The Dark Half Page 7

  Mrs. Arsenault couldn't say for sure. She had an idea he might have come from the direction of Homeland, which would have meant he was heading away from town, but she couldn't say for sure what gave her that impression, because she had looked out the window once and only seen the road, then looked out again before getting up to get her ice cream and he was there. Just standing there and looking toward the lighted window--toward her, presumably. She thought he was going to cross the road or had started to cross the road (probably just stood there, Alan thought; the rest was nothing but the woman's nerves talking), when lights showed on the crest of the hill. When the man in the suit saw the approaching lights, he had cocked his thumb in the timeless, stateless gesture of the hitchhiker.

  "It was Homer's truck, all right, and Homer at the wheel," Mrs. Arsenault told Norris Ridgewick. "At first I thought he'd just go on by, like any normal person who sees a hitchhiker in the middle of the night, but then his taillights flashed on and that man ran up to the passenger side of the cab and got in. "

  Mrs. Arsenault, who was forty-six and looked twenty years older, shook her white head.

  "Homer must have been lit to pick up a hitchhiker that late," she told Norris. "Lit or simple-minded, and I've known Homer almost thirty-five years. He ain't simple. "

  She paused for thought.

  "Well. . . not very. "

  Norris tried to get a few more details from Mrs. Arsenault on the suit the man had been wearing, but had no luck. He thought it really was sort of a pity that the streetlamps ended at the Homeland Cemetery grounds, but small towns like The Rock had only so much money to do with.

  It had been a suit, she was sure of that, not a sport-coat or a man's jacket, and it hadn't been black, but that left quite a spectrum of colors to choose from. Mrs. Arsenault didn't think the hitchhiker's suit had been pure white, but all she was willing to swear to was that it hadn't been black.

  "I'm not actually asking you to swear, Mrs. A.," Norris said.

  "When a body's speaking with an officer of the law on official business," Mrs. A. replied, folding her hands primly into the arms of her sweater, "it comes to the same thing. "

  So what she knew boiled down to this: she had seen Homer Gamache pick up a hitchhiker at about quarter to one in the morning. Nothing to call in the FBI about, you would have said. It only got ominous when you added in the fact that Homer had picked up his passenger three miles or less from his own dooryard . . . but hadn't arrived home.

  Mrs. Arsenault was right about the suit, too. Seeing a hitchhiker this far out in the boonies in the middle of the night was odd enough--by quarter of one, any ordinary drifter would have laid up in a deserted barn or some farmer's shed--but when you added in the fact that be had also been wearing a suit and a tie ("Some dark color," Mrs. A. said, "just don't ask me to swear what dark color, because I can't, and I won't"), it got less comfortable all the time.

  "What do you want me to do next?" Norris had asked over the radio once his report was complete.

  "Stay where you are," Alan said. "Swap Alfred Hitchcock Presents stories with Mrs. A. until I get there. I always used to like those myself. "

  But before he had gone half a mile, the location of the meeting between himself and his officer had been changed from the Arsenault place to a spot about a mile west of there. A boy named Frank Gavineaux, walking home from a little early fishing down at Strimmer's Brook, had seen a pair of legs protruding from the high weeds on the south side of Route 35. He ran home and told his mother. She had called the Sheriff's Office. Sheila Brigham relayed the message to Alan Pangborn and Norris Ridgewick. Sheila maintained protocol and mentioned no names on the air--too many little pitchers with big Cobras and Bearcats were always listening in on the police bands--but Alan could tell by the upset tone of Sheila's voice that even she had a good idea who those legs belonged to.

  About the only good thing which had happened all morning was that Norris had finished emptying his stomach before Alan got there, and had maintained enough wit to throw up on the north side of the road, away from the body and any evidence there might be around it.

  "What now?" Norris asked, interrupting the run of his thoughts.

  Alan sighed heavily and quit waving the flies away from Homer's remains. It was a losing battle. "Now I get to go down the road and tell Ellen Gamache the widow-maker paid a visit early this morning. You stay here with the body. Try to keep the flies off him. "

  "Gee, Sheriff, why? There's an awful lot of em. And he's--"

  "Dead, yeah, I can see that. I don't know why. Because it just seems like the right thing to do, I guess. We can't put his fucking arm back on, but at least we can keep the flies from shitting on what's left of his nose. "

  "Okay," Norris said humbly. "Okay, Sheriff. "

  "Norris, do you think you could call me 'Alan' if you really worked on it? If you practiced?"

  "Sure. Sheriff, I guess so. "

  Alan grunted and turned for one last look at the area of the ditch that would, in all probability, be cordoned off with bright yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tapes attached to surveyor's poles when he got back. The county coroner would be here. Henry Payton from the Oxford State Police Barracks would be here. The photographer and the technicians from the Attorney General's Capital Crimes Division probably wouldn't be--unless there happened to be a couple of them in the area already on another case--but they would arrive shortly after. By one in the afternoon, the State Police's rolling lab would be here, too, complete with hot and cold running forensics experts and a guy whose job it was to mix up plaster and take moulage casts of the tire-prints Norris had either been smart enough or lucky enough not to run over with the wheels of his own cruiser (Alan opted, rather reluctantly, for lucky).

  And what would it all come to? Why, just this. A half-drunk old man had stopped to do a favor for a stranger. (Hop on up here, boy, Alan could hear him saying, I ain't going only a couple of miles, but I'll get you a little further on your way), and the stranger had responded by beating the old man to death and then stealing his truck.

  He guessed the man in the business suit had asked Homer to pull over--the most likely pretext would have been to say he needed to take a leak--and once the truck was stopped, he'd clipped the old man, dragged him out, and--

  Ah, but that was when it got bad. So very goddam bad.

  Alan looked down into the ditch one final time, to where Norris Ridgewick squatted by the bloody piece of meat that had been a man, patiently waving the flies away from what had been Homer's face with his citation clipboard, and felt his stomach turn over again.

  He was just an old man, you son of a whore--an old man who was half in the bag and only had one honest arm to boot, an old man whose one little pleasure left was his bowling league night. So why didn't you just clip him that one good one in the cab of his truck and then leave him be? It was a warm night, and even if it'd been a little chilly, he most likely would have been okay. I'd bet my watch we're going to find a whole lot of antifreeze in his system. And the truck's license plate number goes out on the wire either way. So why this? Man, I hope I get a chance to ask you.

  But did the reason matter? It sure didn't to Homer Gamache. Not anymore. Nothing was ever going to matter to Homer again. Because after clipping him that first one, the hitchhiker had pulled him out of the cab and dragged him into the ditch, probably hauling him by the armpits. Alan didn't need the boys from Capital Crimes to read the marks left by the heels of Gamache's shoes. Along the way, the hitcher had discovered Homer's disability. And at the bottom of the trench, he had wrenched the old man's prosthetic arm from his body and bludgeoned him to death with it.

  Five

  96529Q

  "Hold it, hold it," Connecticut State Trooper Warren Hamilton said in a loud voice, although he was the only one in the cruiser. It was the evening of June 2nd, some thirty-five hours after the discovery of Homer Gamache's body in a Maine town Trooper Hamilton had never heard of.

  He was in the lot of the W
estport 1-95 McDonald's (southbound). He made it a habit to swing into the lots of the food-and-gas stops when he was cruising the Interstate; if you crawled up the last row of the parking spots at night with your lights off, you sometimes made some good busts. Better than good. Awesome. When he sensed he might have come upon such an opportunity, he very often talked to himself. These soliloquies often started with Hold it, hold it, then progressed to something like Let's check this sucker out or Ask Mamma if she believes this. Trooper Hamilton was very big on asking Mamma if she believed this when he was on the scent of something juicy.

  "What have we got here?" he murmured this time, and reversed the cruiser. Past a Camaro. Past a Toyota which looked like a slowly aging horseturd in the beaten copper glare of the arc-sodium lights. And . . . ta-DA! An old GMC pick-up truck that looked orange in the glare, which meant it was--or had been--white or light gray.

  He popped his spotlight and trained it on the license plate. License plates, in Trooper Hamilton's humble opinion, were getting better. One by one, the states were putting little pictures on them. This made them easier to identify at night, when varying light conditions transformed actual colors into all sorts of fictional hues. And the worst light of all for plate ID were these goddam orange hi-intensity lamps. He didn't know if they foiled rapes and muggings as they were designed to do, but he was positive they had caused hardworking cops such as himself to bugger plate IDs on stolen cars and fugitive vehicles without number.

  The little pictures went a long way toward fixing that. A Statue of Liberty was a Statue of Liberty in both bright sunlight and the steady glare of these copper-orange bastards. And no matter what the color, Lady Liberty meant New York.

  Same as that fucked-up crawdaddy he had the spot trained on right now meant Maine. You didn't have to strain your eyes for VACATIONLAND anymore, or try to figure out if what looked pink or orange or electric: blue was really white. You just looked for the fucked-up crawdaddy. It was really a lobster, Hamilton knew that, but a fucked-up crawdaddy by any other name was still a fucked-up crawdaddy, and he would have gobbled shit right out of a pig's ass before he put one of those fucking crawdads in his mouth, but he was mighty glad they were there, all the same.

  Especially when he had a want on a crawdaddy license plate, as he did tonight.

  "Ask Mamma if she believes this, " he murmured, and put the cruiser in Park. He took his clipboard from the magnetized strip which held it to the center of the dash just above the driveshaft hump, flipped past the blank citation form all cops kept as a shield over the hot-sheet (no need for the general public to be gawking at the license plate numbers the cops were particularly interested in while the cop to whom the sheet belonged was grabbing a hamburger or taking an express dump at a handy filling station), and ran his thumbnail down the list.

  And here it was. 96529Q; State of Maine; home of the fucked-up crawdaddies.

  Trooper Hamilton's initial pass had shown him no one was in the cab of the truck. There was a rifle-rack, but it was empty. It was possible--not likely, but possible--that there might be someone in the bed of the truck. It was even possible that the someone in the bed of the truck might have the rifle which belonged in the rack. More likely, the driver was either long gone or grabbing a burger inside. All the same . . .

  "Old cops, bold cops, but no old bold cops," Trooper Hamilton said in a low voice. He snapped off the spot and slowly cruised on down the line of cars. He paused twice more, snapping the spot on both times, although he didn't even bother to look at the cars he was lighting up. There was always the possibility that Mr. 96529Q had seen Hamilton spotlighting the stolen truck while on his way back from the restaurant cum dumpatorium, and if he saw the trooper car had passed on up the line and was checking other cars, he might not take off.

  "Safe is safe, sorry is sorry, and that's all I know, by the great by-Gorry!" Trooper Hamilton exclaimed. This was another of his favorites, not quite up there with asking Mamma if she believed this, but close.

  He pulled into a slot where he could observe the pick-up. He called his base, which was less than four miles up the road, and told them he had found the GMC pick-up Maine wanted in a murder case. He requested back-up units and was told they would arrive shortly.

  Hamilton observed no one approaching the pick-up, and decided it would not be over-bold to approach the vehicle with caution. In fact, he would look like a wimp if he was still sitting here in the dark, one row over, when the other units arrived.

  He got out of his cruiser, thumbing the strap off his gun but not unholstering it. He had unholstered his piece only twice while on duty, and fired it not at all. Nor did he want to do either one now. He approached the pick-up at an angle that allowed him to observe both the truck--especially the bed of the truck--and the approach from Mickey D's. He paused as a man and woman walked from the restaurant to a Ford sedan three rows closer to the restaurant, then moved on when they got in their car and headed for the exit.

  Keeping his right hand on the butt of his service revolver, Hamilton dropped his left hand to his hip. Service belts, in Hamilton's humble opinion, were also getting better. He had, both as man and boy, been a huge fan of Batman, a. k. a. the Caped Crusader--he suspected, in fact, that the Batman was one of the reasons he had become a cop (this was a little factoid he hadn't bothered to put on his application). His favorite Batman accessory had not been the Batpole or the Batarang, not even the Batmobile itself, but the Caped Crusader's utility belt. That wonderful item of apparel was like a good gift-shop: It had a little something for all occasions, be it a rope, a pair of night-vision goggles, or a few capsules of stun-gas. His service belt was nowhere near as good, but on the left side there were three loops holding three very useful items. One was a battery-powered cylinder marketed under the name Down, Hound! When you pressed the red button on top, Down, Hound! emitted an ultrasonic whistle that turned even raging pit-bulls into bowls of limp spaghetti. Next to it was a pressure-can of Mace (the Connecticut State Police version of Batman's stun-gas), and next to the Mace was a four-cell flashlight.

  Hamilton pulled the flashlight from its loop, turned it on, then slid his left hand up to partially hood the beam. He did this without once removing his right hand from the butt of his revolver. Old cops; bold cops; no old bold cops.

  He ran the beam along the bed of the pick-up truck. There was a scrap of tarpaulin in there, but nothing else. The truck-bed was as empty as the cab.

  Hamilton had remained a prudent distance away from the GMC with the crawdaddy plates all the while--this was so ingrained he hadn't even thought about it. Now he bent and shone the flashlight beneath the truck, the last place where someone who meant him harm might be lurking. Unlikely, but when he finally kicked off, he didn't want the minister to begin his eulogy by saying, "Dear friends, we are here today to mourn the unlikely passing of Trooper Warren Hamilton." That would be tres tacky.

  He swept the beam quickly left to right under the truck and observed nothing but a rusty muffler which was going to drop off in the near future--not, from the look of the holes in it, that the driver would notice much difference when it did.

  "I think we're alone, dear," Trooper Hamilton said. He examined the area surrounding the track one final time, paying particular attention to the approach from the restaurant. He observed no one observing him, and so stepped up to the passenger window of the cab and shone his light inside.

  "Holy shit," Hamilton murmured. "Ask Mamma if she believes this happy crappy." He was suddenly very glad for the orange lamps which sent their glare across the parking lot and into the cab, because they turned what he knew was maroon to a color which was almost black, making the blood look more like ink. "He drove it like that? Jesus Christ, all the way from Maine he drove it like that? Ask Mamma--"

  He tipped his flashlight downward. The seat and the floor of the GMC was a sty. He saw beer cans, soft-drink cans, empty or near-empty potato chip and pork rind bags, boxes which had contained Big Macs and Whoppers. A wad of wh
at looked like bubble-gum was squashed onto the metal dashboard above the hole where there had once been a radio. There were a number of unfiltered cigarette butts in the ashtray.

  Most of all, there was blood.

  There were streaks and blotches of blood on the seat. Blood was grimed into the steering wheel. There was a dried splatter of blood on the horn-ring, almost entirely obscuring the Chevrolet symbol embossed there. There was blood on the driver's inside doorhandle and blood on the mirror--that spot was a small circle that wanted to be an oval, and Hamilton thought that Mr. 96529Q might have left an almost perfect thumbprint in his victim's blood when he adjusted his rearview. There was also a large splatter of gore on one of the Big Mac boxes. That one looked like there might be some hair stuck in it.

  "What did he tell the drive-up girl?" Hamilton muttered. "He cut himself shaving?"

  There was a scraping noise behind him. Hamilton whirled, feeling too slow, feeling all too sure that he had, despite his routine precautions, been too bold to ever get old, because there was nothing routine about this, no sir, the guy had gotten behind him and soon there would be more blood in the cab of the old Chevrolet pick-up, his blood, because a guy who would drive a portable abattoir like this from Maine almost to the New York State line was a psycho, the sort of guy who would kill a State Trooper with no more thought than he'd take to buy a quart of milk.

  Hamilton drew his revolver for the third time in his career, thumbed the hammer back, and almost triggered a shot (or two, or three) into nothing but darkness; he was wired to the max. But there was no one there.

  He lowered the gun by slow degrees, blood thumping in his temples.

  A little gust of wind puffed the night. The scraping noise came again. On the pavement he saw a Filet-O-Fish box--from this very McDonald's, no doubt, how clever you are, Holmes, do not mention it, Watson, it was really elementary--skitter five or six feet at the whim of the breeze and then come to rest again.

  Hamilton let out a long, shaky breath and carefully dropped the hammer on his revolver. "Almost embarrassed yourself, there, Holmes," he said in a voice that was not at all steady. "Almost stuck yourself with a CR-14." A CR-14 was a "shot(s) fired" form.