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  "Why?" she breathed.

  "Because they were scared. Later--long after Mark was dead--your grandfather broke my arm. Then, in the Overlook--which stood where Roof O' the World stands today--your grandfather beat my mother almost to death. He used a roque mallet instead of a cane, but it was basically the same deal."

  "I get the point."

  "Years later, in a bar in St. Petersburg--"

  "Stop! I said I get it!" She was trembling.

  "--I beat a man unconscious with a pool cue because he laughed when I scratched. After that, the son of Jack and the grandson of Mark spent thirty days in an orange jumpsuit, picking up trash along Highway 41."

  She turned away, starting to cry. "Thanks, Uncle Dan. Thanks for spoiling . . ."

  An image filled his head, momentarily blotting out the river: a charred and smoking birthday cake. In some circumstances, the image would have been funny. Not in these.

  He took her gently by the shoulders and turned her back to him. "There's nothing to get. There's no point. There's nothing but family history. In the words of the immortal Elvis Presley, it's your baby, you rock it."

  "I don't understand."

  "Someday you may write poetry, like Concetta. Or push someone else off a high place with your mind."

  "I never would . . . but Rose deserved it." Abra turned her wet face up to his.

  "No argument there."

  "So why do I dream about it? Why do I wish I could take it back? She would have killed us, so why do I wish I could take it back?"

  "Is it the killing you wish you could take back, or the joy of the killing?"

  Abra hung her head. Dan wanted to take her in his arms, but didn't.

  "No lecture and no moral. Just blood calling to blood. The stupid urges of wakeful people. And you've made it to a time of life when you're completely awake. It's hard for you. I know that. It's hard for everyone, but most teenagers don't have your abilities. Your weapons."

  "What do I do? What can I do? Sometimes I get so angry . . . not just at her, but at teachers . . . kids at school who think they're such hot shits . . . the ones who laugh if you're not good at sports or wearing the wrong clothes and stuff . . ."

  Dan thought of advice Casey Kingsley had once given him. "Go to the dump."

  "Huh?" She goggled at him.

  He sent her a picture: Abra using her extraordinary talents--they had still not peaked, incredible but true--to overturn discarded refrigerators, explode dead TV sets, throw washing machines. Seagulls flew up in startled packs.

  Now she didn't goggle; she giggled. "Will that help?"

  "Better the dump than your mother's plates."

  She cocked her head and fixed him with merry eyes. They were friends again, and that was good. "But those plates were ug-lee."

  "Will you try it?"

  "Yes." And by the look of her, she couldn't wait.

  "One other thing."

  She grew solemn, waiting.

  "You don't have to be anyone's doormat."

  "That's good, isn't it?"

  "Yes. Just remember how dangerous your anger can be. Keep it--"

  His cell phone rang.

  "You should get that."

  He raised his eyebrows. "Do you know who it is?"

  "No, but I think it's important."

  He took the phone out of his pocket and read the display. RIVINGTON HOUSE.

  "Hello?"

  "It's Claudette Albertson, Danny. Can you come?"

  He ran a mental inventory of the hospice guests currently on his blackboard. "Amanda Ricker? Or Jeff Kellogg?"

  It turned out to be neither.

  "If you can come, you better do it right away," Claudette said. "While he's still conscious." She hesitated. "He's asking for you."

  "I'll come." Although if it's as bad as you say, he'll probably be gone when I get there. Dan broke the connection. "I have to go, honey."

  "Even though he's not your friend. Even though you don't even like him." Abra looked thoughtful.

  "Even though."

  "What's his name? I didn't get that."

  (Fred Carling)

  He sent this and then wrapped his arms around her, tight-tight-tight. Abra did the same.

  "I'll try," she said. "I'll try real hard."

  "I know you will," he said. "I know you will. Listen, Abra, I love you so much."

  She said, "I'm glad."

  3

  Claudette was at the nurses' station when he came in forty-five minutes later. He asked the question he had asked dozens of times before: "Is he still with us?" As if it were a bus ride.

  "Barely."

  "Conscious?"

  She waggled a hand. "In and out."

  "Azzie?"

  "Was there for awhile, but scooted when Dr. Emerson came in. Emerson's gone now, he's checking on Amanda Ricker. Azzie went back as soon as he left."

  "No transport to the hospital?"

  "Can't. Not yet. There was a four-car pile-up on Route 119 across the border in Castle Rock. Lots of injuries. Four ambos on the way, also LifeFlight. Going to the hospital will make a difference to some of them. As for Fred . . ." She shrugged.

  "What happened?"

  "You know our Fred--junk food junkie. Mickey D's is his second home. Sometimes he looks when he runs across Cranmore Avenue, sometimes he doesn't. Just expects people to stop for him." She wrinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue, looking like a little kid who's just gotten a mouthful of something bad. Brussels sprouts, maybe. "That attitude."

  Dan knew Fred's routine, and he knew the attitude.

  "He was going for his evening cheeseburger," Claudette said. "The cops took the woman who hit him to jail--chick was so drunk she could hardly stand up, that's what I heard. They brought Fred here. His face is scrambled eggs, his chest and pelvis are crushed, one leg's almost severed. If Emerson hadn't been here doing rounds, Fred would have died right away. We triaged him, stopped the bleeding, but even if he'd been in peak condition . . . which dear old Freddy most definitely ain't . . ." She shrugged. "Emerson says they will send an ambo after the Castle Rock mess is cleaned up, but he'll be gone by then. Dr. Emerson wouldn't commit on that, but I believe Azreel. You better go on down there, if you're going. I know you never cared for him . . ."

  Dan thought of the fingermarks the orderly had left on poor old Charlie Hayes's arm. Sorry to hear it--that was what Carling had said when Dan told him the old man was gone. Fred all comfy, rocked back in his favorite chair and eating Junior Mints. But that is what they're here for, isn't it?

  And now Fred was in the same room where Charlie had died. Life was a wheel, and it always came back around.

  4

  The door of the Alan Shepard Suite was standing half-open, but Dan knocked anyway, as a courtesy. He could hear the harsh wheeze-and-gurgle of Fred Carling's breathing even from the hall, but it didn't seem to bother Azzie, who was curled up at the foot of the bed. Carling was lying on a rubber sheet, wearing nothing but bloodstained boxer shorts and an acre of bandages, most of them already seeping blood. His face was disfigured, his body twisted in at least three different directions.

  "Fred? It's Dan Torrance. Can you hear me?"

  The one remaining eye opened. The breathing hitched. There was a brief rasp that might have been yes.

  Dan went into the bathroom, wetted a cloth with warm water, wrung it out. These were things he had done many times before. When he returned to Carling's bedside, Azzie got to his feet, stretched in that luxurious, bowed-back way cats have, and jumped to the floor. A moment later he was gone, to resume his evening's patrol. He limped a little now. He was a very old cat.

  Dan sat on the side of the bed and gently rubbed the cloth over the part of Fred Carling's face that was still relatively whole.

  "How bad's the pain?"

  That rasp again. Carling's left hand was a twisted snarl of broken fingers, so Dan took the right one. "You don't need to talk, just tell me."

  (not so bad now)

 
; Dan nodded. "Good. That's good."

  (but I'm scared)

  "There's nothing to be scared of."

  He saw Fred at the age of six, swimming in the Saco with his brother, Fred always snatching at the back of his suit to keep it from falling off because it was too big, it was a hand-me-down like practically everything else he owned. He saw him at fifteen, kissing a girl at the Bridgton Drive-In and smelling her perfume as he touched her breast and wished this night would never end. He saw him at twenty-five, riding down to Hampton Beach with the Road Saints, sitting astride a Harley FXB, the Sturgis model, so fine, he's full of bennies and red wine and the day is like a hammer, everybody looking as the Saints tear by in a long and glittering caravan of fuck-you noise; life is exploding like fireworks. And he sees the apartment where Carling lives--lived--with his little dog, whose name is Brownie. Brownie ain't much, just a mutt, but he's smart. Sometimes he jumps up in the orderly's lap and they watch TV together. Brownie troubles Fred's mind because he will be waiting for Fred to come home, take him for a little walk, then fill up his bowl with Gravy Train.

  "Don't worry about Brownie," Dan said. "I know a girl who'd be glad to take care of him. She's my niece, and it's her birthday."

  Carling looked up at him with his one functioning eye. The rattle of his breath was very loud now; he sounded like an engine with dirt in it.

  (can you help me please doc can you help me) Yes. He could help. It was his sacrament, what he was made for. It was quiet now in Rivington House, very quiet indeed. Somewhere close, a door was swinging open. They had come to the border. Fred Carling looked up him, asking what. Asking how. But it was so simple.

  "You only need to sleep."

  (don't leave me)

  "No," Dan said. "I'm here. I'll stay here until you sleep."

  Now he clasped Carling's hand in both of his. And smiled.

  "Until you sleep," he said.

  May 1, 2011-July 17, 2012

  Turn the page for a preview from Stephen King's new novel

  MR. MERCEDES

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  June 2014

  DET.-RET.

  13

  The waiter returns to ask if there will be anything else. Hodges starts to say no, then orders another cup of coffee. He just wants to sit here awhile, savoring double happiness: it wasn't Mr. Mercedes and it was Donnie Davis, the sanctimonious cocksucker who killed his wife and then had his lawyer set up a reward fund for information leading to her whereabouts. Because, oh Jesus, he loved her so much and all he wanted was for her to come home so they could start over.

  He also wants to think about Olivia Trelawney, and Olivia Trelawney's stolen Mercedes. That it was stolen no one doubts. But in spite of all her protests to the contrary, no one doubts that she enabled the thief.

  Hodges remembers a case that Isabelle Jaynes, then freshly arrived from San Diego, told them about after they brought her up to speed on Mrs. Trelawney's inadvertent part in the City Center Massacre. In Isabelle's story it was a gun. She said she and her partner had been called to a home where a nine-year-old boy had shot and killed his four-year-old sister. They had been playing with an automatic pistol their father had left on his bureau.

  "The father wasn't charged, but he'll carry that for the rest of his life," she said. "This will turn out to be the same kind of thing, wait and see."

  That was a month before the Trelawney woman swallowed the pills, maybe less, and nobody on the Mercedes Killer case had given much of a shit. To them--and him--Mrs. T. had just been a self-pitying rich lady who refused to accept her part in what had happened.

  The Mercedes SL was downtown when it was stolen, but Mrs. Trelawney, a widow who lost her wealthy husband to a heart attack, lived in Sugar Heights, a suburb as rich as its name where lots of gated drives led up to fourteen-and twenty-room McMansions. Hodges grew up in Atlanta, and whenever he drives through Sugar Heights he thinks of a ritzy Atlanta neighborhood called Buckhead.

  Mrs. T.'s elderly mother, Elizabeth Wharton, lived in an apartment--a very nice one, with rooms as big as a political candidate's promises--in an upscale condo cluster on Lake Avenue. The crib had space enough for a live-in housekeeper, and a private nurse came three days a week. Mrs. Wharton had advanced scoliosis, and it was her Oxycontin that her daughter had filched from the apartment's medicine cabinet when she decided to step out.

  Suicide proves guilt. He remembers Lieutenant Morrissey saying that, but Hodges himself has always had his doubts, and lately those doubts have been stronger than ever. What he knows now is that guilt isn't the only reason people commit suicide.

  Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.

  14

  Two motor patrol cops found the Mercedes an hour after the killings. It was behind one of the warehouses that cluttered the lakeshore.

  The huge paved yard was filled with rusty container boxes that stood around like Easter Island monoliths. The gray Mercedes was parked carelessly askew between two of them. By the time Hodges and Huntley arrived, five police cars were parked in the yard, two drawn up nose-to-nose behind the car's back bumper, as if the cops expected the big gray sedan to start up by itself, like that old Plymouth in the horror movie, and make a run for it. The fog had thickened into a light rain. The patrol car roofracks lit the droplets in conflicting pulses of blue light.

  Hodges and Huntley approached the cluster of motor patrolmen. Pete Huntley spoke with the two who had discovered the car while Hodges did a walk-around. The front end of the SL500 was only slightly crumpled--that famous German engineering--but the hood and the windshield were spattered with gore. A shirtsleeve, now stiffening with blood, was snagged in the grille. This would later be traced to August Odenkirk, one of the victims. There was something else, too. Something that gleamed even in that morning's pale light. Hodges dropped to one knee for a closer look. He was still in that position when Huntley joined him.

  "What the hell is that?" Pete asked.

  "I think a wedding ring," Hodges said.

  So it proved. The plain gold band belonged to Francine Reis, thirty-nine, of Squirrel Ridge Road, and was eventually returned to her family. She had to be buried with it on the third finger of her right hand, because the first three fingers of the left had been torn off. The ME guessed this was because she raised it in an instinctive warding-off gesture as the Mercedes came down on her. Two of those fingers were found at the scene of the crime shortly before noon on April tenth. The index finger was never found. Hodges thought that a seagull--one of the big boys that patrolled the lakeshore--might have seized it and carried it away. He preferred that idea to the grisly alternative: that an unhurt City Center survivor had taken it as a souvenir.

  Hodges stood up and motioned one of the motor patrolmen over. "We've got to get a tarp over this before the rain washes away any--"

  "Already on its way," the cop said, and cocked a thumb at Pete. "First thing he told us."

  "Well aren't you special," Hodges said in a not-too-bad Church Lady voice, but his partner's answering smile was as pale as the day. Pete was looking at the blunt, blood-spattered snout of the Mercedes, and at the ring caught in the chrome.

  Another cop came over, notebook in hand, open to a page already curling with moisture. His name-tag ID'd him as F. SHAMMINGTON. "Car's registered to a Mrs. Olivia Ann Trelawney, 729 Lilac Drive. That's Sugar Heights."

  "Where most good Mercedeses go to sleep when their long day's work is done," Hodges said. "Find out if she's at home, Officer Shammington. If she's not, see if you can track her down. Can you do that?"

  "Yes, sir, absolutely."

  "Just routine, right? A stolen-car inquiry."

  "You got it."

  Hodges turned to Pete. "Front of the cabin. Notice anything?"

  "No airbag deployment. He disabled them. Speaks to premeditation."

  "Also speaks to him knowing how to do it. What do you make of the mask?"

  Pete peered throug
h the droplets of rain on the driver's side window, not touching the glass. Lying on the leather driver's seat was a rubber mask, the kind you pulled over your head. Tufts of orange Bozo-ish hair stuck up above the temples like horns. The nose was a red rubber bulb. Without a head to stretch it, the red-lipped smile had become a sneer.

  "Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?"

  Hodges shook his head. Later--only weeks before his retirement--he bought a DVD copy of the film, and Pete was right. The mask-face was very close to the face of Pennywise, the clown in the movie.

  The two of them walked around the car again, this time noting blood on the tires and rocker panels. A lot of it was going to wash off before the tarp and the techs arrived; it was still forty minutes shy of seven A.M.

  "Officers!" Hodges called, and when they gathered: "Who's got a cell phone with a camera?"

  They all did. Hodges directed them into a circle around what he was already thinking of as the deathcar--one word, deathcar, just like that--and they began snapping pictures.

  Officer Shammington was standing a little apart, talking on his cell phone. Pete beckoned him over. "Do you have an age on the Trelawney woman?"

  Shammington consulted his notebook. "DOB on her driver's license is February third, 1957. Which makes her . . . uh . . ."

  "Fifty-two," Hodges said. He and Pete Huntley had been working together for a dozen years, and by now a lot of things didn't have to be spoken aloud. Olivia Trelawney was the right sex and age for the Park Rapist, but totally wrong for the role of spree killer. They knew there had been cases of people losing control of their vehicles and accidentally driving into groups of people--only five years ago, in this very city, a man in his eighties, borderline senile, had plowed his Buick Electra into a sidewalk cafe, killing one and injuring half a dozen others--but Olivia Trelawney didn't fit that profile, either. Too young.