by Stephen King
The lockers had names stuck to them in DymoTape. Liz opened Therriault’s, using a handkerchief because of the leftover fingerprint powder. She did it slowly, like she expected him to be hiding inside like the boogeyman in a kid’s closet. Therriault was sort of a boogeyman, but he wasn’t in there. It was empty. The cops took everything.
Liz said fuck again. I looked at my phone to check the time. It was twenty past three.
“I know, I know,” she said. Her shoulders were slumped, and although I resented the way she’d just scooped me up and taken me away, I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her. I remembered Mr. Thomas saying my mom looked older, and now I thought my mom’s lost friend looked older, too. Thinner. And I had to admit I also felt some admiration, because she was trying to do the right thing and save lives. She was like the hero of a movie, the lone wolf who means to solve the case on her own. Maybe she did care about the innocent people who might be vaporized in Thumper’s last bomb. Probably she did. But I know now she was also concerned with saving her job. I don’t like to think it was her major concern, but in light of what happened later—I’ll get to it—I have to think it was.
“Okay, one more shot. And stop looking at your dumb phone, Champ. I know what time it is, and no matter how much trouble you’re in if I don’t get you home before your mother shows up, I’ll be in more.”
“She’ll probably take Barbara out for a drink before she goes home, anyway. Barbara works for the agency now.” I don’t know why I said that, exactly. Because I also wanted to save innocent lives, I suppose, although that seemed rather academic to me, because I didn’t think we were going to find Kenneth Therriault. I think it was because Liz looked so beaten down. So backed into a corner.
“Well, that’s a lucky break,” Liz said. “All we need is one more.”
23
The Frederick Arms was twelve or fourteen stories high, gray brick, with bars on the windows of the first- and second-floor apartments. To a kid who grew up in the Palace on Park, it looked more like that Shawshank Redemption prison than an apartment building. And Liz knew right away that we were never going to get inside, let alone to Kenneth Therriault’s apartment. The place was swarming with cops. Lookie-loos were standing in the middle of the street, as close to the police sawhorse barricades as they could get, snapping photos. TV news vans were parked on both sides of the block with their antennas up and cables snaking everywhere. There was even a Channel 4 helicopter hovering overhead.
“Look,” I said. “Stacy-Anne Conway! She’s on NY1!”
“Ask me if I give a shit,” Liz said.
I didn’t.
We had been lucky not to run into reporters at Central Park or City of Angels, and I realized the only reason we hadn’t was because they were all here. I looked at Liz and saw a tear trickling down one of her cheeks. “Maybe we can go to his funeral,” I said. “Maybe he’ll be there.”
“He’ll probably be cremated. Privately, at the city’s expense. No relatives. He outlived them all. I’ll take you home, Champ. Sorry to drag you all this way.”
“That’s okay,” I said, and patted her hand. I knew Mom wouldn’t like me doing that, but Mom wasn’t there.
Liz pulled a U-turn and headed back toward the Queens-boro bridge. A block away from the Frederick Arms, I glanced at a little grocery on my side and said, “Oh my God. There he is.”
She snapped a wide-eyed glance at me. “Are you sure? Are you sure, Jamie?”
I leaned forward and vomited between my sneakers. That was all the answer she needed.
24
I can’t really say if he was as bad as the Central Park man, that was a long time ago. He could have been worse. Once you’ve seen what can happen to a human body that’s suffered an act of violence—accident, suicide, murder—maybe it doesn’t even matter. Kenneth Therriault, alias Thumper, was bad, okay? Really bad.
There were benches on either side of the grocery’s door, so people could eat the snacks they bought, I suppose. Therriault was sitting on one of them with his hands on the thighs of his khaki pants. People were passing by, headed for whatever they were headed for. A black kid with a skateboard under his arm went into the store. A lady came out with a steaming paper cup of coffee. Neither of them glanced at the bench where Therriault was sitting.
He must have been right-handed, because that side of his head didn’t look too bad. There was a hole in his temple, maybe the size of a dime, maybe a little smaller, surrounded by a dark corona that was either bruising or gunpowder. Probably gunpowder. I doubt if his body had time to muster enough blood to make a bruise.
The real damage was on the left, where the bullet exited. The hole on that side was almost as big as a dessert plate and surrounded by irregular fangs of bone. The flesh on his head was swelled, like from a gigantic infection. His left eye had been yanked sideways and bulged from its socket. Worst of all, gray stuff had dripped down his cheek. That was his brain.
“Don’t stop,” I said. “Just keep going.” The smell of puke was strong in my nose and the taste of it was in my mouth, all slimy. “Please, Liz, I can’t.”
She swerved to the curb in front of a fire hydrant near the end of the block instead. “You have to. And I have to. Sorry, Champ, but we have to know. Now pull yourself together so people don’t stare at us and think I’ve been abusing you.”
But you are, I thought. And you won’t stop until you get what you want.
The taste in my mouth was the ravioli I’d eaten in the school caff. As soon as I realized that I opened the door, leaned out, and puked some more. Like on the day of the Central Park man, when I never made it to Lily’s birthday party at fancy-shmancy Wave Hill. That was déjà vu I could have done without.
“Champ? Champ!”
I turned to her and she was holding out a wad of Kleenex (show me a woman without Kleenex in her purse and I’ll show you no one at all). “Wipe your mouth and then get out of the car. Try to look normal. Let’s get this done.”
I could see she meant it—we weren’t going to leave until she had what she wanted. Man up, I thought. I can do this. I have to, because lives are at stake.
I wiped my mouth and got out. Liz put her little sign on the dashboard—the police version of Get Out of Jail Free—and came around to where I was standing on the sidewalk, staring into a laundromat at a woman folding clothes. That wasn’t very interesting, but at least it kept me from looking at the ruined man up the street. For the time being, anyway. Soon I’d have to. Worse—oh God—I’d have to talk to him. If he even could talk.
I held out my hand without thinking. Thirteen was probably too old to be holding hands with a woman the people passing by would assume was my mother (if they bothered thinking about us at all), but when she took it, I was glad. Glad as hell.
We started back to the store. I wished we’d had miles to walk, but it was only half a block.
“Where is he, exactly?” she asked in a low voice.
I risked a look to make sure he hadn’t moved. Nope, he was still on the bench, and now I could look directly into the crater where there had once been thoughts. His ear was still on, but it was crooked and I found myself remembering a Mr. Potato Head I’d had when I was four or five. My stomach clenched again.
“Get it together, Champ.”
“Don’t call me that anymore,” I managed to say. “I hate it.”
“Duly noted. Where is he?”
“Sitting on the bench.”
“The one on this side of the door, or—”
“This side, yeah.”
I was looking at him again, we were close now so I couldn’t help it, and I saw an interesting thing. A man came out of the store with a newspaper under his arm and a hot dog in one hand. The hot dog was in one of those foil bags that’s supposed to keep them hot (believe that and you’ll believe the moon is made of green cheese). He started to sit down on the other bench, already pulling his hot dog out of the bag. Then he stopped, looked either at me and Liz or th
e other bench, and walked on down the block to eat his pup somewhere else. He didn’t see Therriault—he would have run if he had, most likely screaming his head off—but I think he felt him. No, I don’t just think it, I know it. I wish I’d paid more attention at the time, but I was upset, as I’m sure you understand. If you don’t, you’re an idiot.
Therriault turned his head. It was a relief because the move hid the worst of the exit wound. It wasn’t a relief because his face was normal on one side and all bloated out of shape on the other, like that guy Two-Face in the Batman comics. Worst of all, now he was looking at me.
I see them and they know I do. It’s always been that way.
“Ask him where the bomb is,” Liz said. She was speaking from the corner of her mouth, like a spy in a comedy.
A woman with a baby in a Papoose carrier came up the sidewalk. She gave me a distrustful glance, maybe because I looked funny or maybe because I smelled of puke. Maybe both. I was past the point of caring. All I wanted was to do what Liz Dutton had brought me here to do, then get the fuck out. I waited until the woman with the baby went inside.
“Where’s the bomb, Mr. Therriault? The last bomb?”
At first he didn’t reply and I was thinking okay, his brains are blown out, he’s here but he can’t talk, end of story. Then he spoke up. The words didn’t exactly match the movements of his mouth and it came to me that he was talking from somewhere else. Like on a time-delay from hell. That scared the shit out of me. If I’d known that was when something awful came into him and took him over, it would have been even worse. But do I know that? Like for sure? No, but I almost know it.
“I don’t want to tell you.”
That stunned me to silence. I had never gotten such a reply from a dead person before. True, my experience was limited, but up until then I would have said they had to tell you the truth first time, every time.
“What did he say?” Liz asked. Still talking from the corner of her mouth.
I ignored her and spoke to Therriault again. Since there was no one around, I spoke louder, enunciating every word the way you would for a person who was deaf or only had a shaky grasp on English. “Where…is…the last…bomb?”
I also would have said that the dead can’t feel pain, that they are beyond it, and Therriault certainly did not seem to be suffering from the cataclysmic self-inflicted wound in his head, but now his half-bloated face twisted as if I were burning him or stabbing him in the belly instead of just asking him a question.
“Don’t want to tell you!”
“What did he—” Liz began again, but then the lady with the baby came back out. She had a lottery ticket. The baby in the Papoose had a Kit-Kat finger which he was smearing all over his face. Then he looked at the bench where Therriault was sitting and started crying. The mom must have thought her kid was looking at me, because she gave me another glance, mega distrustful this time, and hurried on her way.
“Champ…Jamie, I mean…”
“Shut up,” I said. Then, because my mother would have hated me talking to any grownup like that, “Please.”
I looked back to Therriault. His grimace of pain made his ruined face look more ruined than ever, and all at once I decided I didn’t care. He had maimed enough people to fill a hospital ward, he had killed people, and if the note he’d pinned to his shirt wasn’t a lie, he had died trying to kill even more. I decided I hoped he was suffering.
“Where…is it…you…motherfucker?”
He clasped his hands around his middle, bent over like he had cramps, groaned. Then he gave it up. “King Kullen. The King Kullen Supermarket in Eastport.”
“Why?”
“Seemed right to finish where I started,” he said, and drew a circle in the air with one finger. “Complete the circle.”
“No, why do it at all? Why set all those bombs?”
He smiled, and the way it kind of squelched the bloated side of his face? I still see that, and I’ll never be able to unsee it.
“Because,” he said.
“Because what?”
“Because I felt like it,” he said.
25
When I told Liz everything Therriault had said, she was excited and nothing else. I could understand that, she wasn’t the one looking at a man who’d pretty much blown off one whole side of his head. She told me she had to go into the store and get some stuff.
“And leave me here with him?”
“No, go back down the street. Wait by the car. I’ll only be a minute.”
Therriault was sitting there looking at me with the eye that was more or less regular and the one that was all stretched out. I could feel his gaze. It made me think of the time I went to camp and got fleas and had to have this special stinky shampoo like five times before they were all gone.
Shampoo wouldn’t fix the way Therriault made me feel, only getting away from him would do that, so I did what Liz said. I walked as far as the laundromat and looked in at the woman who was still folding clothes. She saw me and gave me a wave. That brought back the little girl with the hole in her throat, and how she had waved to me, and for one horrible moment I thought the laundromat lady was also dead. Only a dead person wouldn’t be folding clothes, they only stood around. Or sat around, like Therriault. So I gave her a return wave. I even tried to smile.
Then I turned back to the store. I told myself it was to see if Liz was coming out yet, but that wasn’t why. I was looking to see if Therriault was still looking at me. He was. He raised one hand, palm up, three fingers tucked into his palm, one finger pointing. He curled it once, then twice. Very slowly. Come here, boy.
I walked back, my legs seeming to move of their own accord. I didn’t want to, but couldn’t seem to help myself.
“She doesn’t care about you,” Kenneth Therriault said. “Not a fig. Not one single fig. She’s using you, boy.”
“Fuck you, we’re saving lives.” There was no one passing by, but even if somebody had been, he or she wouldn’t have heard me. He had stolen all of my voice but a whisper.
“What she’s saving is her job.”
“You don’t know that, you’re just some random psycho.” Still only a whisper, and I felt on the verge of peeing myself.
He didn’t say anything, only grinned. That was his answer. Liz came out. She had one of those cheap plastic bags they gave you in stores like that back then. She looked at the bench, where the ruined man she couldn’t see was sitting, and then at me. “What are you doing here, Cha…Jamie? I told you to go to the car.” And before I could answer, quick and harsh, like I was a perp in a TV cop show interrogation room: “Did he tell you something else?”
That you only care about saving your job, I thought of saying. But maybe I already knew that.
“No,” I said. “I want to go home, Liz.”
“We will. We will. As soon as I do one more thing. Two, actually, I’ve also got to get your mess out of my car.” She put an arm around my shoulders (like a good mom would) and walked me up past the laundromat. I would have waved to the clothes-folding lady again, but her back was turned.
“I set something up. I didn’t really think I’d have a chance to use it, but thanks to you…”
When we were next to her car, she took a flip-phone out of the store bag. It was still in its blister pack. I leaned against the window of a shoe repair place and watched her fiddle with it until she got it working. It was now quarter past four. If Mom went for a drink with Barbara, we could still get back before she came home…but could I keep the afternoon’s adventures to myself? I didn’t know, and right then it didn’t seem that important. I wished Liz could at least have driven around the corner, I thought she could have smelled my puke for that long after what I’d done for her, but she was too wound up. Plus, there was the bomb to consider. I thought of all the movies I’d seen where the clock is counting down to nothing and the hero is wondering whether to cut the red wire or the blue one.
Now she was calling.
“Colton? Ye
s, this is m…shut up, just listen. It’s time to do your thing. You owe me a favor, a big one, and this is it. I’m going to tell you exactly what to say. Record it, then…shut up, I said!”
She sounded so vicious that I took a step back. I’d never heard Liz like that, and realized that I was seeing her for the first time in her other life. The police life where she dealt with scumbuckets.
“Record it, then write it down, then call me back. Do it right away.” She waited. I snuck a look back at the store. Both benches were empty. That should have been a relief, but somehow I didn’t feel relieved.
“Ready? Okay.” Liz closed her eyes, shutting out everything but what she wanted to say. She spoke slowly and carefully. “‘If Ken Therriault was really Thumper…’ I’ll break in there and say I want to record this. You wait until I say ‘Go ahead, start again.’ Got that?” She listened until Colton—whoever he was—said he got it. You say, ‘If Ken Therriault was really Thumper, he was always talking about finishing where he started. I’m calling you because we talked in 2008. I kept your card.’ You got that?” Another pause. Liz nodding. “Good. I’ll say who is this, and you hang up. Do it right away, this is time-sensitive. Screw it up and I’ll fuck you big-time. You know I can.”
She ended the call. She paced around on the sidewalk. I snuck another look at the benches. Empty. Maybe Therriault —whatever remained of him—was heading back home to check out the scene at the good old Frederick Arms.
The drumbeat intro to “Rumor Has It” came from the pocket of Liz’s blazer. She took out her real phone and said hello. She listened, then said, “Hold on, I want to record this.” She did that, then said, “Go ahead, start again.”