by Stephen King
Raves for the Work
of Stephen King!
“Excellent, psychologically textured…Stephen King is so widely acknowledged as America’s master of paranormal terrors that you can forget his real genius is for the everyday.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Mr. King makes palpable the longing and regret that arise out of calamity, and deftly renders the kindness and pettiness that can mark small-town life.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The author is not only immensely popular but immensely talented, a modern-day counterpart to Twain, Hawthorne, Dickens.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Extraordinarily vivid…an impressive tour de force, a sensitive character study that holds the reader rapt.”
—Playboy
“Stephen King is superb.”
—Time
“A thoroughly compelling thriller.”
—Esquire
“Don’t start this one on a school night, kids. You’ll be up till dawn.”
—People
“A big, serious, scary novel…King is at the top of his game.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“As brilliant a dark dream as has ever been dreamed in this century.”
—The Palm Beach Post
“Breathtaking…awesome. Carries such momentum the reader must force himself to slow down!”
—New York Times Book Review
“A great book…A landmark in American literature.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Stephen King is an immensely talented storyteller of seemingly inexhaustible gifts.”
—Interview
“For those of you who think Stephen King writes only horror fiction, think again…King offers readers a rare blend of luminous prose, thought-provoking themes and masterful storytelling.”
—San Diego Union Tribune
“Wonderful…an illusionist extraordinaire, King peoples his fiction with believable characters. The power…lies in the amazing richness of his fevered imagination—he just can’t stop coming up with haunting plots.”
—Publishers Weekly
“He’s a master storyteller. Gather around the pages of his literary campfire and he’ll weave you a darn good yarn.”
—Houston Chronicle
“King is a born storyteller.”
—Library Journal
“King surpasses our expectations, leaves us spellbound and hungry for the next twist of plot.”
—The Boston Globe
“Top shelf. You couldn’t go wrong with a King book.”
—Michael Connelly
“By far the world’s most popular author…He never seems to use up the magic.”
—Chicago Tribune
“King has invented genres, reinvented them, then stepped outside what he himself has accomplished…Stephen King, like Mark Twain, is an American genius.”
—Greg Iles
“King has written…a novel that’s as hauntingly touching as it is just plain haunted…one of his freshest and most frightening works to date.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Stephen King is much more than just a horror fiction writer. And I believe that he’s never been given credit for taking American literature and stretching its boundaries.”
—Gloria Naylor
“To my mind, King is one of the most underestimated novelists of our time.”
—Mordechai Richler, The Vancouver Sun
“An absorbing, constantly surprising novel filled with true narrative magic.”
—The Washington Post
“Stephen King is the Winslow Homer of blood.”
—The New Yorker
“Enthralling…superb.”
—Dallas Times Herald
“A spellbinder, a compulsive page-turner.”
—Atlanta Journal
“It grabs you and holds you and won’t let go…a genuine page turner.”
—Chattanooga Times
“Blending philosophy with a plot that moves at supersonic speed while showcasing deeply imagined characters…an impressive sensitivity to what has often loosely been called the human condition.”
—Newsday
“You surrender yourself…King engulfs you…and carries you away to 4am page-turning.”
—A.P. Wire
“Thoroughly exciting…scary and real.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A spellbinding piece of literature.”
—Library Journal
“Haunting and touching…a literary event.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“In a special and startling way, King has created a small American gem of a story.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A tour de force…vastly entertaining.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A literary triumph…Read this book.”
—Milwaukee Journal
“King is a master storyteller.”
—Seattle Times
“Superbly crafted…extraordinary.”
—Booklist
“His writing has a lyricism, an evocative descriptive sweep…It’s a gift.”
—The Columbia State
“Dazzlingly well written.”
—The Indianapolis Star
“Faultlessly paced…continuously engrossing.”
—Los Angeles Times
“King is a terrific storyteller.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A knockout thriller…brilliant, compelling…grips you by the throat.”
—Flint Journal
“The pages turn and you’re snared by his web.”
—Baton Rouge Advocate
“King possesses an incredible sense of story…[He is] a gifted writer of intensely felt emotions, a soulful writer in control of a spare prose that never gets in the way of the story…I, for one (of millions), wait impatiently to see where this king of storytellers takes us next.”
—Ridley Pearson
“There came a morning in the spring—April, it would have been—when they spied a man sitting out on Hammock Beach. You know, just on the outskirts of the village.”
Stephanie knew it well.
“He was just sittin there with one hand in his lap and the other—the right one—lying on the sand. His face was waxy-white except for small purple patches on each cheek. His eyes were closed and Nancy said the lids were bluish. His lips also had a blue cast to them, and his neck, she said, had a kind of puffy look to it. His hair was sandy blond, cut short but not so short that a little of it couldn’t flutter on his forehead when the wind blew, which it did pretty much constant.
“Nancy says, ‘Mister, are you asleep? If you’re asleep, you better wake up.’
“Johnny Gravlin says, ‘He’s not asleep, Nancy.’
“Johnny reached down—he had to steel himself to do it, he told me that years later—and shook the guy’s shoulder. He said he knew for sure when he grabbed hold, because it didn’t feel like a real shoulder at all under there but like a carving of one. He shook twice. First time, nothing happened. Second time, the guy’s head fell over on his left shoulder and the guy slid off the litter basket that’d been holding him up and went down on his side. His head thumped on the sand. Nancy screamed and ran back to the road, fast as she could…He caught up to her and put his arm around her and said he was never so glad to feel live flesh underneath his arm. He told me he’s never forgotten how it felt to grip that dead man’s shoulder, how it felt like wood under that white shirt…”
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
October 2005
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
<
br /> New York, NY 10020
in collaboration with
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 2005 by Stephen King
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9276-4
ISBN-10: 0-7432-9276-6
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
With admiration, for Dan J. Marlowe,
author of The Name of the Game is Death:
Hardest of the hardboiled.
1
After deciding he would get nothing of interest from the two old men who comprised the entire staff of The Weekly Islander, the feature writer from the Boston Globe took a look at his watch, remarked that he could just make the one-thirty ferry back to the mainland if he hurried, thanked them for their time, dropped some money on the tablecloth, weighted it down with the salt shaker so the stiffish onshore breeze wouldn’t blow it away, and hurried down the stone steps from The Grey Gull’s patio dining area toward Bay Street and the little town below. Other than a few cursory gleeps at her breasts, he hardly noticed the young woman sitting between the two old men at all.
Once the Globe writer was gone, Vince Teague reached across the table and removed the bills—two fifties—from beneath the salt shaker. He tucked them into a flap pocket of his old but serviceable tweed jacket with a look of unmistakable satisfaction.
“What are you doing?” Stephanie McCann asked, knowing how much Vince enjoyed shocking what he called “her young bones” (how much they both did, really), but in this instance not able to keep the shock out of her voice.
“What does it look like?” Vince looked more satisfied than ever. With the money gone he smoothed down the flap over the pocket and took the last bite of his lobster roll. Then he patted his mouth with his paper napkin and deftly caught the departed Globe writer’s plastic lobster bib when another, fresher gust of salt-scented breeze tried to carry it away. His hand was almost grotesquely gnarled with arthritis, but mighty quick for all that.
“It looks like you just took the money Mr. Hanratty left to pay for our lunch,” Stephanie said.
“Ayuh, good eye there, Steff,” Vince agreed, and winked one of his own at the other man sitting at the table. This was Dave Bowie, who looked roughly Vince Teague’s age but was in fact twenty-five years younger. It was all a matter of the equipment you got in the lottery, was what Vince claimed; you ran it until fell apart, patching it up as needed along the way, and he was sure that even to folks who lived a hundred years—as he hoped to do—it seemed like not much more than a summer afternoon in the end.
“But why?”
“Are you afraid I’m gonna stiff the Gull for the tab and stick Helen with it?” he asked her.
“No…who’s Helen?”
“Helen Hafner, she who waited on us.” Vince nodded across the patio where a slightly overweight woman of about forty was picking up dishes. “Because it’s the policy of Jack Moody—who happens to own this fine eating establishment, and his father before him, if you care—”
“I do,” she said.
David Bowie, The Weekly Islander’s managing editor for just shy of the years Helen Hafner had lived, leaned forward and put his pudgy hand over her young and pretty one. “I know you do,” he said. “Vince does, too. That’s why he’s taking the long way around Robin Hood’s barn to explain.”
“Because school is in,” she said, smiling.
“That’s right,” Dave said, “and what’s nice for old guys like us?”
“You only have to bother teaching people who want to learn.”
“That’s right,” Dave said, and leaned back. “That’s nice.” He wasn’t wearing a suit-coat or sport-coat but an old green sweater. It was August and to Stephanie it seemed quite warm on the Gull’s patio in spite of the onshore breeze, but she knew that both men felt the slightest chill. In Dave’s case, this surprised her a little; he was only sixty-five and carrying an extra thirty pounds, at least. But although Vince Teague might look no more than seventy (and an agile seventy at that, in spite of his twisted hands), he had turned ninety earlier that summer and was as skinny as a rail. “A stuffed string” was what Mrs. Pinder, The Islander’s part-time secretary, called him. Usually with a disdainful sniff.
“The Grey Gull’s policy is that the waitresses are responsible for the tabs their tables run up until those tabs are paid,” Vince said. “Jack tells all the ladies that when they come in lookin for work, just so they can’t come whining to him later on, sayin they didn’t know that was part of the deal.”
Stephanie surveyed the patio, which was still half-full even at twenty past one, and then looked into the main dining room, which overlooked Moose Cove. There almost every table was still taken, and she knew that from Memorial Day until the end of July, there would be a line outside until nearly three o’clock. Controlled bedlam, in other words. To expect every waitress to keep track of every single customer when she was busting her ass, carrying trays of steaming boiled lobsters and clams—
“That hardly seems…” She trailed off, wondering if these two old fellows, who’d probably been putting out their paper before such a thing as the minimum wage even existed, would laugh at her if she finished.
“Fair might be the word you’re lookin for,” Dave said dryly, and picked up a roll. It was the last one in the basket.
Fair came out fay-yuh, which more or less rhymed with ayuh, the Yankee word which seemed to mean both yes and is that so. Stephanie was from Cincinnati, Ohio, and when she had first come to Moose-Lookit Island to do an internship on The Weekly Islander, she had nearly despaired…which, in downeast lingo, also rhymed with ayuh. How could she learn anything when she could only understand one word in every seven? And if she kept asking them to repeat themselves, how long would it be before they decided she was a congenital idiot (which on Moose-Look was pronounced ijit, of course)?
She had been on the verge of quitting four days into a four-month University of Ohio postgrad program when Dave took her aside one afternoon and said, “Don’t you quit on it, Steffi, it’ll come to ya.” And it had. Almost overnight, it seemed, the accent had clarified. It was as if she’d had a bubble in her ear which had suddenly, miraculously popped. She thought she could live here the rest of her life and never talk like them, but understand them? Ayuh, that much she could do, deah.
“Fair was the word,” she agreed.
“One that hasn’t ever been in Jack Moody’s vocabulary, except in how it applies to the weather,” Vince said, and then, with no change of tone, “Put that roll down, David Bowie, ain’t you gettin fat, I swan, soo-ee, pig-pig-pig.”
“Last time I looked, we wa’ant married,” Dave said, and took another bite of his roll. “Can’t you tell her what’s on what passes for your mind without scoldin me?”
“Ain’t he pert?” Vince said. “No one ever taught him not to talk with his mouth full, either.” He hooked an arm over the back of his chair, and the breeze from the bright ocean blew his fine white hair back from his brow. “Steffi, Helen’s got three kids from twelve to six and a husband that run off and left her. She don’t want to leave the island, and she can make a go of it—jus
t—waitressin at The Grey Gull because summers are a little fatter than the winters are lean. Do you follow that?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Stephanie said, and just then the lady in question approached. Stephanie noticed that she was wearing heavy support hose that did not entirely conceal varicose veins, and that there were dark circles under her eyes.
“Vince, Dave,” she said, and contented herself with just a nod at the pretty third, whose name she did not know. “See your friend dashed off. For the ferry?”
“Yep,” Dave said. “Discovered he had to get back down-Boston.”
“Ayuh? All done here?”
“Oh, leave on a bit,” Vince said, “but bring us a check when you like, Helen. Kids okay?”
Helen Hafner grimaced. “Jude fell out of his treehouse and broke his arm last week. Didn’t he holler! Scared me bout to death!”
The two old men looked at each other…then laughed. They sobered quickly, looking ashamed, and Vince offered his sympathies, but it wouldn’t do for Helen.
“Men can laugh,” she told Stephanie with a tired, sardonic smile. “They all fell out of treehouses and broke their arms when they were boys, and they all remember what little pirates they were. What they don’t remember is Ma gettin up in the middle of the night to give em their aspirin tablets. I’ll bring you the check.” She shuffled off in a pair of sneakers with rundown backs.
“She’s a good soul,” Dave said, having the grace to look slightly shamefaced.
“Yes, she is,” Vince said, “and if we got the rough side of her tongue we probably deserved it. Meanwhile, here’s the deal on this lunch, Steffi. I dunno what three lobster rolls, one lobster dinner with steamers, and four iced teas cost down there in Boston, but that feature writer must have forgot that up here we’re livin at what an economist might call ‘the source of supply’ and so he dropped a hundred bucks on the table. If Helen brings us a check that says any more than fifty-five, I’ll smile and kiss a pig. With me so far?”
“Yes, sure,” Stephanie said.
“Now the way this works for that fella from the Globe is that he scratches Lunch, Gray Gull, Moose-Lookit Island and Unexplained Mysteries Series in his little Boston Globe expense book while he’s ridin back to the mainland on the ferry, and if he’s honest he writes one hundred bucks and if he’s got a smidge of larceny in his soul, he writes a hundred and twenty and takes his girl to the movies on the extra. Got that?”