Stephen King - Needful Things

He took the tools from her unresisting hands. He placed the tip of the screwdriver against the doorhandle, then whacked the top of the screwdriver several times with the hammer. On the fourth blow, the doorhandle snapped off. Buster slipped the loop of the cuff out of it, then dropped both the handle and the screwdriver to the concrete floor.

He went first to the button which closed the garage door. Then, as it rattled noisily down on its tracks, he advanced on Myrtle with the hammer in his hand.

“Did you sleep with him, Myrtle?” he asked softly.

“What?” She looked at him with dull, apathetic eyes.

Buster began to whack the hammerhead into the palm of his hand.

It made a soft, fleshy sound-thuck! thuck! thuck!

“Did you sleep with him after the two of you put up those goddam pink slips all over the house?”

She looked at him dully, not understanding, and Buster himself had forgotten that she had been with him at Maurice when Ridgewick broke in and did his thing.

“Buster, what are you talking ah-” He stopped, his eyes widening.

“What did you call me?”

The apathy left her eyes. She began to retreat from him, hunching her shoulders protectively. Behind them, the garage door came to rest.

Now the only sounds in the garage were their scuffling feet and the soft clink of the handcuff chain as it swung back and forth.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Danforth.” Then she turned and ran for the kitchen door.

He caught her three steps from it, once again using her hair to draw her to him. “What did you call me?” he screamed, and raised the hammer.

Her eyes turned up to follow its ascent. “Danforth, no, please!”

“What did you call me? What did you call me?”

He screamed it over and over again, and each time he asked the question he punctuated it with that soft, fleshy sound: Thuck.

Thuck. Thuck.

Ace drove into the Camber dooryard at five o’clock. He stuffed the treasure map into his back pocket, then opened the trunk. He got the pick and shovel which Mr. Gaunt had thoughtfully provided and then walked over to the leaning, overgrown porch which ran along one side of the house. He took the map out of his back pocket and sat on the steps to examine it. The short-term effects of the coke had worn off, but his heart was still thudding briskly along in his chest.

Treasure-hunting, he had discovered, was also a stimulant.

He looked around for a moment at the weedy yard, the sagging barn, the clusters of blindly staring sunflowers. It’s not much, but I think this is it, just the same, he thought. The place where I put the Corson Brothers behind me forever and get rich in the bargain.

It’s here-some of it or all of it. Right here. I can feel it.

But it was more than feeling-he could hear it, singing softly to him. Singing from beneath the ground. Not just tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Perhaps as much as a million.

“A million dollars,” Ace whispered in a hushed, choked voice, and bent over the map.

Five minutes later he was hunting along the west side of the Camber house. Most of the way down toward the back, almost obscured in tall weeds, he found what he was looking for-a large, flat stone. He picked it up, threw it aside, and began to dig frantically. Less than two minutes later, there was a muffled clunk as the blade struck rusty metal. Ace fell on his knees, rooted in the dirt like a dog hunting a buried bone, and a minute later he had unearthed the Sherwin-Williams paint-can which had been buried here.

Most dedicated cocaine users are also dedicated nail-biters and Ace was no exception. He had no fingernails to pry with and he couldn’t get the lid off. The paint around the rim had dried to an obstinate glue. With a grunt of frustration and rage, Ace pulled out his pocket-knife, got the blade under the can’s rim, and levered the cover off. He peered in eagerly.

Bills!

Sheafs and sheafs of bills!

With a cry he seized them, pulled them out… and saw that his eagerness had deceived him. It was only more trading stamps.

Red Ball Stamps this time, a kind which had been redeemable only south of the Mason-Dixon line… and there only until 1964, when the company had gone out of business.

“Shit fire and save matches!” Ace cried. He threw the stamps aside. They unfolded and began to tumble away in the light, hot breeze that had sprung up. Some of them caught and fluttered from the weeds like dusty banners. “Cunt! Bastard! Sonofawhore!”

He rooted in the can, even turned it over to see if there was anything taped to the bottom, and found nothing. He threw it away, stared at it for a moment, then rushed over and booted it like a soccer ball.

He felt in his pocket for the map again. There was one panicky second when he was afraid it wasn’t there, that he had lost it somehow, but he had only pushed it all the way down to the bottom in his eagerness to get cracking. He yanked it out and looked at it.

The other cross was out behind the barn… and suddenly a wonderful idea came into Ace’s mind, lighting up the angry darkness in there like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July.

The can he had just dug up was a blind! Pop might have thought someone would tumble to the fact that he had marked his various stashes with flat rocks. Thus, he had practiced a little of the old bait-and-switch out here at the Camber place. just to be safe. A hunter who found one useless treasure-trove would never guess that there was another stash, right here on this same property but in a more out-of-the-way place…

“Unless they had the map,” Ace whispered. “Like I do.”

He grabbed the pick and shovel and raced for the barn, eyes wide, sweaty, graying hair matted to the sides of his head.

He saw the old Air-Flow trailer and ran toward it. He was almost there when his foot struck something and he fell sprawling to the ground. He was up in a moment, looking around. He saw what he had stumbled over at once.

It was a shovel. One with fresh dirt on the blade.

A bad feeling began to creep over Ace; a very bad feeling indeed.

It began in his belly, then spread upward to his chest and down to his balls. His lips peeled back from his teeth, very slowly, in an ugly snarl.

He got to his feet and saw the rock marker lying nearby, dirt side up. It had been thrown aside. Someone had been here first… and not long ago, from the look. Someone had beaten him to the treasure.

“No,” he whispered. The word fell from his snarling mouth like a drop of tainted blood or infected saliva. “No!”

Not far from the shovel and the uprooted rock, Ace saw a pile of loose dirt which had been scraped indifferently back into a hole.

Ignoring both his own tools and the shovel which the thief had left behind, Ace fell on his knees again and began pawing dirt out of the hole. In no time at all, he had found the Crisco can.

He brought it out and pried off the lid.

There was nothing inside but a white envelope.

Ace took it out and tore it open. Two things fluttered out: a sheet of folded paper and a smaller envelope. Ace ignored the second envelope for the time being and unfolded the paper. It was a typed note. His mouth dropped open as he read his own name at the top of the sheet.

Dear Ace, I can’t be sure you’ll find this, but there’s no law against hoping. Sending you to Shawshank was fun, but this has been better. I wish I could see your face when you finish reading this!

Not long after I sent you up, I went to see Pop. I saw him pretty often-once a month, in fact. We had an arrangement: he gave me a hundred a month and I let him go on making his illegal loans. All very civilized. Halfway through this particular meeting, he excused himself to use the toilet-something he et,” he said. Ha-ha! I took the opportunity to peek in his desk, which he had left unlocked. Such carelessness was not like him, but I think he was afraid he might load his pants if he didn’t go “to visit his Uncle John” right away. Ha!