Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  She stiffened under his arm. “Okay.”

  “Do it fast, before there’s a run.”

  “Yes, sir.” His orders, well meant as they might have been, clearly irritated her. “Just figure out my lunatic. If you can.” She managed a smile. “I can always hit the evidence locker. We’ve got mountains of little white pills.”

  This hadn’t occurred to him. “That’s something to keep in mind.”

  She pulled away. “I was kidding, Clint.”

  “I’m not telling you to tamper with anything. I’m just telling you to . . .” He held up his palms. “. . . keep it in mind. We don’t know where this is going.”

  She looked at him doubtfully, and opened the passenger door of the cruiser. “If you talk to Jared before I do, tell him I’ll try to get home for dinner, but the chances are slim approaching none.”

  She got in the car, and before she rolled up the window to take full advantage of the air conditioning, he almost popped the question, in spite of Reed Barrows’s presence and in spite of the sudden, impossible crisis that the news insisted was possible. It was a question he supposed men had been asking for thousands of years: Where were you last night? But instead he said, and momentarily felt clever, “Hey, hon, remember Mountain Rest? It might still be blocked up. Don’t try the shortcut.” Lila didn’t flinch, just said, uh-huh, okay, flapped a hand goodbye, and swung the cruiser toward the double gate between the prison and the highway. Clint, not so clever after all, could only watch her drive away.

  He got back inside just in time to see Evie “You Couldn’t Even Pronounce My Real Name” Black get a photo snapped for her inmate ID. Don Peters then filled her arms with bedding.

  “You look like a stoner to me, darling. Don’t puke on the sheets.”

  Hicks gave him a sharp look but kept his Novocain-numbed mouth shut. Clint, who’d had enough of Officer Peters to last a lifetime, did not. “Cut the shit.”

  Peters swiveled his head. “You don’t tell me—”

  “I can write up an incident report, if you want,” Clint said. “Inappropriate response. Unprovoked. Your choice.”

  Peters glared at him, but only asked, “Since you’re in charge of this one, what’s her assignment?”

  “A-10.”

  “Come on, inmate,” Peters said. “You’re getting a soft cell. Lucky you.”

  Clint watched them go, Evie with her arms full of bedding, Peters close behind. He watched to see if Peters would touch her, but of course he didn’t. He knew Clint had an eye on him.

  3

  Lila had surely been this tired before, but she couldn’t remember when. What she could remember—from Health class in high school, for God’s sweet sake—were the adverse consequences of long-term wakefulness: slowed reflexes, impaired judgment, loss of vigilance, irritability. Not to mention short-term memory problems, such as being able to recall facts from Sophomore Health but not what the fuck you were supposed to do next, today, this minute.

  She pulled into the parking lot of the Olympia Diner (MY OH MY, TRY OUR EGG PIE, read the easel sign by the door), turned off her engine, got out, and took long slow deep breaths, filling her lungs and bloodstream with fresh oxygen. It helped a little. She leaned in her window, grabbed her dash mic, then thought better of it—this was not a call she wanted going out over the air. She replaced the mic and pulled her phone from its pocket on her utility belt. She punched one of the dozen or so numbers she kept on speed dial.

  “Linny, how are you doing?”

  “Okay. Got seven hours or so last night, which is a little more than usual. So, all good. I’m worried about you, though.”

  “I’m fine, don’t worry about—” She was interrupted by a jaw-cracking yawn. It made what she was saying a bit ludicrous, but she persevered. “I’m fine, too.”

  “Seriously? How long have you been awake?”

  “I don’t know, maybe eighteen, nineteen hours.” To reduce Linny’s concern she added, “I cooped some last night, don’t worry.” Lies kept falling out of her mouth. There was a fairy tale that warned about this, about how one lie led to other lies, and you eventually turned into a parakeet or something, but Lila’s worn-out brain couldn’t come up with it. “Never mind me right now. What’s the deal with Tiffany what’s-her-face, from the trailer? Did the EMTs transport her to the hospital?”

  “Yes. Good thing they got her there fairly early.” Linny lowered her voice. “St. Theresa’s is a madhouse.”

  “Where are Roger and Terry now?”

  Linny’s response to this question was embarrassed. “Well . . . They waited for the Assistant DA for awhile, but he never showed, and they wanted to check on their wives—”

  “So they left the crime scene?” Lila was furious for a moment, but her anger had dissipated by the time her disbelief was expressed. Probably the reason the ADA hadn’t shown was the same reason that Roger and Terry had left—to check on his wife. It wasn’t just St. Theresa’s that was a madhouse. It was everywhere.

  “I know, Lila, I know, but Roger’s got that baby girl, you know—” If it’s his, Lila thought. Jessica Elway liked to bed-hop, that was the word around town. “—and Terry was panicking, too, and neither of them could get an answer when they called home. I told them you’d be pissed.”

  “All right, get them back. I want them to go to all three drugstores in town and tell the pharmacists . . .”

  Pinocchio. That was the fairy tale about lying, and he didn’t turn into a parakeet, his nose grew until it was as long as Wonder Woman’s dildo.

  “Lila? Are you still there?”

  Pull it together, woman.

  “Tell the pharmacists to use discretion on all the speedy stuff they’ve got. Adderall, Dexedrine . . . and I know there’s at least one prescription methamphetamine, although I can’t remember the name.”

  “Prescription meth? Shut up!”

  “Yes. The pharmacists will know. Tell them to use discretion. Prescriptions are going to be pouring in. The fewest number of pills they can give people until we understand what in the hell is going on here. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “One other thing, Linny, and this is just between us. Look in Evidence. See what we’ve got in there for speed-up stuff, and that includes the coke and Black Beauties from the Griner brothers bust.”

  “Jeepers, are you sure? There’s almost half a pound of Bolivian marching powder! Lowell and Maynard, they’re due to go on trial. Don’t want to mess that up, we’ve been after them like forever!”

  “I’m not sure at all, but Clint put the idea in my head and now I can’t get it out. Just inventory the stuff, okay? No one’s going to start rolling up dollar bills and snorting.” Not this afternoon, anyway.

  “Okay.” Linny sounded awed.

  “Who’s out at that trailer where the meth lab exploded?”

  “Just a minute, let me check Gertrude.” Linny called her office computer Gertrude for reasons Lila did not care to understand. “Forensics and the FD units have departed. I’m surprised they left the scene so soon.”

  Lila wasn’t. Those guys probably had wives and daughters, too.

  “Um . . . looks like a couple of AAH dudes might still be around, putting out the last of the hot spots. Can’t say for sure which ones, all I’ve got is a note saying they rolled out of Maylock at eleven thirty-three. Willy Burke’s probably one of them, though. You know Willy, he never misses.”

  AAH, an acronym that came out sounding like a sigh, was the Tri-Counties’ Adopt-A-Highway crew, mostly retirees with pickup trucks. They were also the closest thing the Tri-Counties had to a volunteer fire department, and often came in handy during brushfire season.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Are you going out there?” Linny sounded faintly disapproving, and Lila wasn’t too tired to catch the subtext: With all this other stuff going on?

  “Linny, if I had a magic wake-up wand, believe me, I’d use it.”

  “Okay, Sheriff.” Subtext: Don’t bite
my head off.

  “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve got to do what I can do. Presumably someone—a bunch of someones—is working on this sleeping sickness thing at the Disease Control Center in Atlanta. Here in Dooling, I’ve got a double murder, and I need to work on that.”

  Why am I explaining all this to my dispatcher? Because I’m tired, that’s why. And because it’s a distraction from the way my husband was looking at me back at the prison. And because it’s a distraction from the possibility—fact, really, Lila, not a possibility, but a fact, and that fact’s name is Sheila—that the husband you’re so concerned about isn’t anybody you really knew anyway.

  Aurora, they were calling it. If I fall asleep, Lila thought, will that be the end? Will I die? Could be, as Clint might say. Could fucking be.

  The good-natured back-and-forth they had always had, the ease of their collaborations on projects and meals and parenting responsibilities, the comfortable pleasure they’d taken from each other’s bodies—these repeated experiences, the marrow of their daily life together, had turned crumbly.

  She pictured her husband smiling and it made her stomach sick. It was the same smile that Jared had, and it was Sheila’s smile, too.

  Lila remembered how Clint had quit his private practice without a word of discussion. All the work they’d done planning his office, the care that they had put into choosing not just the location but also the town, ultimately selecting Dooling because it was the biggest population center in the area that didn’t have a psychiatrist with a general practice. But Clint’s second patient had annoyed him, so he had decided, on the spot, that he needed to make a change. And Lila had just gone along. The wasted effort had bothered her, the resultant lowering of their financial prospects had meant a lot of recalculating, and all things being equal she would much rather have lived closer to a city than in the rural Tri-Counties, but she had wanted Clint to be happy. She had just gone along. Lila hadn’t wanted a pool. She had gone along. One day Clint had decided that they were switching to bottled water and filled up half of the refrigerator with the stuff. She had gone along. Here was a prescription for Provigil that he had decided she needed to take. She would probably go along. Maybe sleep was her natural state. Maybe that was why she could accept Aurora, because for her, it was not much of a change. Could be. Who the hell knew?

  Had Evie been there last night? Was that possible? Watching the AAU game in the Coughlin High gym as the tall blond girl went in for lay-up after lay-up, cutting through Fayette’s defense like a sharp blade? That would explain the triple-double thing, wouldn’t it?

  Kiss your man before you go to sleep.

  Yes, this is probably how you started to lose your mind.

  “Linny, I have to go.”

  She ended the call without waiting for a reply and re-holstered her phone.

  Then she remembered Jared, and pulled the phone back out. Only what to tell him, and why bother? He had the Internet on his phone; they all did. By now Jere probably knew more about what was going on than she herself. Her son—at least she had a son, not a daughter. That was something to be thankful for today. Mr. and Mrs. Pak must be going crazy. She texted Jere to come straight home from school, and that she loved him, and left it at that.

  Lila turned her face up to the sky and took more deep breaths. After almost a decade and a half of cleaning up the results of bad behavior, much of it drug-related, Lila Norcross was confident enough in her status and position to know that, although she would do her job to the best of her ability, she had very little personal stake in obtaining justice for a couple of dead meth chefs who, one way or another, had probably been destined to electrocute themselves on the great Bug Light of Life. And she was politically savvy enough to know that nobody was going to be yelling for a quick solve, not with this panic-inducing Aurora thing going on. But the trailer out by Adams Lumberyard was where Evie Doe had made her Dooling County debut, and Lila did have a personal stake in Freaky Evie. She hadn’t dropped out of thin air. Had she left a car out there? Possibly one with an owner’s registration in the glove compartment? The trailer was less than five miles away; no reason not to have a look-see. Only something else needed doing first.

  She went into the Olympia. The place was nearly deserted, both waitresses sitting at a corner booth, gossiping. One of them saw Lila and started to get up, but Lila waved her back. Gus Vereen, the owner, was planted on a stool by the cash register, reading a Dean Koontz paperback. Behind him was a small TV with the sound muted. Across the bottom of the screen ran a crawl reading AURORA CRISIS DEEPENS.

  “I read that one,” Lila said, tapping his book. “The dog communicates using Scrabble tiles.”

  “Now you gone and spalled it fur me,” Gus said. His accent was as thick as red-eye gravy.

  “Sorry. You’ll like it, anyway. Good story. Now that we’ve got the literary criticism out of the way, coffee to go. Black. Make it an XL.”

  He went to the Bunn and filled a large go-cup. It was black, all right: probably stronger than Charles Atlas and as bitter as Lila’s late Irish granny. Fine with her. Gus slipped a cardboard heat-sleeve to the halfway point, snapped on a plastic cap, and handed it to her. But when she reached for her wallet, he shook his head.

  “No charge, Shurf.”

  “Yes, charge.” It was an unbreakable rule, one summarized by the plaque on her desk reading NO FAT COPS STEALING APPLES. Because once you started taking stuff on the arm, it never stopped . . . and there was always a quid pro quo.

  She laid a five on the counter. Gus pushed it back.

  “It ain’t the badge, Shurf. Free coffee fur all the womenfolk today.” He glanced at his waitresses. “Ain’t that so?”

  “Yes,” one of them said, and approached Lila. She reached into the pocket of her skirt. “And dump this in your coffee, Sheriff Norcross. It won’t help the taste any, but it’ll jump-start you.”

  It was a packet of Goody’s Headache Powder. Although Lila had never used it, she knew Goody’s was a Tri-Counties staple, right up there with Rebel Yell and cheese-covered hash browns. When you tore open the envelope and poured out the contents, what you had looked pretty much like the Baggies of coke they’d found in the Griner brothers’ back shed, wrapped in plastic and stored in an old tractor tire—which was why they, and plenty of other dealers, used Goody’s to cut their product. It was cheaper than Pedia-Lax.

  “Thirty-two milligrams of caffeine,” the other waitress said. “I had two already today. I ain’t going to sleep until the bright boys solve this Aurora shit. No way.”

  4

  One of the great benefits of being Dooling County’s one and only animal control officer—maybe the only benefit—was having no boss lording it over him. Technically, Frank Geary answered to the mayor and the town council, but they almost never came to his little corner around the rear side of the nondescript building that also housed the historical society, the recreation department, and the assessor’s office, which was fine with him.

  He got the dogs walked and quieted down (there was nothing like a handful of Dr. Tim’s Doggy Chicken Chips for that), made sure they were watered, and checked that Maisie Wettermore, the high school volunteer, was due in at six to feed them and take them out again. Yes, she was on the board. Frank left her a note concerning various medications, then locked up and left. It did not occur to him until later that Maisie might have more important things on her mind than a few homeless animals.

  It was his daughter he was thinking about. Again. He’d scared her that morning. He didn’t like to admit it, even to himself, but he had.

  Nana. Something about her had started to nag him. Not the Aurora, exactly, but something related to the Aurora. What was it?

  I’ll return El’s call, he thought. I’ll do it just as soon as I get home.

  Only what he did first when he got to the little four-room house he was renting on Ellis Street was to check the fridge. Not much going on in there: two yogurt cups, a moldy salad, a bottle of Sweet Baby Ra
y’s barbecue sauce, and a case of Miner’s Daughter Oatmeal Stout, a high-calorie tipple which he assumed must be healthy—it had oatmeal in it, didn’t it? As he grabbed one, his phone went. He looked at Elaine’s picture on the little screen and had a moment of clarity he could have done without: he feared the Wrath of Elaine (a little) and his daughter feared the Wrath of Daddy (only a little . . . he hoped). Were these things any basis for a family relationship?

  I’m the good guy here, he reminded himself, and took the call. “Hey, El! Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, but something came up. Pretty sad. I had to put Judge Silver’s cat down, and then—”

  Elaine wasn’t about to be put off by the subject of Judge Silver’s cat; she wanted to get right into it with him. And as usual, she had her volume turned up to ten right from the jump. “You scared the crap out of Nana! Thank you very much for that!”

  “Calm down, okay? All I did was tell her to draw her pictures inside. Because of the green Mercedes.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Frank.”

  “Remember when she first got the paper route, and she said she had to swerve onto the Nedelhafts’ lawn because some guy driving a big green car with a star on the front went up onto the sidewalk? You told me to let it go, and I did. I let it go.”

  The words were spilling out faster and faster, soon he’d be spitting them if he didn’t get control of himself. What Elaine didn’t understand was that sometimes he had to shout to be heard. With her, at least.

  “The car that took out Judge Silver’s cat was also a big green car with a star on the front. A Mercedes. I was pretty sure I knew who it belonged to when Nana had her close call—”

  “Frank, she said it swerved onto the sidewalk half a block down!”

  “Maybe so, or maybe it was closer and she didn’t want to scare us. Didn’t want us to take away her paper route right after she got it. Just listen, okay? I let it go. I’d seen that Mercedes around the neighborhood many times, but I let it go.” How many times had he said that? And why did it remind him of that song from Frozen, the one Nana had gone around singing until he’d been quite sure it would drive him mad? He was clutching the can of stout so hard he’d dented it, and if he didn’t stop, he’d pop it wide open. “But not this time. Not after he ran over Cocoa.”