The Castle Rock selectmen (and selectwoman) shared a single fulltime secretary, a young woman with the exotic name of Ariadne St.
Claire. She was a happy young woman, not overburdened with intelligence but tireless and pleasing to look at. She had large br**sts which rose in soft, steep hills beneath an apparently endless supply of angora sweaters, and lovely skin. She also had very bad eyes.
They swam, brown and enlarged, behind the thick lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles. Buster liked her. He considered her too dumb to be one of Them.
Ariadne poked her head into his office at quarter to four. "Deke Bradford came by, Mr. Keeton. He needs a signature on a fundrelease form. Can you do it?"
"Well, let's see what it is," Buster said, slipping that day's sports section of the Lewiston Daily Sun, folded to the racing card, deftly into his desk drawer.
He felt better today; purposeful and alert. Those wretched pink slips had been burned in the kitchen stove, Myrtle had stopped sidling away like a singed cat when he approached (he no longer cared much for Myrtle, but it was still annoying to live with a woman who thought you were the Boston Strangler), and he expected to clear another large bundle of cash at the Raceway that night. Because of the holiday, the crowds (not to mention the payoffs) would be bigger.
He had, in fact, started to think in terms of quinellas and trifectas.
As for Deputy Dickface and Sheriff Shithead and all the rest of their merry crew... well, he and Mr. Gaunt knew about Them, and Buster believed the two of them were going to make one hell of a team.
For all these reasons he was able to welcome Ariadne into his office with equanimity-he was even able to take some of his old pleasure in observing the gentle way her bosom swayed within its no doubt formidable harness.
She put a fund-release form on his desk. Buster picked it up and leaned back in his swivel chair to look it over. The amount requested was noted in a box at the top-nine hundred and forty dollars. The payee was to be Case Construction and Supply in Lewiston. In the space reserved for Goods and/or Services to Be Supplied, Deke had printed 16 CASES OF DYNAMITE. Below, in the CommentslExplanations section, he had written: We've finally come up against that granite ridge at the gravel pi't out on Town Road #5, the one the state geologist warned us about back i'n '87 (see my report for details). Anyway, there is plenty more gravel beyond it, but we'll have to blow out the rock to get at i't.
This should be done before it gets cold and the winter snowfall starts.
If we have to buy a winter's worth of gravel over. n Norway, the taxpayers are going to howl blue murder. Two or three bangs should take care of it, and Case has a hig supply of Taggart Hi'-Impact on hand-I checked. We can have it by noon tomorrow, if we want, and start blasting on Wednesday. I have the spots marked if anyone from the Selectmen's Office wants to come out and take a look.
Below this, Deke had scrawled his signature.
Buster read Deke's note twice, tapping his front teeth thoughtfully as Ariadne stood waiting. At last he rocked forward in his chair, made a change, added a sentence, initialed both the change and the addition, then signed his own name below Deke's with a flourish. When he handed the pink sheet of paper back to Ariadne, he was smiling.
"There!" he said. "And everyone thinks I'm such a skinflint!"
Ariadne looked at the form. Buster had changed the amount from nine hundred and forty dollars to fourteen hundred dollars.
Below Deke's explanation of what he wanted the dy***ite for, Buster had added this: Better get at least twenty cases while the supply I. s good.
"Will you want to go out and look at the gravel pit, Mr. Keeton?"
"Nope, nope, won't be necessary." Buster leaned back in his chair again and locked his hands together behind his neck. "But ask Deke to give me a call when the stuff arrives. That's a lot of bang. We wouldn't want it to fall into the wrong hands, would we?"
"No indeed," Ariadne said, and went out. She was glad to go.
There was something in Mr. Keeton's smile which she found... well, a little creepy.
Buster, meanwhile, had swivelled his chair around so he could look out at Main Street, which was a good deal busier than it had been when he had looked out over the town with such despair on Saturday morning.
A lot had happened since then, and he suspected that a lot more would happen in the next couple of days. Why, with twenty cases of Taggart HI-Impact Dynamite stored in the town's Public Works shed-a shed to which he, of course, had a keyalmost anything could happen.
Anything at all.