"Did you have a good time throwing mud at my sheets, you numb cunt?" Wilma was furious. The woman was actually trying to pretend this was still about the dog.
"Sheets? What sheets? I... I..." Nettle looked toward the carnival glass lampshade and seemed to draw strength from it. "You leave me alone! You're the one that's crazy, not me!"
"I'm going to get you for this. Nobody comes into my yard and throws mud at my sheets while I'm gone. Nobody. NOBODY!
Understand? Is this getting through that cracked skull of yours?
You won't know where, and you won't know when, and most of all you won't know how, but I... am going... to GET you. Do you understand?"
Nettle held the phone tightly screwed against her ear. Her face had gone dead pale except for a single bright streak of red which ran across her forehead between her eyebrows and hairline. Her teeth were clenched and her cheeks puffed in and out like a bellows as she panted from the sides of her mouth.
"You leave me alone or you'll be sorry!" she screamed in her high, fainting, helium voice. Raider was standing now, his ears up, his eyes bright and anxious. He sensed menace in the room. He barked once, severely. Nettle didn't hear him. "You'll be very sorry!
I... I know people! People in Authority! I know them very well!
I don't have to put up with this!"
Speaking slowly in a voice which was low and sincere and utterly furious, Wilma said: "Tucking with me is the worst mistake you ever made in your life. You won't see me coming."
There was a click.
"You don't dare!" Nettle wailed. Tears were running down her cheeks now, tears of terror and abysmal, impotent rage. "You don't dare, you bad thing! I... I'll..."
There was a second click. It was followed by the buzz of an open line.
Nettle hung up the phone and sat bolt upright in her chair for almost three minutes, staring into space. Then she began to weep.
Raider barked again and put his paws up on the edge of her chair.
Nettle hugged him and wept against his fur. Raider licked her neck.
"I won't let her hurt you, Raider," she said. She inhaled the sweet and clean doggy warmth of him, trying to take comfort from it.
"I won't let that bad, bad woman hurt you. She's not a Person in Authority, not at all. She's just a bad old thing and if she tries to hurt you... or me... she'll be sorry."
She straightened at last, found a Kleenex tucked down between the side of her chair and the cushion, and used it to wipe her eyes.
She was terrified... but she could also feel anger buzzing and drilling through her. It was the way she'd felt before she'd taken the meat-fork from the drawer under the sink and stuck it in her husband's throat.
She took the carnival glass lampshade off the table and hugged it gently to her. "If she starts something, she will be very, very sorry," Nettle said.
She sat that way, with Raider at her feet and the lampshade in her lap, for a very long time.
5
Norris Ridgewick cruised slowly down Main Street in his police cruiser, eyeballing the buildings on the west side of the street.
His shift would be over soon, and he was glad. He could remember how good he had felt this morning before that idiot had grabbed him; could remember standing at the mirror in the men's room, adjusting his hat and thinking with satisfaction that he looked Squared Away. He could remember it, but the memory seemed very old and sepia-toned, like a photograph from the nineteenth century. From the moment that idiot Keeton had grabbed him up to right now, nothing had gone right.
He'd gotten lunch at Cluck-Cluck Tonite, the chicken shack out on Route 119. The food there was usually good, but this time it had given him a roaring case of acid indigestion followed by a case of the dribbling shits. Around three o'clock he had run over a nail out on Town Road #7 near the old Camber place and had to change the tire.
He'd wiped his fingers on the front of his freshly dry-cleaned uniform blouse, not thinking about what he was doing, only wanting to dry the tips so they would provide a better grip on the loosened lug-nuts, and he had rubbed grease across the shirt in four glaring dark-gray stripes. While he was looking at this with dismay, the cramps had turned his bowels to water again and he'd had to hurry off into the puckerbrush. It had been a race to see if he could manage to drop his trousers before he filled them. That race Norris managed to win... but he hadn't liked the look of the little stand of bushes he had chosen to take a squat in. It had looked like poison sumac, and the way his day had gone so far, it probably had been.
Norris crept slowly past the buildings which made up Castle Rock's downtown: the Norway Bank and Trust, the Western Auto, Nan's Luncheonette, the black hole where Pop Merrill's rickrack palace had once stood, You Sew and Sew, Needful Things, Castle Rock Hardware Norris suddenly applied the brakes and came to a stop. He had seen something amazing in the window of Needful Things@r thought he had, anyway.