The Dark Half(107)

2

It was nothing but a variation on the white-cane scam he'd run on the cops in New York, but that was perfectly okay with Stark; he was a firm believer in the idea that if you happened on a good gag, you should go on using it until you used it up. These cops presented no problem, anyway, unless he got sloppy; they had been on duty for better than a week, now, the surety growing in them every day that the crazy guy had been telling the truth when he'd said he was just going to pick up his marbles and go home. The only wild card was Liz - if she happened to be looking out the window when he wasted the pigs, it could complicate things. But it was still a few minutes shy of noon; she and the twins would either be taking naps or getting ready to take them. Regardless of how it went, he was confident things would work out.

In fact, he was sure of it.

Love would find a way.

3

Chatterton lifted his boot to butt his cigarette - he planned to put the stub in the cruiser's ashtray once it was dead; Maine state police did not litter the driveways of the taxpayers - and when he looked up the man with the skinned face was there, lurching slowly up the driveway. One hand waved slowly at him and Jack Eddings for help; the other was bent behind his back and looked broken.

Chatterton almost had a heart-attack.

'Jack!' he shouted, and Eddings turned. His mouth dropped open.

'-help me -' the man with the skinned face croaked. Chatterton and Eddings ran toward him..If they had lived, they might have told their fellow officers that they thought the man had been in a car crash, or had been burned by an explosive backlash of gas or kerosene, or that he might have fallen face-first into one of those cruel pieces of farm machinery which decide, every now and then, to reach out and tomahawk their owners with their blades, choppers, or cruel, whirling spokes.

They might have told their fellow officers any of these things, but at that moment they were really thinking of nothing at all. Their minds had been sponged clean by horror. The left side of the man's face seemed almost to be boiling, as if, after the skin had been stripped off, someone had poured a powerful carbolic acid solution over the raw meat. Sticky, unthinkable fluid ran down hillocks of proud flesh and rolled through black cracks, sometimes overspilling in gruesome flash floods.

They thought nothing; they simply reacted.

That was the beauty of the white-cane trick.

'-help me -'

Stark allowed his feet to tangle together and fell forward. Yelling something incoherent to his partner, Chatterton reached out to grab the wounded man before he could fall. Stark looped his right arm around the state policeman's neck and brought his left hand out from behind his back. There was a surprise in it. The surprise was the pearl-handled straight-razor. The blade glittered feverishly in the humid air. Stark rammed it forward and it split Chatterton's right eyeball with an audible pop. Chatterton screamed and clapped a hand to his face. Stark ran his hand into Chatterton's hair, jerked his head back, and slit his throat from ear to ear. Blood burst from his muscular neck in a red shout. All of this happened in four seconds.

'What?' Eddings inquired in a low and weirdly studious tone of voice. He was standing flat-footed about two feet behind Chatterton and Stark. 'What?'

One of his dangling hands was hanging beside the butt of his service revolver' but one quick glance convinced Stark that the pig had no more idea that his gun was in reach than he had of the

population of Mozambique. His eyes were bulging. He didn't know what he was looking at, or who was bleeding. No, that isn't true, Stark thought, he thinks it's me. He stood there and watched me cut his partner's throat, but he thinks I'm the one bleeding because half my face is gone, and that isn't really why - it's me bleeding, has to be, because he and his partner, they're the police. They're the heroes of this movie.

'Here,' he said, 'hold this for me, will you?' And shoved Chatterton's dying body backward at his partner.

Eddings uttered a high-pitched little scream. He tried to step away, but he was too late. The twohundred-pound sack of dying bull that was Tom Chatterton sent him reeling back against the police car. Loose hot blood poured down into his upturned face like water from a busted shower-head. He screamed and flailed at Chatterton's body. Chatterton spun slowly away and grabbed blindly at the car with the last of his strength. His left hand hit the hood, leaving a splattered handprint. His right grabbed weakly at the radio antenna and snapped it off. He fell into the driveway holding it in front of his one remaining eye like a scientist with a specimen too rare to relinquish even in extremism

Eddings caught a blurred glimpse of the skinned man coming in low and hard and tried to draw back. He struck the car.

Stark sliced upward, splitting the crotch of Eddings's beige trooper uniform, splitting his scrotal sac, drawing the razor up and out in a long, buttery stroke. Eddings's balls, suddenly untethered from each other, swung back against his inner thighs like heavy knots on the end of an unravelling.sash-cord. Blood stained his pants around the zipper. For a moment he felt as if someone had

jammed a handful of ice cream into his groin . . . and then the pain struck, hot and full of ragged teeth. He screamed.

Stark snapped the razor out, wicked-quick, at Eddings's throat, but Eddings managed somehow to get a hand up and the first stroke only split his palm in half. Eddings tried to roll to the left, and that exposed the right side of his neck.

The naked blade, pale silver in the day's hazy light, whickered through the air again, and this time it went where it was supposed to go. Eddings sank to his knees, hands between his legs. His beige pants had turned bright red almost to the knees. His head drooped, and now he looked like the object of a pagan sacrifice.