into something that sounded almost like a bray of laughter: baaa'n. Alan pushed the inter-office telephone back to its normal place. God favored fools and drunks
- a fact he had learned well in his many years of police work - and it seemed that Fuzzy's house and barn were still standing in spite of his habit of flicking live cigarette butts here, there, and everywhere while he was drunk. Now all I have to do, Alan thought, is sit here until he unravels whatever the problem is. Then I can figure out - or try to - if it's in the real world or only inside whatever is left of Fuzzy's mind.
He caught his hands flying another sparrow across the wall and made them stop.
'What car was it that came out of your barn, Albert?' Alan asked patiently. Almost everyone in The Rock (including the man himself) called Albert Fuzzy, and Alan might try it himself after he'd been in town another ten years. Or maybe twenty.
'Just told you I never seen it before,' Fuzzy Martin said in a tone that said oh you damned fool so clearly he might as well have spoken it. 'That's why I'm callin you, Chief. Sure wasn't one of mine.'
A picture at last began to form in Alan's mind. With his cows, his kids, and his wife gone, Fuzzy Martin didn't need a whole lot of hard cash - the land had been his free and clear, except for taxes, when he inherited it from his dad. What money Fuzzy did see came from various odd sources. Alan believed, almost knew, in fact, that a bale or two of marijuana joined the hay in Fuzzy's barn loft every couple of months or so' and that was just one of Fuzzy's little scams. He had thought from time to time that he ought to make a serious effort to bust Fuzzy for possession with intent to sell, but he doubted if Fuzzy even smoked the stuff, let alone had brains enough to
sell it. Most likely he just collected a hundred or two hundred dollars every now and again for providing storage space. And even in a little burg like Castle Rock, there were more important things to do than busting drunks for holding weed.
Another of Fuzzy's storage services - this a legal one, at least was keeping cars in his barn for summer people. When Alan first came to town, Fuzzy's barn had been a regular parking garage. You could go in there and see as many as fifteen cars - most of them summer cars owned by people who had places on the lake - stored where the cows used to spend their nights and winter afternoons. Fuzzy had knocked out the partitions to make one big garage and there the summer cars waited out the long months of fall and winter in the sweet hay-smelling shadows, their bright surfaces dulled by the steady fall of old chaff from the loft, parked bumper to bumper and side to side.
Over the years, Fuzzy's car-storage business had fallen off radically. Alan supposed that word of his careless smoking habits had gotten around and that had done it. No one wants to lose their car in a barn-fire, even if it's just an old lag you kept around to run errands when summer came. The last time he had been out to Fuzzy's, Alan had seen only two cars in the barn: Ossie Brannigan's 59 T-Bird - a car which would have been a classic if it hadn't been so rusted out and beat-to-shit - and Thad Beaumont's old Ford Woody wagon. Thad again.
Today it seemed that all roads led back to Thad Beaumont. Alan sat up straighter in his chair, unconsciously pulling the telephone closer to him.
'It wasn't Thad Beaumont's old Ford?' he asked Fuzzy now. 'You're sure?'
''Course I'm sure. This wasn't no Ford, and it sure as hell wasn't any Woody wagon. It was a black Toronado.'.Another flare went off in Alan's mind . . . but he wasn't quite sure why. Someone had said
something to him about a black Toronado, and not long ago. He couldn't think just who or when, not now . . . but it would come to him.
'I just happened to be in the kitchen, gettin myself a cool drink of lemonade,' Fuzzy was going on, 'when I seen that car backin out of the barn. First thing I thought of was bow I don't store no car like that. Second thing I thought of was how anybody got it in there in the first place, when there's a big old Kreig padlock on the barn door and I got the only key to it on my ring.'
'What about the people with cars stored in there? They don't have keys?'
'No, sir!' Fuzzy seemed offended by the very idea.
'You didn't happen to get the license plate number, did you?'
'You're damn tooting I got it!' Fuzzy cried. 'Got the goddam ote jeezly b'noc'lars right there on the kitchen windowsill, ain't I?'
Alan, who had been in the barn on inspection tours with Trevor Hartland but never in Fuzzy's kitchen (and had no plans to make such a trip soon, thanks), said: 'Oh, yeah. The binoculars. I forgot about them.'
'Well, I didn't!' Fuzzy said with happy truculence. 'You got a pencil?'
'I sure do, Albert.'
'Chief, why don't you just call me Fuzzy, like everyone else?'
Alan sighed. 'Okay, Fuzzy. And while we're at it, why don't you just call me Sheriff?'
'Whatever you say. Now do you want this plate number or not?'
'Shoot.'