by Stephen King
—then the Territories and all they contain are involved somehow in these wretched crimes, and he has been thrust into a drama of enormous consequence he cannot possibly grasp right now. The Tower. The Beam. He had seen this in his mother’s handwriting, something about the Tower falling and the Beams breaking: these things are parts of the puzzle, whatever they mean, as is Jack’s gut conviction that Tyler Marshall is still alive, tucked away in some pocket of the other world. The recognition that he can never speak of all this to anyone else, not even Henry Leyden, makes him feel intensely alone.
Jack’s thoughts blow away in the noisy chaos that erupts alongside and in front of the shack. It sounds like an Indian attack in a cowboy movie, whooping and yelling and the sound of running feet. A woman sends up a shrill scream eerily like the blip-blips of the police siren he had half-noted a few moments ago. Dale mutters “Jeez,” and breaks into a run, followed by Bobby and Jack.
Outside, what appears to be a half dozen crazy people are racing around in the weedy gravel in front of Ed’s. Dit Jesperson and Beezer, still too stunned to react, watch them caper back and forth. The crazy people make an amazing amount of noise. One man yells, “KILL THE FISHERMAN! KILL THE DIRTY BASTARD!” Another is shouting “LAW ’N’ ORDER ’N’ FREE BEER!” A scrawny character in bib overalls picks up “FREE BEER! WE WANT FREE BEER!” A harpy too old for her tank top and blue jeans skitters around waving her arms and screeching at the top of her lungs. The grins on their faces indicate that these people are engaged in some dimwitted prank. They are having the time of their lives.
Up from the end of the lane comes a State Police car, with the Mad Hungarian’s DARE Pontiac right behind it. In the middle of the chaos, Henry Leyden tilts his head and smiles to himself.
When he sees his chief take off after one of the men, fat Dit Jesperson lurches into action and spots Doodles Sanger, against whom he has borne a grudge ever since she turned him down late one night in the Nelson Hotel. Dit recognizes Teddy Runkleman, the tall galoot with the broken nose Dale is chasing; and he knows Freddy Saknessum, but Freddy is undoubtedly too fast for him and, besides, Dit has the feeling that if he put his hands on Freddy Saknessum, about eight hours later he would probably come down with something really nasty. Bobby Dulac is on the skinny guy’s case, so Doodles is Dit’s target, and he looks forward to pulling her down into the weeds and making her pay for calling him what she did, six years ago in the Nelson’s filthy bar. (In front of maybe a dozen of French Landing’s most raffish characters, Doodles had compared him to the then chief’s smelly, waddling old mongrel, Tubby.)
Dit looks her in the eye, and for a second she stops jumping around to stand flat-footed on the ground and give him a little come-hither gesture with the fingers of both hands. He launches himself at her, but when he gets to where she was, she is six feet off to the right, shifting on her feet like a basketball player. “Tubby-Tubby,” she says. “Come and get it, Tub-Tub.” Furious, Dit reaches, misses, and nearly loses his balance. Doodles prances away laughing and mouths the hateful expression. Dit doesn’t get it—why doesn’t Doodles just break away and take off? It’s like she almost wants to get caught, but first she has to run out the clock.
After another serious lunge that misses the target by only an inch or two, Dit Jesperson wipes the sweat off his face and checks out the scene. Bobby Dulac is snapping cuffs on the skinny guy, but Dale and Hollywood Sawyer are faring only a little better than he is. Teddy Runkleman and Freddy Saknessum dodge and bob away from their pursuers, both of them cackling like idiots and shouting their halfwit slogans. Why is low-life scum always so agile? Dit supposes that rodents like Runkleman and Saknessum get more practice in being light on their feet than regular people.
He charges Doodles, who slips past him and goes into a chuckling, high-stepping diddley-bop. Over her shoulder, Dit sees Hollywood finally fake out Saknessum, wrap an arm around his waist, and throw him to the ground.
“You didn’t have to get all physical on my ass,” Saknessum says. His eyes shift, and he gives a brief nod. “Hey, Runks.”
Teddy Runkleman glances at him, and his eyes shift, too. He stops moving. The chief says, “What, you run out of gas?”
“Party’s over,” Runkleman says. “Hey, we were just funnin’, you know?”
“Aw, Runksie, I wanna play some more,” Doodles says, throwing a few hip wiggles into the diddley-bop. In a flash, Beezer St. Pierre thrusts his mountainous self between her and Dit. He steps forward, rumbling like a semi going up a steep grade. Doodles tries to dance backward, but Beezer envelops her and carries her toward the chief.
“Beezie, don’cha love me no more?” Doodles asks.
Beezer grunts in disgust and deposits her in front of the chief. The two state cops, Perry Brown and Jeff Black, are hanging back, looking even more disgusted than the biker. If Dit’s mental processes were to be transcribed from their shorthand into standard English, the result would be, He’s gotta have something on the ball if he brews that Kingsland Ale, because that is some fine, fine beer. And look at the chief! He’s so ready to bust a gut, he can’t even see that we’re about to lose this case.
“You were FUNNIN’?” the chief roars. “What’s the MATTER with you idiots? Don’t you have any respect for that poor girl in there?”
As the state cops step forward to take charge, Dit sees Beezer go rigid with shock for a moment, then move as inconspicuously as possible away from the group. No one but Dit Jesperson pays any attention to him—the enormous biker has done his bit, and now his part is over. Arnold Hrabowski, who had been more or less concealed behind Brown and Black, shoves his hands in his pockets, hunches his shoulders, and gives Dit a glance of shamefaced apology. Dit doesn’t get it: What does the Mad Hungarian have to feel so guilty about? Hell, he just got here. Dit looks back at Beezer, who is advancing ponderously toward the side of the shack and—surprise, surprise!—everybody’s best pal and favorite reporter, Mr. Wendell Green, now appearing a little alarmed. Guess more than one kind of scum just rose to the surface, Dit thinks.
Beezer likes women who are smart and levelheaded, like Bear Girl; brainless skanks like Doodles drive him crazy. He reaches out, grabs two handfuls of pasty, rayon-covered flesh, and scoops wriggling Doodles under his arm.
Doodles says, “Beezie, don’cha love me no more?”
He lowers the dumb mutt to the ground in front of Dale Gilbertson. When Dale finally explodes at these four grown-up juvenile delinquents, Beezer remembers the signal Freddy had given Runksie, and looks over the chief’s shoulder at the front of the old store. To the left of the rotting gray entrance, Wendell Green is aiming his camera at the group before him, getting fancy, bending and leaning, stepping to one side and another as he snaps pictures. When he sees Beezer looking at him through his lens, Wendell straightens up and lowers his camera. He has an awkward little smile on his face.
Green must have slithered in through the back way, Beezer imagines, because there’s no way the cops down front would give him a pass. Come to think of it, Doodles and the Dodos must have come the same way. He hopes all of them did not learn of the back road by following him, but that’s a possibility.
The reporter lets his camera hang from its strap and, keeping his eyes on Beezer, sidles away from the old shanty. The guilty, frightened way he moves reminds Beezer of a hyena’s slink toward its carrion. Wendell Green does fear Beezer, and Beezer cannot blame him. Green is lucky that Beezer did not actually rip off his head, instead of merely talking about it. Yet . . . Green’s hyenalike crawl strikes Beezer as pretty strange, under the circumstances. He can’t be afraid of getting beaten up in front of all these cops, can he?
Green’s uneasiness forms a link in Beezer’s mind to the communication he had seen pass between Runkleman and Freddy. When their eyes shifted, when they looked away, they were looking at the reporter! He had set the whole thing up in advance. Green was using the Dodos as a distraction from whatever he was doing with his camera, of course. Such tota
l sleaziness, such moral ugliness, infuriates Beezer. Galvanized by loathing, he moves quietly away from Dale and the other policemen and walks toward Wendell Green, keeping his eyes locked on the reporter’s.
He sees Wendell consider making a break for it, then reject the idea, most likely because he knows he doesn’t have a chance of getting away.
When Beezer comes to within ten feet of him, Green says, “We don’t need any trouble here, Mr. St. Pierre. I’m just doing my job. Surely you can understand that.”
“I understand a lot of things,” Beezer says. “How much did you pay those clowns?”
“Who? What clowns?” Wendell pretends to notice Doodles and the others for the first time. “Oh, them? Are they the ones who were making all that ruckus?”
“And why would they go do a thing like that?”
“Because they’re animals, I guess.” The expression on Wendell’s face communicates a great desire to align himself with Beezer on the side of human beings, as opposed to animals like Runkleman and Saknessum.
Taking care to fix Green’s eyes, instead of his camera, with his own, Beezer moves in closer and says, “Wendy, you’re a real piece of work, you know that?”
Wendell holds up his hands to ward off Beezer. “Hey, we may have had our differences in the past, but—”
Still looking him in the eye, Beezer folds his right hand around the camera and plants his left on Wendell Green’s chest. He jerks the right hand back and gives Green a massive shove with the left. One of two things is going to break, Green’s neck or the camera strap, and he does not much care which it is to be.
To a sound like the crack of a whip, the reporter flails backward, barely managing to remain upright. Beezer is pulling the camera out of the case, from which dangle two strips of severed leather. He drops the case and rotates the camera in his big hands.
“Hey, don’t do that!” Wendell says, his voice louder than speech but softer than a shout.
“What is it, an old F2A?”
“If you know that, you know it’s a classic. Give it back to me.”
“I’m not going to hurt it, I’m going to clean it out.” Beezer snaps open the back of the camera, gets one thick finger under the exposed length of film, and rips out the entire roll. He smiles at the reporter and tosses the film into the weeds. “See how much better it feels without all that crap in there? This is a nice little machine—you shouldn’t fill it with garbage.”
Wendell does not dare show how furious he is. Rubbing the sore spot on the back of his neck, he growls, “That so-called garbage is my livelihood, you oaf, you moron. Now give me back my camera.”
Beezer casually holds it out before him. “I didn’t quite catch all of that. What did you say?”
His only response a bleak glance, Wendell snatches the camera from Beezer’s hand.
When the two state cops finally step forward, Jack feels a mixture of disappointment and relief. What they are going to do is obvious, so let them do it. Perry Brown and Jeff Black will take the Fisherman case away from Dale and run their own investigation. From now on, Dale will be lucky to get random scraps from the state’s table. Jack’s greatest regret is that Brown and Black should have walked into this madhouse, this circus. They have been waiting for their moment all along—in a sense, waiting for the local guy to prove his incompetence—but what is going on now is a public humiliation for Dale, and Jack wishes it weren’t happening. He could not have imagined feeling grateful for the arrival of a biker gang at a crime scene, but that’s how bad it is. Beezer St. Pierre and his companions kept the crowd away more efficiently than Dale’s officers. The question is, how did all those people find out?
Apart from the damage to Dale’s reputation and self-esteem, however, Jack has few regrets about the case passing to another jurisdiction. Let Brown and Black scour every basement in French County: Jack has the feeling they won’t get any further than the Fisherman permits. To go further, he thinks, you’d have to travel in directions Brown and Black could never understand, visit places they are certain do not exist. Going further means making friends with opopanax, and men like Brown and Black distrust anything that even smells like opopanax. Which means that, in spite of everything Jack has said to himself since the murder of Amy St. Pierre, he will have to catch the Fisherman by himself. Or maybe not entirely by himself. Dale is going to have a lot more time on his hands, after all, and no matter what the State Police do to him, Dale is too wrapped up in this case to walk away from it.
“Chief Gilbertson,” says Perry Brown, “I believe we have seen enough here. Is this what you call securing an area?”
Dale gives up on Teddy Runkleman and turns in frustration to the state cops, who stand side by side, like storm troopers. In his expression, Jack can see that he knows exactly what is going to happen, and that he hopes it will not be humiliatingly brutal. “I did everything in my power to make this area secure,” Dale says. “After the 911 call came in, I talked to my men face to face and ordered them to come out in pairs at reasonable intervals, to keep from arousing any curiosity.”
“Chief, you must have used your radio,” says Jeff Black. “Because for sure somebody was tuned in.”
“I did not use the radio,” Dale says. “And my people knew better than to spread the news. But you know what, Officer Black? If the Fisherman called us on 911, maybe he also made a couple of anonymous calls to the citizens.”
Teddy Runkleman has been attending to this discussion like a spectator at a tennis final. Perry Brown says, “Let’s handle first things first. What do you intend to do with this man and his friends? Are you going to charge them? The sight of his face is getting on my nerves.”
Dale thinks for a moment, then says, “I’m not going to charge them. Get out of here, Runkleman.” Teddy moves backward, and Dale says, “Hold it for a second. How did you get here?”
“The back road,” Teddy says. “Comes straight down from behind Goltz’s. Thunder Five came the same way. So did that big-shot reporter, Mr. Green.”
“Wendell Green is here?”
Teddy points to the side of the ruin. Dale glances over his shoulder, and Jack looks in the same direction and witnesses Beezer St. Pierre ripping film from the back of a camera while Wendell Green watches in dismay.
“One more question,” Dale says. “How did you learn that the Freneau girl’s body was out here?”
“They was five or six bodies up at Ed’s, is what I heard. My brother Erland called up and told me. He heard it from his girlfriend.”
“Go on, get out of here,” Dale says, and Teddy Runkleman ambles away as if he has been awarded a medal for good citizenship.
“All right,” Perry Brown says. “Chief Gilbertson, you have reached the end of your leash. As of now, this investigation is to be conducted by Lieutenant Black and myself. I’ll want a copy of the 911 tape and copies of all notes and statements taken by you and your officers. Your role is to be entirely subordinate to the state’s investigation, and to cooperate fully when called upon. You will be given updates at the discretion of Lieutenant Black and myself.
“If you ask me, Chief Gilbertson, you are getting far more than you deserve. I have never seen a more disorganized crime scene. You violated the security of this site to an unbelievable degree. How many of you walked into the . . . the structure?”
“Three,” Dale says. “Myself, Officer Dulac, and Lieutenant Sawyer.”
“Lieutenant Sawyer,” Brown says. “Excuse me, has Lieutenant Sawyer rejoined the LAPD? Has he become an official member of your department? And if not, why did you give him access to that structure? In fact, what is Mr. Sawyer doing here in the first place?”
“He’s cleared more homicide cases than you and me ever will, no matter how long we live.”
Brown gives Jack an evil glance, and Jeff Black stares straight ahead. Beyond the two state cops, Arnold Hrabowski also glances at Jack Sawyer, though not at all the way Perry Brown did. Arnold’s expression is that of a man who deeply wis
hes to be invisible, and when he finds Jack’s eye on him, he quickly glances sideways and shifts on his feet.
Oh, Jack thinks. Of course, the Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Hungarian, there you go.
Perry Brown asks Dale what Mr. St. Pierre and his friends are doing on the scene, and Dale replies that they are assisting with crowd control. Did Dale advise Mr. St. Pierre that in exchange for this service he would be kept up-to-date on the investigation? It was something like that, yes.
Jack steps back and begins to move sideways along a gentle arc that will bring him to Arnold Hrabowski.
“Incredible,” says Brown. “Tell me, Chief Gilbertson, did you decide to delay a little bit before passing the news on to Lieutenant Black and myself?”
“I did everything according to procedure,” Dale says. In answer to the next question he says that yes, he has called for the medical examiner and the evidence wagon, which, by the way, he can see coming up the lane right now.
The Mad Hungarian’s efforts at self-control succeed only in making him look as though he urgently needs to urinate. When Jack places a hand on his shoulder, he stiffens like a cigar-store Indian.
“Calm down, Arnold,” Jack says, then raises his voice. “Lieutenant Black, if you’re taking over this case, there’s some information you should have.”
Brown and Black turn their attention to him.
“The man who made the 911 call used the pay phone at the 7-Eleven store on Highway 35 in French Landing. Dale had the phone taped off, and the owner knows to keep people from handling it. You might get some useful prints from that phone.”
Black scribbles something in his notebook, and Brown says, “Gentlemen, I think your role is finished here. Chief, use your people to disperse those individuals at the bottom of the lane. By the time the M.E. and I come out of that structure, I don’t want to see a single person down there, including you and your officers. You’ll get a call later in the week, if I have any new information.”
