Stephen King - Needful Things

“Just the man I wanted to see,” Lester Pratt said in his new soft and silky voice. He held up a black leather wallet. “Lose something, you ugly two-timing gambling godless son of a bitch?”

John didn’t have the slightest idea what Lester Pratt was doing here, or how he could have found his lost wallet. He only knew that he was Clut’s designated backup and he had to get going right away.

“Whatever it is, I’ll talk to you about it later, Lester,” John said, and reached for his wallet. When Lester first pulled it back out of his reach and then brought it down hard, smacking him in the center of the face with it, John was more astounded than angry.

“Oh, I don’t want to talk,” Lester said in his new soft and silky voice. “I wouldn’t waste my time.” He dropped the wallet, grabbed John by the shoulders, picked him up, and threw him back into the Sheriff’s Office. Deputy LaPointe flew six feet through the air and landed on top of Norris Ridgewick’s desk. His butt skated across it, plowing a path through the heaped paperwork and knocking Norris’s IN/OUT basket onto the floor. John followed, landing on his back with a painful thump.

Sheila Brigham was staring through the dispatcher’s window, her mouth wide open.

John began to pick himself up. He was shaken and dazed, without the slightest clue as to what was going on here.

Lester was walking toward him in a fighting strut. His fists were held up in an old-fashioned John L. Sullivan pose that should have been comic but wasn’t. “I’m going to learn you a lesson,” Lester said in his new soft and silky voice. “I’m going to teach you what happens to Catholic fellows who steal Baptist fellows’ girls. I’m going to teach you all about it, and when I’m done, you’ll have it so right you’ll never forget it.”

Lester Pratt closed in to teaching distance.

Billy Tupper might not have been an intellectual, but he was a sympathetic ear, and a sympathetic ear was the best medicine for Henry Beaufort’s rage that afternoon. Henry drank his drink and told Billy what had happened… and as he talked, he felt himself calming down.

It occurred to him that if he had gotten the shotgun and)just kept rolling, he might have ended this day not behind his bar but behind those of the holding cell in the Sheriff’s Office. He loved his T-Bird a lot, but he began to realize he didn’t love it enough to go to prison for it. He could replace the tires, and the scratch down the side would eventually buff out. As for Hugh Priest, let the law take care of him.

He finished the drink and stood up.

“You still goin after him, Mr. Beaufort?” Billy asked apprehensively.

“I wouldn’t waste my time,” Henry said, and Billy breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m going to let Alan Pangborn take care of him.

Isn’t that what I pay my taxes for, Billy?”

“I guess so.” Billy looked out the window and brightened a little more. A rusty old car, a car which had once been white but was now a faded no-color-call it Dirt Road Gray-was coming up the hill toward The Mellow Tiger, spreading a thick blue fog of exhaust behind it. “Look!

It’s old Lenny! I ain’t seen him in a coon’s age!”

“Well, we still don’t open until five,” Henry said. He went behind the bar to use the telephone. The box containing the sawedoff shotgun was still on the bar. I think I was planning to use that, he mused. I think I really was. What the hell gets into peoplesome kind of poison?

Billy walked toward the door as Lenny’s old car pulled into the parking lot.

“Lester-” John LaPointe began, and that was when a fist almost as large as a Daisy canned ham-but much harder-collided with the center of his face. There was a dirty crunching sound as his nose broke in a burst of horrible pain. John’s eyes squeezed shut and brightly colored sparks of light fountained up in the darkness. He went reeling and flailing across the room, waving his arms, fighting a losing battle to stay on his feet. Blood was pouring out of his nose and over his mouth. He struck the bulletin board and knocked it off the wall.

Lester began to walk toward him again, his brow wrinkled into a beetling frown of concentration below his screaming haircut.

In the dispatcher’s office, Sheila got on the radio and began yelling for Alan.

Frank Jewett was on the verge of leaving the home of his good old “friend” George T. Nelson when he had a sudden cautionary thought.

This thought was that, when George T. Nelson arrived home to find his bedroom trashed, his coke flushed, and the likeness of his mother beshitted, he might come looking for his old partybuddy. Frank decided it would be nuts to leave without finishing what he had started… and if finishing what he had started meant blowing the blackmailing bastard’s oysters off, so be it. There was a gun cabinet downstairs, and the idea of doing the job with one of George T. Nelson’s own guns felt like poetic justice to Frank.

If he was unable to unlock the gun cabinet, or force the door, he would help himself to one of his old party-buddy’s steak-knives and do the job with that. He would stand behind the front door, and when George T. Nelson came in, Frank would either blow his motherfucking oysters off or grab him by the hair and cut his motherfucking throat.

The gun would probably be the safer of the two options, but the more Frank thought of the hot blood jetting from George T. Nelson’s slit neck and splashing all over his hands, the more fitting it seemed.

Et tu, Georgia. Et tu, you blackmailing fuck.

Frank’s reflections were disturbed at this point by George T.

Nelson’s parakeet, Tammy Faye, who had picked the most inauspicious moment of its small avian life to burst into song. As Frank listened, a peculiar and terribly unpleasant smile began to surface on his face. How did I miss that goddam bird the first time?

he asked himself as he strode into the kitchen.

He found the drawer with the sharp knives in it after a little exploration and spent the next fifteen minutes poking it through the bars of Tammy Faye’s cage, forcing the small bird into a fluttery, feather-shedding panic before growing bored with the game and skewering it. Then he went downstairs to see what he could do with the gun cabinet. The lock turned out to be easy, and as Frank climbed the stairs to the first floor again, he burst into an unseasonal but nonetheless cheery song: Ohh… you better not fight, you better not cry, You better not pout, I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town!

He sees you when you’re sleeping!

He knows when you’re awake!

He knows if you’ve been bad or good, So you better be good for goodness’ sake!

Frank, who had never failed to watch Lawrence Welk every Saturday night with his own beloved mother, sang the last line in a low Larry Hooper basso. Gosh, he felt good! How could he have ever believed, only an hour or so earlier, that his life was at an end?

This wasn’t the end; it was the beginning! Out with the oldespecially dear old “friends” like George T. Nelson-and in with the new!

Frank settled in behind the door. He was pretty well loaded for bear; there was a Winchester shotgun leaning against the wall, a Llama.32 automatic stuffed into his belt, and a Sheffington steakknife in his hand. From where he stood he could see the heap of yellow feathers that had been Tammy Faye. A small grin twitched Frank’s Mr.

Weatherbee mouth and his eyes-utterly mad eyes now-rolled ceaselessly back and forth behind his round rimless Mr. Weatherbee spectacles.

“You better be good for goodness’ sake!” he admonished under his breath. He sang this line several times as he stood there, and several more times after he had made himself more comfortable, sitting behind the door with his legs crossed, his back propped against the wall, and his weapons in his lap.