by Stephen King
She felt dazed, punchy. “Sure. I’ll tell them. But—”
“That’s all.” He lifted his open, empty palms again. She saw something and leaned forward, unsettled.
“What are you looking at?” There was an edge in his voice.
“Nothing.”
But she had seen, and she knew from the narrow expression on his face that he knew she had. There were no lines on Flagg’s palms. They were as smooth and as blank as the skin on an infant’s stomach. No lifeline, no loveline, no rings or bracelets or loops. Just . . . blank.
They looked at each other for what seemed a very long time.
Then Flagg bounced to his feet and went toward the desk. Dayna also rose. She had actually begun to believe that he might let her go. He sat on the edge of the desk and drew the intercom toward him.
“I’ll tell Lloyd to have the oil and the plugs and points changed on your cycle,” he said. He thumbed the button. “Lloyd?”
“Yeah, right here.”
“Will you have Dayna’s bike gassed and tuned up and left in front of the hotel? She’s going to be leaving us.”
“Yes.”
Flagg clicked off. “Well, that’s it, dear.”
“I can . . . just go?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s been my pleasure.” He lifted his hand to the door . . . palm side down.
She went to the door. Her hand had barely brushed the knob when he said: “There is one more thing. One . . . very minor thing.”
Dayna turned to look at him. He was grinning at her, and it was a friendly grin, but for a flashing second she was reminded of a huge black mastiff, its tongue lolling over white spiked teeth that could rip off an arm as if it was a dishrag.
“What’s that?”
“There’s one more of your people over here,” Flagg said. His smile widened. “Who might that be?”
“How in the world would I know?” Dayna asked, and her mind flashed: Tom Cullen! . . . could it really have been him?
“Oh, come now, dear. I thought we had it all straightened out.” “Really,” she said. “Look at it straight ahead and you’ll see I’m being dead honest. The committee sent me . . . and the Judge . . . and who knows how many others . . . and they were very careful. Just so we couldn’t tattle on each other if something . . . you know, happened.”
“If we decided to pull some fingernails?”
“Okay, yes. I was approached by Sue Stern. I’d guess Larry Underwood . . . he’s on the committee, too—”
“I know who Mr. Underwood is.”
“Yes, well, I’d guess he asked the Judge. But as for anyone else . . .” She shook her head. “It could be anyone. Or anyones. For all I know, each of the seven committee members was responsible for recruiting one spy.”
“Yes, but you know” His grin widened yet more, and now it began to frighten her. It was not a natural thing. It began to remind her of dead fish, polluted water, the surface of the moon seen through a telescope. It made her bladder feel loose and full of hot liquid.
“You know," Flagg repeated. He folded his hands. “There is one more. Not two, not five. One. And you know who that person is.” “No, I—”
Flagg bent over the intercom again. “Has Lloyd left yet?”
“No, I’m right here.” Expensive intercom, good reproduction.
“Hold off for a bit on Dayna’s cycle,” he said.
“Okay.”
The intercom clicked off. Flagg looked at her, smiling, hands folded. He looked for a very long time. Dayna began to sweat. His eyes seemed to grow larger and darker. This time when she tried to drag her gaze away, she couldn’t.
“Tell me,” he said, very softly. “Let’s not have an unpleasantness, dear.”
From far off, she heard her voice say, “This whole thing was a script, wasn’t it? A little one-act play.”
“Dear, I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Yes you do. The mistake was having Lloyd answer so fast. When you say frog around here, they jump. He should have been halfway down The Strip with my cycle. Except you told him to stay put because you never intended to let me go.”
“Dear, you’ve got a terrible case of unfounded paranoia.”
Her strength was draining away; it seemed to be flowing down her legs in perfect lines of force. With the last of her will, she turned her numb right hand into a fist and struck herself above the right eye. There was an airburst of pain inside her skull and her vision went wavery. Her head rocked back and struck the door with a hollow whack. Her gaze was snapped away from his, and she felt her will returning. And her strength to resist.
“You know who it is,” he said. He got off the desk and began to walk toward her. “And you’re going to tell me. Punching yourself out won’t help, dear.”
“How come you don’t know?” she cried at him. “You knew about the Judge and you knew about me! How come you don’t know about—”
His hands descended on her shoulders, as cold as marble. “Who?” “I don’t know.”
He shook her like a ragdoll, his face grinning and fierce and terrible. His hands were cold, but his face gave off the baking oven heat of the desert. “You know. Tell me. Who?”
“Why don't you know?"
"Because I can’t see it!” he roared, and flung her across the room.
She went in a boneless, rolling heap, and when she saw the searchlamp of his face bearing down upon her in the gloom, her bladder let go, spreading warmth down her legs. The soft and helpful face of reason was gone. Randy Flagg was gone. She was with the Walkin Dude now, and God help her.
“You’ll tell,” he said. “You’ll tell me what I want to know.”
She gazed at him, and then slowly got to her feet. She felt the weight of the knife lying against her forearm.
“Yes, I’ll tell you,” she said. “Come closer.”
He took a step toward her, grinning.
“No, a lot closer. I want to whisper it in your ear.”
He came closer still. She could feel baking heat, freezing cold. There was a high, atonal singing in her ears. She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.
“Closer,” she whispered huskily.
He took another step and she cocked her right wrist in viciously. She heard the spring click. Weight slapped into her hand.
“Here!” she shrieked hysterically, and brought her arm up in a hard sweep, meaning to gut him, leaving him to blunder around the room with his intestines hanging out in steaming loops. Instead he roared laughter, hands on his hips, flaming face cocked back, squeezing and contorting with great good humor.
“Oh, my dear!” he cried, and went off into another gale of laughter.
She looked stupidly down at her hand. It held a firm yellow banana with a blue and white Chiquita sticker on it. She dropped it, horrified, to the carpet, where it became a yellow, sickly grin, miming Flagg’s own.
“You’ll tell,” he whispered. “Oh yes indeed you will.”
And Dayna knew he was right.
She whirled quickly, so quickly that even the dark man was momentarily caught by surprise. One of those blank hands snatched out and caught only the back of her blouse, leaving him with nothing more substantial than a swatch of silk.
Dayna leaped at the window-wall.
“No!” he screamed. She could feel him after her like a black wind.
She drove with her legs, using them like pistons, hitting the window with the top of her head. There was a dull flat cracking sound, and she saw amazingly thick hunks of glass fall out into the employees’ parking lot. Twisting cracks, like lodes of quicksilver, ran out from her point of impact. Momentum carried her halfway through the hole and it was there that she lodged, bleeding.
She felt his hands on her shoulders and wondered how long it would take him to make her tell. An hour? Two? She suspected she was dying now, but that was not good enough.
It was Tom I saw, and you can’t feel him o
r whatever it is you do because he’s different, he’s—
He was dragging her back in.
She killed herself by simply whipping her head viciously around to the right. A razor-sharp jag of glass plunged deep into her throat. Another slipped into her right eye. Her body went stiff for a moment, and her hands beat against the glass. Then she went limp. What the dark man dragged back into the office was only a bleeding sack.
She had gone, perhaps in triumph.
Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclatron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a battery. His eyes blazed with dark fire.
Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney—they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it.
Only Lloyd waited—not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.
He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd’s head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood.
Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form.
“Get rid of that,” Flagg said.
“Okay.” His voice fell to a husky whisper. “Should I take the head?”
“Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and burn it.”
“All right.”
“Yes.” Flagg smiled benignly.
Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. It was sticky. It made a U in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it again, clutched it, and staggered toward the door.
“Lloyd?”
He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room.
“W-W-What?”
“Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?”
“Yes.”
“Keep it handy. The time is coming.”
“A-All right.”
He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mind-boggling Hindu fakir’s trick, looking outward, smiling gently.
Lloyd left quickly, as always happy to go with his life and his sanity.
Lloyd arrived back in Vegas around 2 P.M., smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o’clock it was howling up and down The Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against the sky like tattered and yellowing battle flags. Clouds in strange shapes scudded overhead.
In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies—the Weird Sisters, everyone called them—kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling happily around on one of the crap tables with an army of plastic soldiers.
“Lookit that little squirt,” Ken said fondly. “Someone asked me if I’d watch him an hour. I’d watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out.” He looked up as Lloyd came in.
“Hey, Dinny!” Lloyd called.
“Yoyd! Yoyd!” Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard.
“Got kisses for Lloyd?” he asked.
Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.
“I got something for you,” Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses from his breast pocket.
Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. “Yoyd?”
“What, Dinny?”
“Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?”
Lloyd smiled. “I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who’s your mom now?”
“Angelina.” He pronounced it Angeyeena. “Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too.”
“Don’t tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd.”
Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON’T COME line of the crap table, generaling his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm’s.
“Thanks,” Lloyd said. “Looks great.”
“That’s homemade Syrian bread,” Whitney said proudly.
Lloyd munched for a while. “Has anybody seen him?” he asked finally.
Ken shook his head. “I think he’s gone again.”
Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play.
“I think he’s around somewhere,” Lloyd said finally. “I don’t know why, but I do.”
Whitney said in a low voice, “You think he got it out of her?” “No,” Lloyd said, watching Dinny. “I don’t think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She . . . she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn’t happen often.”
“It won’t matter in the long run,” Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same.
“No, it won’t.” Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. “Maybe he’s gone back to L.A. But my guess is that he’s still around. Someplace.” Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as he had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two games of the World Series; it was hard for them to believe, and frightening.
The wind blew hard all night.
Chapter 53
On the late afternoon of September 10, Dinny was playing in the small city park that lies just north of the city’s hotel and casino district. His “mother” that week, Angelina Hirschfield, was sitting on a park bench and talking with a young girl who had drifted into Las Vegas about five weeks before, ten days or so after Angie herself had come in.
Angie Hirschfield was twenty-seven. The girl was ten years younger, now clad in tight bluejeans shorts and a brief middy blouse which left absolutely nothing to the imagination. There was something obscene about the contrast between the tight allure of her young body and the childish, pouty, and rather vacuous expression on her face. Her conversation was monotonous and seemingly without end: rock stars, sex, her lousy job cleaning Cosmoline preservative off armaments at Indian Springs, sex, her diamond ring, sex, the TV programs that she missed so much, and sex.
Angie wished she would go have sex with someone and leave her alone. And she hoped Dinny would be at least thirty before he worked around to having this girl for a mother.
At that moment Dinny looked up, smiled, and yelled: “Tom! Hey, Tom!”
On the other side of the park, a big man with straw-blond hair was shambling along with a big workman’s lunchbucket slamming against his leg.
“Say, that guy looks drunk,” the girl said to Angie.
Angie smiled. “No, that’s Tom. He’s just—”
But Dinny was off and running, hollering “Tom! Wait up, Tom!” at the top of his lungs. Tom turned, grinning. “Airplane me, Tom! Airplane me!”
<
br /> Tom grabbed Dinny’s wrists and began to spin him around, faster and faster. Centrifugal force pulled the boy’s body out until his whizzing legs were parallel to the ground. He shrieked with laughter. After two or three spins, Tom set him gently on his feet.
Dinny wobbled around, laughing and trying to get his balance back.
“Do it again, Tom! Do it again some more!”
“No, you’ll puke if I do. And Tom’s got to get to his home. Laws, yes.”
“Kay, Tom. Bye!”
Angie said, “I think Dinny loves Lloyd and Tom more than anyone else in town. Tom Cullen is simple, but—” She looked at the girl and broke off. She was watching Tom, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful.
“Did he come in with another man?” she asked.
“Who? Tom? No, he came in all by himself about a week and a half ago. He was with those other people in their Zone, but they drove him out. Their loss is our gain, that’s what I say.”
“And he didn’t come in with a dummy? A deaf-and-dummy?”
“A deaf-mute? No, he came in alone. Dinny just loves him.”
The girl watched Tom out of sight. She thought of Pepto-Bismol in a bottle. She thought of a scrawled note that said We don’t need you. That had been back in Kansas, a thousand years ago. She had shot at them. She wished she had killed them, particularly the dummy. “Julie? Are you all right?”
Julie Lawry didn’t answer. She stared after Tom Cullen. In a little while, she began to smile.
Chapter 54
The dying man opened the Permacover notebook, uncapped his pen, paused a moment, and then began to write.
It was strange; where once the pen had flown over the paper, seeming to cover each sheet from top to bottom by a process of benign magic, the words now straggled and draggled, the letters large and tottery, as if he was regressing back to early grammar school days in his own private time machine.