"No," Cora moaned, lurching out of bed. She wanted to shriek, but some inner voice-not her own-warned her that the police in the garage would hear if she did, and come running. "No, please no, please, pleeeease-" She tried to fit chunks of the broken lenses back into the streamlined gold frames, but it had been impossible. They were broken.
Broken by that evil whoring slut. Broken by herfriend, Myra Evans.
Her friend who had somehow found her own way to Graceland, her friend who was even now, as Cora tried to put together a priceless artifact that was irretrievably broken, making love to The King.
Cora looked up. Her eyes had become glittering black slits.
"I'll butch her," she had whispered hoarsely. "See if I don't."
6
She read the sign in the window of Needful Things, paused for a moment, thinking, and then walked around to the service alley. She brushed by Francine Pelletier, who was on her way out of the alley, putting something into her purse. Cora hardly even looked at her.
Halfway down the alley she saw Mr. Gaunt standing behind a wooden table which lay across the open back door of his shop like a barricade.
"Ah, Cora!" he exclaimed. "I was wondering when you'd drop by."
"That bitch!" Cora spat. "That double-crossing little slut-bitch!"
"Pardon me, Cora," Mr. Gaunt said with urbane politeness, "but you seem to have missed a button or two." He pointed one of his odd, long fingers at the front of her dress.
Cora had slipped the first thing she'd found in the closet on over her nakedness, and had managed to do only the top button.
Below that one, the dress gaped open to the curls of her pubic hair. Her belly, swelled by a great many Ring-Dings, Yodels, and chocolate-covered cherries during Santa Barbara (and all her other shows), curved smoothly out.
"Who gives a shit?" Cora snapped.
"Not I," Mr. Gaunt agreed serenely. "How may I help you?"
"That bitch is f**king The King. She broke my sunglasses. I want to kill her."
"Do you," Mr. Gaunt said, raising his eyebrows. "Well, I can't say that I don't sympathize, Cora, because I do. It may be that a woman who would steal another woman's man deserves to live. I wouldn't care to say on that subject one way or the other-I've been a businessman all my life, and know very little about matters of the heart. But a woman who deliberately breaks another woman's most treasured possession well, that is a much more serious thing. Do you agree?"
She began to smile. It was a hard smile. It was a merciless smile.
It was a smile utterly devoid of sanity. "Too f**king right," said Cora Rusk.
Mr. Gaunt turned around for a moment. When he faced Cora again, he was holding an automatic pistol in one hand.
"Might you be looking for something like this?" he asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1
After Buster finished with Myrtle, he fell into a deep fugue state.
All sense of purpose seemed to desert him. He thought of them-the whole town was crawling with Them-but instead of the clear, righteous anger the idea had brought only minutes before, he now felt only weariness and depression. He had a pounding headache.
His arm and back ached from wielding the hammer.
He looked down and saw that he was still holding it. He opened his hand and it fell to the kitchen linoleum, making a bloody splatter there. He stood looking at this splatter for almost a full minute with a kind of idiot attention. It looked to him like a sketch of his father's face drawn in blood.
He plodded through the living room and into his study, rubbing his shoulder and upper arm as he went. The handcuff chain jingled maddeningly. He opened the closet door, dropped to his knees, crawled beneath the clothes which hung at the front, and dug out the box with the pacers on the front. He backed clumsily out of the closet again (the handcuff caught in one of Myrtle's shoes and he threw it to the back of the closet with a sulky curse), took the box over to his desk, and sat down with it in front of him. Instead of excitement, he felt only sadness. Winning Ticket was wonderful, all right, but what good could it possibly do him now? It didn't matter if he put the money back or not. He had murdered his wife.
She had undoubtedly deserved it, but They wouldn't see it that way.
They would happily throw him in the deepest, darkest Shawshank Penitentiary cell they could find and throw away the key.
He saw that he had left large bloody smears on the box-top, and he looked down at himself. For the first time he noticed that he was covered with blood. His meaty forearms looked as though they belonged to a Chicago hog-butcher. Depression folded over him again in a soft, black wave. They had beaten him... okay. Yet he would escape Them.
He would escape Them just the same.
He got up, weary to his very center, and plodded slowly upstairs.
He undressed as he went, kicking off his shoes in the living room, dropping his pants at the foot of the stairs, then sitting down halfway up to peel off his socks. Even they were bloody. The shirt gave him the hardest time; pulling off a shirt while you were wearing a handcuff was the devil's own job.