aged woman with frightened, distrustful eyes.

  'Whatever you want, we haven't got it for you,' she said. 'We've got troubles here. We're closed. Sorry.'

  Ginelli fl
ashed the folder. 'Special Agent Stoner, ma'am. FBI.'

  Her eyes widened. She crossed herself rapidly and said something in Romany. Then she said, 'Oh, God, what next? Nothing is right anymore. Since Susanna died it's like we've been cursed. Or -'

  She was pushed aside by her husband, who told her to shut up.

  'Special Agent Stoner,' Ginelli began again.

  'Yeah, I heard what you said.' He worked his way out. Ginelli guessed he was forty-five but he looked older, an extremely tall man who slumped so badly that he looked almost deformed. He wore a Disney World T-shirt and huge baggy Bermuda shorts. He smelled of Thunderbird wine and vomit waiting to happen. He looked like the sort of man to whom it happened fairly often. Like three and four times a week. Ginelli thought he recognized him from the night before -it had either been this guy or there was another Gypsy around here who went six-four or six-five. He had been one of those bounding away with all the grace of a blind epileptic having a heart attack, he told Billy.

  'What do you want? We've had cops on our asses all day. We always got cops on our asses, but this is just . . .fucking ... ridiculous. P He spoke in an ugly, hectoring tone, and his wife spoke to him agitatedly in Rom.

  He turned his head toward her. 'Det krigiska jag-haller,' he said, and added for good measure: 'Shut up, bitch.' The woman retreated. The man in the Disney shirt turned back to Ginelli. 'What do you want? Why don't you go talk to your buddies if you want something?' He nodded toward the crime-lab people.

  'Could I have your name, please?' Ginelli asked with the same blank-faced politeness.

  'Why don't you get it from them?' He crossed slabby, flabby arms truculently. Under his shirt his large breasts jiggled. 'We gave them our names, we gave them our statements. Someone took a few shots at us in the middle of the night, that's all any of us know. We just want to be let loose. We want to get out of Maine, out of New England, off the fucking East Coast.' In a slightly lower voice he added, 'And never come back.' The index and pinky fingers of his left hand popped out in a gesture Ginelli knew well from his mother and grandmother - it was the sign against the evil eye. He didn't believe this man was even aware he had done it.

  'This can go one of two ways,' Ginelli said, still playing the ultrapolite FBI man to the hilt. 'You can give me a bit of information, sir, or you can end up in the State Detention Center pending a recommendation on whether or not to charge you with the obstruction of justice. If convicted of obstruction, you would face five years in jail and a fine of five thousand dollars.'

  Another flood of Rom from the camper, this one nearly hysterical.

  'Enkelt!' the man yelled hoarsely, but when he turned back to Ginelli again, his face had paled noticeably. 'You're nuts.'

  'No, sir,' Ginelli said. 'It wasn't a matter of a few shots. It was at least three bursts fired from an automatic rifle. Private ownership of machine guns and rapid-fire automatic weapons is against the law in the United States. The FBI is involved in this case and I must sincerely advise you that you are currently waist-deep in shit, it's getting deeper, and I don't think you know how to swim.'

  The man looked at him sullenly for a moment longer and then said, 'My name's Heilig. Trey Heilig. You coulda gotten it from those guys.' He nodded.

  'They've got their jobs to do, I've got mine. Now, are you going to talk to me?' The big man nodded resignedly.

  He put Trey Heilig through an account of what had happened the night before. Halfway through it, one of the state detectives wandered over to see who he was. He glanced at Ginelli's ID and then left quickly, looking both impressed and a little worried.

  Heilig claimed he had burst out of his camper at the sound of the first shots, had spotted the gun flashes, and had headed up the hill to the left, hoping to flank the shooter. But in the dark he had stumbled over a tree or something, hit his head on a rock, and blacked out for a while - otherwise he surely would have had the bastard. In support of his story he pointed to a fading bruise, at least three days old and probably incurred in a drunken stumble, and his left temple. Uh-huh, Ginelli thought, and turned to another page in his notebook. Enough of the hocus-pocus; it was time to get down to business.

  'Thank you very much, Mr Heilig, you've been a great help.'

  Telling the tale seemed to have mollified the man. 'Well ... that's okay. I'm sorry I jumped on you like that. But if you were us' He shrugged.

  'Cops,' his wife said from behind him. She was looking 'I out the door of the camper like a very old, very tired badger looking out of her hole to see how many dogs are around, and how vicious they look. 'Always cops, wherever we go. That's usual. But this is worse. People are scared.'

  'Enkelt, Mamma,' Heilig said, but more gently now.

  'I've got to talk to two more people, if you can direct me,' he said, and looked at a blank page in his notebook. 'Mr Taduz Lemke and a Mrs Angelina Lemke.'

  'Taduz is asleep in there,' Heilig said, and pointed at the unicorn camper. Ginelli found this to be excellent news indeed, if it was true. 'He's very old and all of this has tired him out real bad. I think Gina's in her camper over there - she ain't a missus, though.'

  He pointed a dirty finger at a small green Toyota with a neat wooden cap on the back.

  'Thank you very much.' He closed the notebook and tucked it into his back pocket.

  Heilig retreated to his camper (and his bottle, presumably), looking relieved. Ginelli walked across the inner circle again in the growing gloom, this time to the girl's camper. His heart, he told Billy, was beating high and hard and fast. He drew a deep breath and knocked on the door.

  There was no immediate answer. He was raising his hand to knock again when it was opened. William had said she was lovely, but he was not prepared for the depth of her loveliness -the dark, direct eyes with corneas so white they were faintly bluish, the clean olive skin that glowed faintly pink deep down. He looked for a moment at her hands and saw that they were strong and corded. There was no polish in the nails, which were clean but clipped as bluntly close as the fingernails of a farmer. In one of those hands she held a book called Statistical Sociology.

  'Yes?'

  'Special Agent Ellis Stoner, Miss Lemke,' he said, and immediately that clear, lucent quality left her eyes - it was as if a shutter had fallen over them. 'FBI.'

  'Yes?' she repeated, but. with no more life than a telephone-answering machine.

  'We're investigating the shooting incident that took place here last night.'

  'You and half the world,' she said. 'Well, investigate away, but if I don't get my correspondence-course lessons in the mail by tomorrow morning I'm going to get grades taken off for lateness. So if you'll excuse me -'

  'We've reason to believe that a man named William Halleck may have been behind it,' Ginelli said. 'Does that name mean anything to you?' Of course it did; for a moment her eyes opened wide and simply blazed. Ginelli had thought her lovely almost beyond believing. He still did, but he now also believed this girl really could have been the one who killed Frank Spurton.

  'That pig!' she spat. 'Han satte sig pa en av stolarna! Han sneglade pa nytt mot hyllorna i vild! Vild!'

  'I have a number of pictures of a man we believe to be Halleck,' Ginelli said mildly. 'They were taken in Bar Harbor by an agent using a telephoto lens -'

  'Of course it's Halleck!' she said. 'That pig killed my tantenyjad - my grandmother! But he won't bother us long. He . . .' She bit her full lower lip, bit it hard, and stopped the words. If Ginelli had been the man he was claiming to be she would already have assured herself of an extremely deep and detailed interrogation. Ginelli, however, affected not to notice.

  'In one of the photographs, money appears to be passing between the two men. If one of the men is Halleck, then the other one is probably the shooter who visited your camp last night. I'd like you and your grandfather to identify Halleck positively if you can.'

  'He's my great-grandfather,' she said absently. 'I think he's asleep. My brother is with him. I hate to wake him.' She paus
ed. 'I hate to upset him with this. The last few days have been dreadfully hard on him.'

  'Well, suppose we do this,' Ginelli said. 'You look through the photos, and if you can positively identify the man as Halleck, we won't need to bother the elder Mr Lemke.'

  'That would be fine. If you catch this Halleck pig, you will arrest him?'

  'Oh, yes. I have a federal John Doe warrant with me.'

  That convinced her. As she swung out of the camper with a swirl of skirt and a heartbreaking flash of tanned leg, she said something that chilled Ginelli's heart: 'There won't be much of him to arrest, I don't think.'

  They walked past the cops still sifting dirt in the deepening gloom. They passed several Gypsies, including the two brothers, now dressed for bed in identical pairs of camouflage pajamas. Gina nodded at several of them and they nodded back but steered clear - the tall Italian-looking man with Gina was FBI, and it was best not to meddle in such business.

  They passed out of the circle and walked up the hill toward Ginelli's car, and the evening shadows swallowed them.

  'It was just as easy as pie, William,' Ginelli said. 'Third night in a row, and it was still as easy as pie ... why not? The place was crawling with cops. Was the guy who shot them up just going to come back and do something else while the cops were there? They didn't think so ... but they were stupid, William. I expected it of the rest of them, but not of the old man - you don't spend your whole life learning how to hate and distrust the cops and then just suddenly decide they're gonna protect you from whoever has been biting on your ass. But the old man was sleeping. He's worn out. That's good. We may just take him, William. We may just.'