Your Local Police Department thanks you!
Below the sermon was a series of blanks labelled MAKE, MODEL, and LIC. #. Printed on the slip in the first two blanks were the words Cadillac and Seville. Neatly printed in the blank for LIC. # was this:
BUSTER 1.
Most of the slip was taken up by a checklist of common traffic violations such as failure to signal, failure to stop, and illegal parking.
None of them was checked. Toward the bottom were the words OTHER VIOLATION(S), followed by two blank lines. OTHER VIOLATION(S) had been checked. The message on the lines provided to describe the violation was also neatly printed in small block capitals. It read:
BEING THE BIGGEST COCKSUCKER IN CASTLE ROCK.
At the bottom was a line with the words CITING OFFICER printed under it. The rubber-stamp signature on this line was Norris Ridgewick.
Slowly, very slowly, Keeton clenched his fist on the pink slip.
It crackled and bent and crumpled. At last it disappeared between Keeton's big knuckles. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking around at all the other pink slips. A vein beat time in the center of his forehead.
"I'll kill him," Keeton whispered. "I swear to God and all the saints I'll kill that skinny little f**k."
13
When Nettle arrived home it was only twenty past one, but it felt to her as if she had been gone for months, maybe even years. As she walked up the cement path to her door, her terrors slipped from her shoulders like invisible weights. Her head still ached from the tumble she had taken, but she thought a headache was a very small price to pay for being allowed to arrive back at her own little house safe and undetected.
She still had her own key; that was in the pocket of her dress.
She took it out and put it in the lock. "Raider?" she called as she turned it. "Raider, I'm home!"
She opened the door.
"Where's Mummy's wittle boy, hmmm? Where is urns? Izzum hungwy?"
The hallway was dark, and at first she did not see the small bundle lying on the floor. She took her key out of the lock and stepped in.
"Is Mummy's wittle boy awful hungwy? Izzum just sooo hung-" Her foot struck something which was both stiff and yielding, and her voice halted in mid-simper. She looked down and saw Raider.
At first she tried to tell herself she wasn't seeing what her eyes told her she was seeing-wasn't, wasn't, wasn't. That wasn't Raider on the floor with something sticking out of his chest-how could it be?
She closed the door and beat frantically at the wall-switch with one hand. At last the hall light jumped on and she saw. Raider was lying on the floor. He was lying on his back the way he did when he wanted to be scratched, and there was something red jutting out of him, something that looked like... looked like...
Nettle uttered a high, wailing scream-it was so high it sounded like the whine of some huge mosquito-and fell on her knees beside her dog.
"Raider! Oh jesus Savior meek and mild! Oh my God, Raider, you ain't dead, are you? You ain't dead?"
Her hand-her cold, cold hand-beat at the red thing sticking out of Raider's chest the way it had beat at the light-switch a few seconds before. At last it caught hold and she tore it free, using a strength drawn from the deepest wells of her grief and horror. The corkscrew came out with a thick ripping sound, pulling chunks of flesh, small clots of blood, and tangles of hair with it. It left a ragged dark hole the size of a four-ten slug. Nettle shrieked. She dropped the gory corkscrew and gathered the small, stiff body in her arms.
"Raider!" she cried. "Oh my little doggy! No! Oh no!" She rocked him back and forth against her breast, trying to bring him back to life with her warmth, but it seemed she had no warmth to give.
She was cold. Cold.
Some time later she put his body down on the hall floor again and fumbled around with her hand until she found the Swiss Army knife with the murdering corkscrew jutting out of its handle. She picked it up dully, but some of that dullness left her when she saw that a note had been impaled upon the murder weapon. She pulled it off with numb fingers and held it up close in front of her. The paper was stiff with her poor little dog's blood, but she could still read the words scrawled on it:
NOBODY SLINGS MUD AT MY CLEAN SHEETS! I TOLD YOU I'D GET YOU!
The look of distracted grief and horror slowly left Nettle's eyes.
It was replaced with a gruesome sort of intelligence that sparkled there like tarnished silver. Her cheeks, which had gone as pale as milk when she finally understood what had happened here, began to fill with dark red color. Her lips peeled slowly back from her teeth. She bared them at the note. Two harsh words slid out of her open mouth, hot and hoarse and rasping: "You... bitch!"
She crumpled the paper in her fist and threw it against the wall.