The Dark Half(16)

Chapter Four

Death in a Small Town

1

Castle Rock has been, at least in recent years, an unlucky town. As if to prove that old saw about lightning and how often it strikes in the same place isn't always right, a number of bad things had happened in Castle Rock over the last eight or ten years

- things bad enough to make the national news. George Bannerman was the local sheriff when those things occurred, but Big George, as he had been affectionately called, would not have to deal with Homer Gamache, because Big George was dead. He had survived the first bad thing, a series of rape-strangulations committed by one of his own officers, but two years later he had been killed by a rabid dog out on Town Road #3 - not just killed, either, but almost literally torn apart. Both of these cases had been extremely strange, but the world was a strange place. And a hard one. And, sometimes, an unlucky one.

The new sheriff (he had been in office going on eight years, but Alan Pangborn had decided he was going to be 'the new sheriff' at least until the year 2000 - always assuming, he told his wife, that he went on running and being elected that long) hadn't been in Castle Rock then; until 1980 he had been in charge of highway enforcement in a small-going-on-medium-sized city in upstate New York, not far from Syracuse.

Looking at Homer Gamache's battered body, lying in a ditch beside Route 35, he wished he was still there. It looked like not all of the town's bad luck had died with Big George Bannerman after all.

Oh, quit it - you don't wish you were anyplace else on God's green earth. Don't say you do, or bad luck will really come down and take a ride on your shoulder. This has been a damned good place for Annie and the boys, and it's been a damned good place for you, too. So why don't you just get off it?

Good advice. Your head, Pangborn had discovered, was always giving your nerves good advice they couldn't take. They said Yessir, now that you mention it, that's just as true as it can be. And then they went right on jumping and sizzling.

Still, he had been due for something like this, hadn't he? During his tour of duty as sheriff he had scraped the remains of almost forty people off the town roads, broken up fights beyond counting, and been faced with maybe a hundred cases of spouse and child abuse - and those were just the ones reported. But things have a way of evening out; for a town that had sported its very own mass killer not so long ago, he had had an unusually sweet ride when it came to murder. Just four, and only one of the perps had run - Joe Rodway, after he blew his wife's brains out. Having had some acquaintance of the lady, Pangborn was almost sorry when he got a telex from the police in Kingston, Rhode Island, saying they had Rodway in custody. One of the others had been vehicular manslaughter, the remaining two plain cases of seconddegree, one with a knife and one with bare knuckles - the latter a case of spouse abuse that had simply gone too far, having only one odd wrinkle to distinguish it: the wife had beaten the.husband to death while he was dead drunk, giving back one final apocalyptic tit for almost twenty years of tat. The woman's last set of bruises had still been a good, healthy yellow when she was booked. Pangborn hadn't been a bit sorry when the judge let her off with six months in Women's Correctional followed by six years' probation. Judge Pender had probably done only that because it would have been impolitic to give the lady what she really deserved, which was a medal. Small-town murder in real life, he had found, rarely bore any likeness to the small-town murders in Agatha Christie novels, where seven people all took a turn at stabbing wicked old Colonel Storping-Goiter at his country house in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh during a moody winter storm. In real life, Pangborn knew, you almost always arrived to find the perp still standing there,

looking down at the mess and wondering what the f**k he'd done; how it had all jittered out of control with such lethal speed. Even if the perp had strolled off, he usually hadn't gone far and there were two or three eyewitnesses who could tell you exactly what had happened, who had done it, and where he had gone. The answer to the last question was usually the nearest bar. As a rule, small-town murder in real life was simple, brutal, and stupid. As a rule.

But rules are made to be broken. Lightning sometimes does strike twice in the same place, and from time to time murders that happen in small towns are not immediately solvable . murders like this one.

Pangborn could have waited.

2

Officer Norris Ridgewick came back from his cruiser, which was parked behind Pangborn's. Calls from the two police-band radios crackled out in the warm late spring air.

'Is Ray coming?' Pangborn asked. Ray was Ray Van Allen, Castle County's medical examiner and coroner.

'Yep,' Norris said.

'What about Homer's wife? Anybody tell her about this yet?'

Pangborn waved flies away from Homer's upturned face as he spoke. There was not much left but the beaky, jutting nose. If not for the prosthetic left arm and the gold teeth which had once been in Gamache's mouth and now lay in splinters on his wattled neck and the front of his shirt, Pangborn doubted if his own mother would have known him. Norris Ridgewick, who bore a passing resemblance to Deputy Barney Fife on the old Andy Griffith Show, scuffled his feet and looked down at his shoes as if they had suddenly become very interesting to him. 'Well . . . John's on patrol up in the View, and Andy Clutterbuck's in Auburn, at district court - '

Pangborn sighed and stood up. Gamache was - had been - sixty-seven years old. He'd lived with his wife in a small, neat house by the old railroad depot less than two miles from here. Their children were grown and gone away. It was Mrs Gamache who had called the sheriffs office early this morning, not crying but close, saying she'd wakened at seven to find that Homer, who sometimes slept in one of the kids' old rooms because she snored, hadn't come home at all last night. He had left for his league bowling at seven the previous evening, just like always, and should have been home by midnight, twelve-thirty at the latest, but the beds were all empty and his truck wasn't in the dooryard or the garage..Sheila Brigham, the day dispatcher, had relayed the initial call to Sheriff Pangborn, and he had