Keeton decided he'd better stay away. He had the course of his life neatly planned. He intended to become Castle Rock's Head Selectman when Steve Frazier finally pulled the pin, and after six or seven years of that, he intended to stand for the State House of Representatives. After that, who knew? National office was not out of reach for a man who was ambitious, capable... and sane.
That was the real trouble with the track. He hadn't recognized it at first, but he had recognized it soon enough. The track was a place where people paid their money, took a ticket... and gave up their sanity for a little while. Keeton had seen too much insanity in his own family to feel comfortable with the attraction Lewiston Raceway held for him. It was a pit with greasy sides, a snare with hidden teeth, a loaded gun with the safety removed. When he went, he was unable to leave until the last race of the evening had been run. He knew. He had tried. Once he had made it almost all the way to the exit turnstiles before something in the back of his brain, something powerful, enigmatic, and reptilian, had arisen, taken control, and turned his feet around. Keeton was terrified of fully waking that reptile. Better to let it sleep.
For three years he had done just that. Then, in 1984, Steve Frazier had retired, and Keeton had been elected Head Selectman.
That was when his real troubles began.
He had gone to the track to celebrate his victory, and since he was celebrating, he decided to go whole hog. He bypassed the two- and five-dollar windows, and went straight to the ten-dollar window. He had lost a hundred and sixty dollars that night, more than he felt comfortable losing (he told his wife the next day that it had been forty), but not more than he could afford to lose. Absolutely not.
He returned a week later, meaning to win back what he had lost so he could quit evens. And he had almost made it. Almost-that was the key word. The way he had almost made it to the exit turnstiles. The week after, he had lost two hundred and ten dollars.
That left a hole in the checking account Myrtle would notice, and so he had borrowed a little bit from the town's petty-cash fund to cover the worst of the shortfall. A hundred dollars. Peanuts, really.
Past that point, it all began to blur together. The pit had greased sides, all right, and once you started sliding you were doomed.
You could expend your energy clawing at the sides and succeed in slowing your fall... but that, of course, only drew out the agony.
If there had been a point of no return, it had been the summer of 1989. The pacers ran nightly during the summer, and Keeton was in attendance constantly through the second half of July and all of August. Myrtle had thought for awhile that he was using the racetrack as an excuse, that he was actually seeing another woman, and that was a laugh-it really was. Keeton couldn't have got a hardon if Diana herself had driven down from the moon in her chariot with her toga open and a FUCK ME DANFORTH Sign hung around her neck. The thought of how deep he'd dipped into the town treasury had caused his poor dick to shrivel to the size of a pencil eraser.
When Myrtle finally became convinced of the truth, that it was only horse racing after all, she had been relieved. it kept him out of the house, where he tended to be something of a tyrant, and he couldn't be losing too badly, she had reasoned, because the checkbook balance didn't fluctuate that much. It was just that Danforth had found a hobby to keep him amused in his middle age.
Only horse racing after all, Keeton thought as he walked down Main Street with his hands plunged deep into his overcoat pockets.
He uttered a strange, wild laugh that would have turned heads if there had been anyone on the street. Myrtle kept her eye on the checking account. The thought that Danforth might have plundered the T-bills which were their life savings never occurred to her.
Likewise, the knowledge that Keeton Chevrolet was tottering on, the edge of extinction belonged to him alone.
She balanced the checkbook and the house accounts.
He was a CPA.
When it comes to embezzlement, a CPA can do a better job than most... but in the end the package always comes undone.
The string and tape and wrapping paper on Keeton's package had begun to fall apart in the autumn of 1990. He had held things together as well as he could, hoping to recoup at the track. By then he had found a bookie, which enabled him to make bigger bets than the track would handle.
It hadn't changed his luck, however.
And then, this summer, the persecution had begun in earnest.
Before, They had only been toying with him. Now They were moving in for the kill, and the Day of Armageddon was less than a week away.
I'll get Them, Keeton thought. I'm not done yet. I've still got a trick or two up my sleeve.
He didn't know what those tricks were@ though; that was the trouble.