by Stephen King
Too late, then. Clint closed his eyes. A quick fairy tale formed itself:
Once upon a time there was an obscure prison psychiatrist who dressed all in black, ran out into the night, and lay crosswise in the middle of a length of interstate. A Trailways bus came tooling along and put him out of his misery and everyone else lived happily ever after or maybe they didn’t, but it was no longer the obscure prison psychiatrist’s problem. The end.
“Okay, okay,” Clint said. “Here’s what we do: tell them no more calls, not to anybody. Have you got that?”
“I called my sister!” Van burst out. “I’m sorry, Doc, but I wanted to do something good, something to make up for having to shoot Dempster! I told Bonnie not to go to sleep no matter how much she wanted to, because we might have an immune person in the prison, and that might mean there’s a cure! Or that it cures itself!”
Clint opened his eyes. “How long have you been up, Van?”
“Since four this morning! The goddam dog woke me up! She had to go out and p-p-pee!” Tough-as-nails Vanessa Lampley could hold back no longer. She began to cry.
“Just tell everyone on staff no more calls, got it?” It was almost certainly too late, but maybe they could slow the news. There might even be a way to put a pin in this. “Call your sister back and tell her you were mistaken. Tell her it was a false rumor and you bought into it. Tell the others who made calls to do the same.”
Silence.
“Van, are you still there?”
“I don’t want to, Dr. Norcross. And, all due respect, I don’t think that’s the right way to go. Bonnie will stay awake now, at least through the night, because she believes there’s a chance. I don’t want to take that away.”
“I understand how you feel, but it is the right call. Do you want a bunch of people from town coming up to the prison like . . . like torch-carrying peasants storming the castle in an old Frankenstein movie?”
“Go see your wife,” Van said. “You said she’s been up even longer than me. See if you can look her in the face and not tell her there might be a little light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Van, listen—”
But Van was gone. Clint stared at the CALL ENDED message in the window of his phone for a long time before he put it in his pocket and drove the rest of the way into town.
Dempster was dead. Cheerful Ree Dempster. He couldn’t believe it. And his heart ached for Van Lampley in spite of her insubordination. Although, really, how could she be insubordinate to him? He was just the jailhouse shrink, for God’s sake.
2
Clint pulled into one of the 15 MINUTES ONLY spaces in front of the sheriff’s station, and heard the last thing he would have expected: the sound of laughter spilling out through the open door.
There was quite a crew in the ready-room. Lila was sitting at the dispatch desk next to Linny. Ranged around them in a rough circle were five other deputies, all male—Terry Coombs, Reed Barrows, Pete Ordway, Elmore Pearl, and Vern Rangle. Sitting outside the circle of cops was Barry Holden, the public defender who had briefly handled Evie Black’s case, and a white-bearded elderly gent that Clint knew from around town, Willy Burke.
Lila was smoking. She had stopped eight years ago, when Jared had one day remarked that he hoped she wouldn’t die from lung cancer until he grew up. Linny Mars and two of the others present were also puffing away. The air was blue and fragrant.
“What’s going on, guys?” he asked.
Lila saw him, and her face brightened. She snuffed her cigarette out in a coffee cup, ran across the room to him, and jumped into his arms. Literally, with her ankles hooked together at the backs of his thighs. She kissed him hard. This occasioned more laughter, a hoot from Attorney Holden, and a spatter of applause.
“Oh, am I glad to see you!” she said, and kissed him again.
“I was on my way to see Jared,” Clint said. “I thought I’d stop and see if you were here, if you could get away.”
“Jared!” she cried. “Can you believe what a great kid we raised, Clint? Gosh, as good a job as we did, sometimes I think it was selfish of us not to have a second one.” His wife thumped him on the chest and detached herself. Above her smile, Lila’s pupils were pinpoints.
Terry Coombs came over. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Terry shook Clint’s hand. “You know what happened to Roger, don’t you? Tried to unwrap his wife. Bad idea. Should have waited for Christmas.” Terry burst into a peal of laughter that turned into a sob. “My wife’s gone, too. Can’t get in touch with my kid.”
There was liquor on Terry’s breath, but there had been none on Lila’s; whatever she had ingested was a lot more up-tempo than booze. Clint thought of matching Terry by recounting what had just happened at the prison. He pushed the idea away. The death of Ree Dempster wasn’t a party story, and that was exactly what this gathering looked like.
“I’m sorry, Terry.”
Pete Ordway hooked an arm over Terry’s shoulder and drew him away.
Lila pointed to the bearded man. “Hon, you know Willy Burke, don’t you? He helped me transport Roger and Jessica to the morgue with his pickup truck. Except by morgue I actually mean the freezer at the Squeaky Wheel. Turns out the hospital is a no-go these days. Talk about low-rent, huh?” She giggled and clapped her hands to her face. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
“Good to see you, sir,” Willy said. “Got a fine wife there. She’s well about her business, tired as she is.”
“Thanks.” And to his fine wife: “I take it you’ve been into the evidence locker.”
“Just Lila and me,” Linny said. “Terry had a little Scotch.”
Lila produced the Provigil scrip from her back pocket and gave it to Clint. “No luck with this, or anything else. Two of the pharmacies have been looted, and the Rite Aid is nothing but ashes and embers. You probably smelled it when you came into town.”
Clint shook his head.
“We’ve been having what I guess you’d call a wake,” Vern said. “Which is what I wish all the women would do.”
For a moment everyone looked puzzled. Then Barry started laughing, and the other deputies, and Willy and Lila and Linny joined in. The sound was jarringly merry.
“A wake,” Lila said. She punched Clint on the arm. “Awake. Get it?”
“Got it,” Clint said. He had stepped into the law enforcement version of Wonderland.
“Sober over here,” Willy Burke said, raising his hand. “I make a little from time to time—” He shot a wink at Lila: “You didn’t hear that, Sheriff—but I don’t touch the stuff. Been teetotal for going on forty years.”
“I must admit I appropriated Mr. Burke’s nip for myself,” said Barry Holden. “Seemed like the right thing to do, given all that’s going on.”
Deputies Barrows, Ordway, Pearl, and Rangle declared themselves sober, Vern Rangle raising his own hand as if he were testifying in court. Clint was beginning to be angry. It was the laughter. He understood it, certainly Lila was entitled to get a little wonky after thirty or more hours of sleeplessness, and getting into the evidence locker had been his own idea, but he still didn’t like it a bit. On the drive into town, he’d thought himself ready for just about anything, but he hadn’t been prepared to hear about Van shooting Ree, and he hadn’t been ready to walk in on an Irish wake at the sheriff’s station.
Lila was saying, “We were just talking about the time Roger rolled on a domestic and the lady of the house leaned out of an upstairs window and told him to fuck off and die. When he wouldn’t do either, she poured a bucket of paint on his head. He was still scrubbing it out of his hair a month later.”
“Dutch Boy Rhumba Red!” Linny screamed with laughter and dropped her cigarette in her lap. She picked it up, almost puffed on the lit end, and dropped it on the floor trying to get it turned around. That brought on more general laughter.
“What did you take?” Clint asked. “You and Linny? Was it the coke?”
“No, we’re saving the blow fo
r later,” Lila said.
“Don’t worry, Sheriff, I’ll defend you,” Barry said. “I’ll plead exigent circumstances. No jury in America will convict.”
That caused another explosion of hilarity.
“We took in over a hundred Blue Scooties in the Griner brothers bust,” Linny said. “Lila opened one of the capsules, and we snorted the powder.”
Clint thought of Don Peters, first getting Jeanette Sorley to perform a sex act on him in the common room, then drugging Janice’s java. He thought of the idiotic coffee-mix that Coates had signed off on. He thought of the strange woman in A Wing. He thought of Ree choking Claudia and trying to open her throat with her teeth. He thought of terrified inmates crying in their cells, and of Vanessa Lampley saying, I don’t want to, Dr. Norcross.
“I see it worked,” Clint said. To hold himself in took a concentrated effort. “You seem very awake.”
Lila took Clint’s hands. “I know how it looks, honey—how we look—but we had no choice. The pharmacies are a bust, and anything of a speedy nature that the supermarkets sell is long gone. Jared told me. I spoke with him. He’s all right, you know, you don’t have to worry, you—”
“Uh-huh. Can I talk to you alone for a minute?”
“Of course.”
3
They walked outside into the cool night. Now he could smell ashes and burning plastic—all that remained of the Rite Aid, he supposed. Behind them, the conversation started up again. And the laughter.
“Now, what’s going on with Jared?”
She put up a hand, like a crossing guard. Like he was an aggressive driver. “He’s babysitting a little girl named Molly. She’s old Mrs. Ransom’s granddaughter. Mrs. Ransom is cocooned, so he took charge. He’s all right for now. You don’t need to worry about him.”
No, he thought, don’t tell me not to worry about our son. Until he turns eighteen, our job is to worry about him. Are you so drugged that you’ve forgotten that?
“Or at least, not any more than you have to,” she added after a moment.
She’s tired and she’s got a lot on her plate, Clint reminded himself. She just killed a woman, for God’s sake. You have no reason to be angry with her. But he was angry, just the same. Logic had very little power over emotions. As a shrink he knew that, not that knowing it was any help at this moment.
“Any idea how long you’ve been awake?”
She closed one eye, calculating. It gave her a piratical aspect he didn’t care for. “Since maybe . . . one o’clock or so yesterday afternoon, I guess. That makes it . . .” She shook her head. “Can’t do the math. Boy, my heart’s pounding. But I’m wide awake, there’s that. And look at the stars! Aren’t they pretty?”
Clint could do the math. It came to roughly thirty-two hours.
“Linny went on the Internet to see how long a person can go without sleep,” Lila said brightly. “The record is two hundred sixty-four hours, isn’t that interesting? Eleven days! It was set by a high school kid who was doing a science project. I’ll tell you, that record is going down. There are some very determined women out there.
“Cognition declines pretty quickly, though, and then emotional restraint. In addition, there’s this phenomenon called microsleep, which I myself experienced out at Truman Mayweather’s trailer, whoo, that was scary, I felt the first strands of that stuff coming right out of my hair. On the bright side, humans are diurnal mammals, and that means as soon as the sun comes up, all the women who’ve managed to stay awake through the night will get a boost. It’s apt to be gone by mid-afternoon tomorrow, but—”
“It’s too bad you had to pull that graveyard shift last night,” Clint said. The words were out before he even knew they were on the way.
“Yeah.” The laughter went out of her at once. “It is too bad I had to do that.”
“No,” said Clint.
“Pardon?”
“A pet food truck did overturn on Mountain Rest Road, that much is true, but it happened a year ago. So what were you doing last night? Where the hell were you?”
Her face was very white, but in the darkness, her pupils had grown to more or less their normal size. “Are you sure that’s something you want to get into right now? With everything else that’s going on?”
He might have said no, but then another burst of that infuriating laughter came from inside, and he gripped her arms. “Tell me.”
Lila looked at his hands on her biceps, then at him. He let go and stepped back from her.
“At a basketball game,” said Lila. “I went to see a girl play. Number thirty-four. Her name is Sheila Norcross. Her mother is Shannon Parks. So tell me, Clint, who’s been lying to who?”
He opened his mouth—to say what, he didn’t know—but before he could say anything at all, Terry Coombs burst out through the door, eyes wild. “Oh, Jesus, Lila! Jesus fuckin God!”
She turned away from Clint. “What?”
“We forgot! How could we forget? Oh, Jesus!”
“Forgot what?”
“Platinum!”
“Platinum?”
She only stared at him, and what Clint saw on her face caused his rage to collapse. Her perplexed expression said she sort of knew what he was talking about, but couldn’t put it in any context or frame of reference. She was too tired.
“Platinum! Roger and Jessica’s baby daughter!” Terry shouted. “She’s only eight months old, and she’s still at their house! We forgot the fucking baby!”
“Oh dear God,” Lila said. She spun and ran down the steps with Terry on her heels. Neither of them looked at Clint, or looked around when he called after them. He took the steps two at a time and caught Lila by the shoulder before she could get into her car. She was in no shape to drive, neither of them were, but he could see that wouldn’t stop them.
“Lila, listen. The baby is almost certainly okay. Once they’re in those cocoons, they seem to enter a kind of steady state, like life support.”
She shrugged his hand away. “We’ll talk later. I’ll meet you at the house.”
Terry was behind the wheel. Terry who had been drinking.
“Hope you’re right about that baby, Doc,” he said, and slammed the door.
4
Near Fredericksburg, the spare tire the warden’s daughter had been driving on for several weeks blew at the least opportune time, the way her mother—maniacally dedicated, as mothers and wardens are wont to be, to the calculation of worst case scenarios—would have warned her that it inevitably would. Michaela eased her car to a stop at a McDonald’s parking lot. She went inside to pee.
A biker guy, massive and bare-chested except for a leather vest with SATAN’S 7 stitched on it, and what appeared to be a Tec-9 strapped over his back, was at the counter. He was explaining to a raccoon-eyed counter girl that, no, he wouldn’t be paying for any of his Big Macs. There was a special tonight; everything he wanted was free. At the hush of the door closing, the biker guy turned to see Michaela.
“Hey, sister.” His look was appreciative: not bad. “I know you?”
“Maybe?” Michaela replied, not stopping as she strode up the side of the McDonald’s, skipping the bathroom, and continuing right back outside again through the rear exit door. She hustled for the rear of the parking lot and pushed between the branches of a hedge. On the other side of the hedge was the parking lot for a Hobby Lobby. The store was lit and she could see people inside. Michaela wondered how goddam dedicated to your scrapbooking you had to be to go shopping at Hobby Lobby on this night of all nights.
She took a step and something closer caught her attention: a Corolla idling about twenty feet away. A white form occupied the front seat.
Michaela approached the car. The white form was a woman, of course, head and hands cocooned. Although Michaela was still high from the coke, she wished she were much, much higher. In the cocooned woman’s lap was a dead dog, a poodle, the body wrung and twisted.
Oh, Fido, you shouldn’t lick the webs off Mommy’s face wh
en she’s snoozing in the parking lot. Mommy can be very cross if you wake her up.
Michaela gingerly transported the dead dog to the grass. Then she dragged the woman, by her driver’s license Ursula Whitman-Davies, over to the front passenger side. While she didn’t much like the idea of keeping the woman in the car, she was deeply uncomfortable with the alternative, which would be depositing her in the grass next to her dead poodle. And there was the utilitarian to consider: with Ursula along, she could legally use the carpool lane.
Michaela got behind the wheel and rolled onto the service road that would take her back to I-70.
As she passed the McDonald’s, an evil idea struck her. It was no doubt coke-fueled, but it seemed divinely right, nevertheless. She turned around at the Motel 6 next door and went back to Mickey D’s. Parked right in front and heeled over on its kickstand was a Harley Softail that looked vintage. Above the Tennessee plate on the rear fender was a skull decal with SATAN’S in one eyesocket and 7 in the other. Written across the teeth was BEWARE.
“Hang on, Ursula,” Michaela said to her cocooned co-pilot, and aimed the Corolla at the motorcycle.
She was doing less than ten miles an hour when she struck it, but it went over with a satisfying crash. The biker guy was sitting at a table by the front window, with a mountain of food stacked before him on a tray. He looked up in time to see Michaela backing away from his iron horse, which now looked like one dead pony. She could see his lips moving as he ran for the door, a Big Mac dripping Secret Sauce in one hand and a milkshake in the other, Tec-9 bouncing against his back. Michaela couldn’t tell what he was saying, but she doubted if it was shalom. She gave him a cheerful wave before swinging back onto the service road and putting Ursula’s Toyota up to sixty.
Three minutes later, she was back on the interstate, laughing wildly, knowing that the euphoria wouldn’t last, and wishing for more blow so that it might.