The Dead Zone(96)

'And if he doesn't?'

Johnny remembered the vision on the handstand. It whirled back at him like a crazy, lethal boomerang. The tearing sensation. The pain that was pleasant, the pain that recalled the pain of the clothespin, the pain that reconfirmed everything.

'Get him to drop his pants,' Johnny said. Bannerman looked at him.

13.

The reporters were still out in the lobby. In truth, they probably wouldn't have moved even had they not suspected a break in the case - or at least a bizarre new development. The roads out of town were impassable.

Bannerman and Johnny went out the supply closet window.

'Are you sure this is the way to do it?' Johnny asked, and the storm tried to rip the words out of his mouth. His legs hurt.

'No,' Bannerman said simply, 'but I think you should be in on it. Maybe I think he should have the chance to look you in the face, Johnny. Come on. The Dodds are only two blocks from here.'

They set off, hooded and booted, a pair of shadows in the driving snow. Beneath his coat Bannerman was wearing his service pistol. His handcuffs were clipped to his belt. Before they had gone a block through the deep snow Johnny was limping badly, but he kept his mouth grimly shut about it.

But Bannerman noticed. They stopped in the doorway of the Castle Rock Western Auto.

'Son, what's the matter with you?'

'Nothing,' Johnny said. His head was starting to ache again, too.

'It sure is something. You act like you're walking on two broken legs.'

'They had to operate on my legs after I came out of the coma. The muscles had atrophied. Started to melt is how Dr. Brown put it. The joints were decayed. They fixed it up the best they could with synthetics...

'Like the Six Million Dollar Man, huh?'

Johnny thought of the neat piles of hospital hills back home, sitting in the top drawer of the dining room hutch.

'Yes, something like that. When I'm on them too long, they stiffen up. That's all.'

'You want to go back?'

You bet I do. Go back and not have' to think about this hellacious business anymore'. Wish I'd never come. Not my problem. This is the guy who compared me to a two-headed cow.

'No, I'm okay,' he said.

They stepped out of the doorway and the wind grabbed them and tried to bowl them along the empty street. They struggled through the harsh, snow-choked glare of arc-sodium streetlights, bent into the wind. They turned onto a side street and five houses down Bannerman stopped in front of a small and neat New England salt-box. Like the other houses on the street, it was dark and battened down.

'This is the house,' Bannerman said, his voice oddly colorless. They worked their way through the snowdrift that the wind had thrown against the porch and mounted the steps.

14.

Mrs. Henrietta Dodd was a big woman who was carrying a dead weight of flesh on her frame. Johnny had never seen a woman who looked any sicker. Her skin was a yellowish-gray. Her hands were nearly reptilian with an eczemalike rash. And there was something in her eyes, narrowed to glittering slits in their puffy sockets, that reminded him unpleasantly of the way his mother's eyes had sometimes looked when Vera Smith was transported into one of her religious frenzies.

She had opened the door to them after Bannerman had rapped steadily for nearly five minutes. Johnny stood beside him on his aching legs, thinking that this night would never end. It would just go on and on until the snow bad piled up enough to avalanche down and bury them all.

'What do you want in the middle of the night, George Bannerman?' she asked suspiciously. Like many fat women, her voice was a high, buzzy reed instrument - it sounded a bit like a fly or a bee caught in a bottle.

'Have to talk to Frank, Henrietta.'

'Then talk to him in the morning,' Henrietta Dodd said, and started to close the door in their faces.

Bannerman stopped the door's swing with a gloved hand. 'I'm sorry, Henrietta. Has to be now.'

'Well, I'm not going to wake him up!' she cried, not moving from the doorway. 'He sleeps like the dead anyway! Some nights I ring my bell for him, the palpitations are terrible sometimes, and does he come? No, he sleeps right through it and he could wake up some morning to find me dead of a heart attack in my bed instead of getting him his goddam runny poached egg! Because you work him too hard!'

She grinned in a sour kind of triumph; the dirty secret exposed and hats over the windmill.

'All day, all night, swing shift, chasing after drunks in the middle of the night and any one of them could have a - gun under the seat, going out to the ginmills and honky-tonks, oh, they're a rough trade out there but a lot you mind! I guess I know what goes on in those places, those cheap slutty women that'd be happy to give a nice boy like my Frank an incurable disease for the price of a quarter beer!'

Her voice, that reed instrument, swooped and buzzed. Johnny's head pumped and throbbed in counterpoint. He wished she would shut up. It was a hallucination, he knew, just the tiredness and stress of this awful night catching up, but it began to seem more and more to him that this was his mother standing here, that at any moment she would turn from Bannerman to him and begin to huckster him about the wonderful talent God had given him.

'Mrs. Dodd ... Henrietta ...' Bannerman began patiently.

Then she did turn to Johnny, and regarded him with her smart-stupid little pig's eyes.