The Dead Zone(91)

At last he handed the cigarette box back. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

'No soap, huh?'

'No.'

There was a perfunctory tap at the door and Roscoe Fisher stuck his head in. He looked a bit shamefaced. 'Frank and I are going home, George. I guess you caught me coopin.'

'As long as I don't catch you doing it in your cruiser,' Bannerman said. 'Say hi to Deenie for me.'

'You bet.' Fisher glanced at Johnny for a moment and then closed the door.

'Well,' Bannerman said. 'It was worth the try, I guess. I'll run you back...'

'I want to go over to the common,' Johnny said abruptly.

'No, that's no good. It's under a foot of snow.'

'You can find the place, can't you?'

'Of course I can. But what'll it gain?'

'I don't know. But let's go across.'

'Those reporters are going to follow us, Johnny. Just as sure as God made little fishes.'

'You said something about a back door.'

'Yeah, but it's a fire door. Getting in that way is okay, but if we use it to go out, the alarm goes off.'

Johnny whistled through his teeth. 'Let them follow along, then.'

Bannerman looked at him thoughtfully, for several moments and then nodded. 'Okay.'

8.

When they came out of the office, the reporters were up and surrounding them immediately. Johnny was reminded of a rundown kennel over in Durham where a strange old woman kept collies. The dogs would all runout at you when you went past with your fishing pole, yapping and snarling and generally scaring the hell out of you. They would nip but not actually bite.

'Do you know who did it, Johnny?' 'Have any ideas at all?'

'Got any brainwaves, Mr. Smith?'

'Sheriff, was calling in a psychic your idea?'

'Do the state police and the A.G.'s office know about this development, Sheriff Bannerman?'

'Do you think you can break the case, Johnny?'

'Sheriff, have you deputized this guy?'

Bannerman pushed his way slowly and solidly through them, zipping his coat. 'No comment, no comment.' Johnny said nothing at all.

The reporters clustered in the foyer as Johnny and Bannerman went down the snowy steps. It wasn't until they bypassed the cruiser and began wading across the street that one of them realized they were going to the common. Several of them ran back for their topcoats. Those who had been dressed for outside when Banner-man and Johnny emerged from the office now floundered down the Town Office steps after them, calling like children.

9.

Flashlights bobbing in the snowy dark. The wind howled, blowing snow past them this way and that in errant sheets.

'You're not gonna be able to see a damn thing,' Bannerman said. 'You w ... holy shit!' He was almost knocked off his feet as a reporter in a bulky overcoat and a bizarre tam o'shanter sprawled into him.

'Sorry, Sheriff,' he said sheepishly. 'Slippery. Forgot my galoshes.'

Up ahead a yellow length of nylon rope appeared out of the gloom. Attached to it was a wildly swinging sign reading POLICE INVESTIGATION.

'You forgot your brains, too,' Bannerman said. 'No- you keep back, all of you! Keep right back!'

'Town common's public property, Sheriff!' one of the reporters cried.

'That's right, and this is police business. You stay be-hind this rope here or you'll spend the night in my holding cell.'

With the beam of his flashlight he traced the course of the rope for them and then held it up so Johnny could pass beneath. They walked down the slope toward the snow-mounded shapes of the benches. Behind them the reporters gathered at the rope, pooling their few lights so that Johnny and George Bannerman walked in a dull sort of spotlight,

'Flying blind,' Bannerman said.

'Well, there's nothing to see, anyway,' Johnny said. 'Is there?'

'No, not now. I told Frank he could take that rope down anytime. Now I'm glad he didn't get around to it. You want to go over to the bandstand?'

'Not yet. Show me where the cigarette butts were.' They went on a little farther and then Bannerman stopped. 'Here,' he said, and shone his light on a bench that was little more than a vague hump poking out of a drift.

Johnny took off his gloves and put them in his coat pockets. Then he knelt and began to brush the snow away from the seat of the bench. Again Bannerman was struck by the haggard pallor of the man's face. On his knees before the bench he looked like a religious penitent, a man in desperate prayer.

Johnny's hands went cold, then mostly numb. Melted now ran off his fingers. He got down to the splintered, weatherbeaten surface of the bench. He seemed to see it very clearly, almost with magnifying power. It had once been green, but now much of the paint had flaked and eroded away. Two rusted steel bolts held the seat to the backrest.

He seized the bench in both hands, and sudden weirdness flooded him he had felt nothing so intense before and would feel something so intense only once ever again.

He stared down at the bench, frowning, gripping it tightly in his hands. It -...

(A summer bench)

How many hundreds of different people had sat here at one time or another, listening to 'God Bless America', to 'Stars and Stripes Forever' ('Be hind to your web-footed friends... for a duck may be somebody's moooother...'), to the Castle Rock Cougars' fight song? Green summer leaves, smoky haze of fall like a memory of cornhusks and men with rakes in mellow dusk. The thud of the big snare drum. Mellow gold trumpets and trombones. School band uniforms ...