by Stephen King
In a second, he’s going to grab me. I need to drop and roll.
Only he couldn’t. He was frozen. Why hadn’t he turned around when he saw the scene was deserted? Why hadn’t he gotten his gun out of the safe? Why had he ever gotten out of the truck in the first place? Jack suddenly understood that he was going to die at the end of a dirt road in Canning Township.
That was when he was touched. Caressed on the back of his neck by a hand as hot as a hot water bottle. He tried to scream and couldn’t. His chest was locked up like the Glock in its safe. Now another hand would join the first and the choking would begin.
Only the hand pulled back. Not the fingers, though. They moved back and forth – lightly, just the tips – playing across his skin and leaving trails of heat.
Jack didn’t know how long he stood there, unable to move. It might have been twenty seconds; it might have been two minutes. The wind blew, tousling his hair and caressing his neck like those fingers. The shadows of the cottonwoods schooled across the dirt and weeds like fleeing fish. The person – or the thing – stood behind him, its shadow long and thin. Touching and caressing.
Then both the fingertips and the shadow were gone.
Jack wheeled around, and this time the scream came out, long and loud, when the tail of his sportcoat belled out behind him in the wind and made a flapping sound. He stared at—
Nothing.
Just a few abandoned buildings and an acre or so of dirt.
No one was there. No one had ever been there. No one in the barn; just a busted hame. No fingers on the back of his sweaty neck; just the wind. He returned to his truck in big strides, looking back over his shoulder once, twice, three times. He got in, cringing when a wind-driven shadow raced across the rearview mirror, and started the engine. He drove back down the ranch road at fifty miles an hour, past the old graveyard and the abandoned ranchhouse, not pausing at the yellow tape this time but simply driving through it. He swerved onto Highway 79, tires squalling, and headed back toward FC. By the time he passed the city limits, he had convinced himself nothing had happened out there at that abandoned barn. The throbbing at the nape of his neck also meant nothing.
Nothing at all.
YELLOW
July 21st–July 22nd
1
At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, O’Malley’s Irish Spoon was as close to deserted as it ever got. Two geezers sat near the front with mugs of coffee beside them and a chessboard between them. The only waitress was staring, transfixed, at a small TV over the counter, where an infomercial was playing. The item on sale appeared to be some sort of golf club.
Yunel Sablo was sitting at a table toward the rear, dressed in faded jeans and a tee-shirt tight enough to show off his admirable musculature (Ralph had not had admirable musculature since 2007 or so). He was also watching the TV, but when he saw Ralph, he raised a hand and beckoned.
As he sat down, Yune said: ‘I don’t know why the waitress is so interested in that particular club.’
‘Women don’t golf? What kind of male chauvinist world are you living in, amigo?’
‘I know women golf, but that particular club is hollow. The idea is if you get caught short on the fourteenth hole, you can piss in it. There’s even a little apron included that you can flip over your junk. Thing like that wouldn’t work for a woman.’
The waitress came over to take their order. Ralph asked for scrambled eggs and rye toast, looking at the menu rather than her, lest he burst into laughter. That was one urge he hadn’t expected to struggle against this morning, and a small, strained giggle escaped him, anyway. It was the thought of the apron that did it.
The waitress didn’t need to be a mind reader. ‘Yeah, it might have its funny side,’ she said. ‘Unless, that is, your husband’s a golf nut with a prostate the size of a grapefruit and you don’t know what to get him for his birthday.’
Ralph met Yune’s eyes, and that tipped them both over. They burst into hearty roars of hilarity that made the chess players look around disapprovingly.
‘You going to order anything, honey,’ the waitress asked Yune, ‘or just drink coffee and laugh about the Comfort Nine Iron?’
Yune ordered huevos rancheros. When she was gone, he said, ‘It’s a strange world, ese, full of strange things. Don’t you think so?’
‘Given what we’re here to talk about, I’d have to agree. What was strange out there in Canning Township?’
‘Plenty.’
Yune had a leather shoulder-bag, the sort of thing Ralph had heard Jack Hoskins refer to (slightingly) as a man-purse. From it he took an iPad Mini in a battered case that had seen a lot of hard traveling. Ralph had noticed more and more cops carrying these gadgets, and guessed that by 2020, 2025 at the latest, they might entirely replace the traditional cop’s notebook. Well, the world moved on. You either moved with it, or got left behind. On the whole, he would rather have one of those for his birthday than a Comfort Nine Iron.
Yune tapped a couple of buttons and brought up his notes. ‘Kid named Douglas Elfman found the discarded clothes late yesterday afternoon. Recognized the horse’s head belt buckle from a news report. Called his dad, who got in touch with the SP right away. I got there with the crime van around quarter to six. The jeans, who knows, bluejeans just about grow on trees, but I recognized the buckle right away. Look for yourself.’
He tapped the screen again, and a close-up of the buckle filled the screen. Ralph had no doubt it was the same one that Terry had been wearing in the security cam footage from the Vogel Transportation Center in Dubrow.
Talking to himself as well as to Yune, Ralph said, ‘Okay, one more link in the chain. He ditches the van behind Shorty’s Pub. Takes the Subaru. Ditches that near the Iron Bridge, puts on fresh clothes—’
‘501 jeans, Jockey underpants, white athletic socks, and a pretty damn expensive pair of sneakers. Plus the belt with the fancy buckle.’
‘Uh-huh. Once he’s dressed in clothes with no blood on them, he takes a cab from Gentlemen, Please to Dubrow. Only when he gets to the station, he doesn’t take the train. Why not?’
‘Maybe he was trying to lay a false trail, in which case doubling back was always part of the plan. Or … I have a crazy idea. Want to hear?’
‘Sure,’ Ralph said.
‘I think Maitland meant to run. Meant to take that train to Dallas–Fort Worth, then keep on going. Maybe to Mexico, maybe to California. Why would he want to stay in Flint City after killing the Peterson boy, when he knew people had seen him? Only …’
‘Only what?’
‘Only he couldn’t bear to leave with that big game on the line. He wanted to coach his kids to one more win. Get them to the finals.’
‘That really is crazy.’
‘Crazier than killing the boy in the first place?’
Yune had him there, but Ralph was spared the need to make a reply when their food came. As soon as the waitress left, Ralph said: ‘Fingerprints on the buckle?’
Yune swiped his Mini and showed Ralph another close-up of the horse’s head. In this shot, the buckle’s silver shine had been dulled by white fingerprint powder. Ralph could see an overlay of prints, like footprints in one of those old learn-to-dance diagrams.
‘The Forensics Unit had Maitland’s dabs in their computer,’ Yune said, ‘and the program matched them up right away. But here’s the first weird thing, Ralph. The lines and whorls in the buckle prints are faint, and entirely broken up in a few places. Enough for a match that would stand up in court, but the tech who did the work – and he’s done thousands of these – said they were like the prints of an old person. Like eighty or even ninety. I asked if it could have been because Maitland was moving fast, wanting to change to yet another set of clothes and just get the hell out of there. The tech said it was possible, but I could tell from his face that it didn’t really ring his bell.’
‘Huh,’ Ralph said, and dug into his scrambled eggs. His appetite, like his sudden burst of laughter over the dua
l-purpose golf club, was a welcome surprise. ‘That is weird, but probably not substantive.’
And just how long, he wondered, was he going to continue dismissing the anomalies that kept popping up in this business by calling them non-substantive?
‘There was another set,’ Yune said. ‘They were also blurred – too blurred for the computer tech to even bother sending them out to the FBI’s national database – but he had all the stray prints from the van, and those other prints on the buckle … see what you think.’
He passed the iPad to Ralph. Here were two sets of prints, one labeled VAN UNKNOWN SUB and the other BELT BUCKLE UNKNOWN SUB. They did look alike, but only sort of. No way would they stand up in court as proof of anything, especially if a bulldog defense attorney like Howie Gold challenged them. Ralph was not in court, however, and he thought the same unsub had made them both, because it fit with what he’d learned from Marcy Maitland the night before. Not a perfect fit, no, but close enough for a detective on administrative leave who didn’t have to run everything by his superiors … or by a district attorney hellbent for election.
While Yune ate his huevos rancheros, Ralph told him about his meeting with Marcy, holding back one thing for later.
‘It’s all about the van,’ he finished. ‘Forensics may find a few prints from the kid who originally stole it—’
‘Already did. We had Merlin Cassidy’s prints from the El Paso police. Computer guy matched them to some of the stray prints in the van – mostly on the toolbox, which Cassidy must have opened to see if there was anything valuable inside. They’re clear, and they’re not these.’ He swiped back to the blurry UNSUB prints, labeled VAN and BELT BUCKLE.
Ralph leaned forward, pushing his plate aside. ‘You see how it dovetails, don’t you? We know it wasn’t Terry who stole the van in Dayton, because the Maitlands flew home. But if the blurry prints from the van and those from the buckle really are the same …’
‘You think he had an accomplice, after all. One who drove the van from Dayton to Flint City.’
‘Must have,’ Ralph said. ‘No other way to explain it.’
‘One who looked just like him?’
‘Back to that,’ Ralph said, and sighed.
‘And both sets of prints were on the buckle,’ Yune pushed on. ‘Meaning Maitland and his double wore the same belt, maybe the whole set of clothes. Well, they’d fit, wouldn’t they? Twin brothers, separated at birth. Except the records say Terry Maitland was an only child.’
‘What else have you got? Anything?’
‘Yes. We have arrived at the really weird shit.’ He brought his chair around and sat next to Ralph. The picture now on his iPad showed a close-up of the jeans, socks, underpants, and sneakers, all in an untidy pile, next to a plastic evidence-marker with a 1 on it. ‘See the stains?’
‘Yes. What is that crap?’
‘I don’t know,’ Yune said. ‘And the forensics guys don’t, either, but one of them said it looked like jizz, and I sort of agree with that. You can’t see it in the picture very well, but—’
‘Semen? Are you kidding?’
The waitress came back. Ralph turned the iPad screen side down.
‘Either of you gents want a refill on the coffee?’
They both took one. When she left, Ralph went back to the photo of the clothes, spreading his fingers on the screen to enlarge the image.
‘Yune, it’s on the crotch of the jeans, all down both legs, on the cuffs …’
‘Also on the underpants and socks,’ Yune said. ‘Not to mention the sneakers, both on em and in em, dried to a nice crack-glaze, like on pottery. Might be enough of the stuff, whatever it is, to fill a hollow nine iron.’
Ralph didn’t laugh. ‘It can’t be semen. Even John Holmes in his prime—’
‘I know. And semen doesn’t do this.’
He swiped the screen. The new picture was a wide shot of the barn floor. Another evidence tab, this one marked 2, had been placed next to a pile of loose hay. At least Ralph thought it was hay. On the far left side of the photo, evidence tab 3 had been placed atop a softly collapsing bale that looked like it had been there for a long, long time. Much of it was black. The side of the bale was also black, as if some corrosive goo had run down it to the floor.
‘Is it the same stuff?’ Ralph asked. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Ninety per cent. And there’s more in the loft. If it’s semen, that would be a nocturnal emission worthy of The Guinness Book of Records.’
‘Can’t be,’ Ralph said, low. ‘It’s something else. For one thing, semen wouldn’t turn hay black. It makes no sense.’
‘Not to me, either, but of course I am just the son of a poor Mexican farming family.’
‘Forensics is analyzing it, though.’
Yune nodded. ‘As we speak.’
‘And you’ll let me know.’
‘Yes. You see what I meant when I said this just keeps getting weirder and weirder.’
‘Jeannie called it inexplicable.’ Ralph cleared his throat. ‘She actually used the word supernatural.’
‘My Gabriela has suggested the same,’ Yune said. ‘Maybe it’s a chick thing. Or a Mexican thing.’
Ralph raised his eyebrows.
‘Sí, señor,’ Yune said, and laughed. ‘My wife’s mother died young, and she grew up at her abuela’s knee. The old lady stuffed her full of legends. When I was talking this mess over with her, Gaby told me one about the Mexican boogeyman. He was supposedly a dude dying of tuberculosis, see, and this old wise man who lived in the desert, an ermitaño, told him he could be cured by drinking the blood of children and rubbing their fat on his chest and privates. So that’s what this boogeyman did, and now he lives forever. Supposedly he only takes children who misbehave. He pops them in a big black bag he carries. Gaby told me that when she was a little girl, maybe seven, she had a screaming fit one time when the doctor came to the house for her brother, who had scarlet fever.’
‘Because the doctor had a black bag.’
Yune nodded. ‘What was that boogeyman’s name? It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t pick it off. Don’t you hate that?’
‘So is that what you think we’ve got here? The boogeyman?’
‘Nope. I may be the son of a poor Mexican farming family, ese, or possibly the son of an Amarillo car dealer, but either way, I ain’t atontado. A man killed Frank Peterson, as mortal as you and me, and that man was almost certainly Terry Maitland. If we could figure out what happened, everything would fall into place and I could go back to sleeping through the night. Because this bugs the shit out of me.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Gotta go. Promised my wife I’d take her to a craft fair in Cap City. Any more questions? You ought to have at least one, because yet one more weird thing is staring you right in the face.’
‘Were there vehicle tracks in the barn?’
‘That’s not what I was thinking of, but as a matter of fact, there were. Not useful ones, though – you can see the impressions, and there’s a little oil, but no tread marks good enough for comparison. My guess is they were made by the van Maitland used to abduct the kid. They weren’t close enough together to have been made by the Subaru.’
‘Uh-huh. Listen, you’ve got all the witness interviews on your magic gadget, right? Before you split, find the one I did with Claude Bolton. He’s a bouncer at Gentlemen, Please. Although he took issue with that word, as I remember.’
Yune brought up one file, shook his head, brought up another, and handed the iPad to Ralph. ‘Scroll down.’
Ralph did so, went past what he wanted, and at last centered on it. ‘Here it is. Bolton said, “I remember one other thing, no big deal but kind of spooky if he really was the one who killed that kid.” Bolton said the guy cut him. When I asked what he meant, Bolton said he thanked Maitland for working with his friend’s nephews, then shook with him. When he did, Maitland’s pinky fingernail grazed the back of Bolton’s hand. Made a little cut. Bolton said it reminded him of his drug days, because
some of the MCs he ran with used to grow out their pinky nails to scoop coke with. Apparently it was a fashion statement.’
‘And this is important because?’ Yune looked at his watch again, rather ostentatiously.
‘Probably it’s not. Probably it’s …’
But he wasn’t going to say non-substantive again. He liked the word less every time it came out of his mouth.
‘Probably no big deal, but it’s what my wife calls a confluence. Terry got a similar cut when he was visiting his father in a dementia ward in Dayton.’ Ralph quickly related the story about how the orderly had slipped and grabbed for Terry, cutting him in the process.
Yune thought about it, then shrugged. ‘I think that one’s pure coincidence, ese. And I really have to go, if I don’t want to incur the Wrath of Gabriela, but there’s still that thing you’re missing, and I’m not talking about tire tracks. Your pal Bolton even mentions it. Scroll back up and you’ll find it.’
But Ralph didn’t need to. It had been right in front of him. ‘Pants, underpants, socks, and sneakers … but no shirt.’
‘Correct,’ Yune said. ‘Either it was his favorite, or he didn’t have another one to change into when he left the barn.’
2
Halfway back to Flint City, Ralph finally realized what had been bugging him about the bra strap.
He pulled into the two-acre lot of a Byron’s Liquor Warehouse, and hit speed-dial. His call went to Yune’s voicemail. Ralph broke the connection without leaving a message. Yune had already gone above and beyond; let him have his weekend. And now that he had time to give it a little thought, Ralph decided this was a confluence he didn’t want to share with anyone, except maybe his wife.
The bra strap hadn’t been the only bright yellow thing he had seen during those moments of hyper-vigilance before Terry was shot; it was just his brain’s stand-in for something that had been part of the larger gallery of grotesques, and overshadowed by Ollie Peterson, who had drawn the old revolver from his newspaper bag only seconds later. No wonder it had gotten lost.