On June 18, five hours after he had talked to his cousin Bill Hapscomb, Joe Bob Brentwood pulled down a speeder on Texas Highway 40 about twenty-five miles east of Arnette. The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. He had been doing sixty-five miles per in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. Joe Bob gave him a speeding ticket. Trent accepted it humbly and then amused Joe Bob by trying to sell him insurance on his house and his life. Joe Bob felt fine; dying was the last thing on his mind. Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb's Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.
Harry, a gregarious man who liked his job, passed the sickness to more than forty people during that day and the next. How many those forty passed it to is impossible to say - you might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If you were to make a conservative estimate of five apiece, you'd have two hundred. Using the same conservative formula, one could say those two hundred went on to infect a thousand, the thousand five thousand, the five thousand twenty -five thousand.
Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers' money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.
On June 19, the day Larry Underwood came home to New York and the day that Frannie Goldsmith told her father about her impending Little Stranger, Harry Trent stopped at an East Texas café called Babe's Kwik-Eat for lunch. He had the cheeseburger platter and a piece of Babe's delicious strawberry pie for dessert. He had a slight cold, an allergy cold, maybe, and he kept sneezing and having to spit. In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, two truckers in a corner booth, the man who came in to deliver bread, and the man who came in to change the records on the juke. He left the sweet thang that waited his table a dollar tip that was crawling with death.
On his way out, a station wagon pulled in. There was a roofrack on top, and the wagon was piled high with kids and luggage. The wagon had New York plates and the driver, who rolled down his window to ask Harry how to get to US 21 going north, had a New York accent. Harry gave the New York fellow very clear directions on how to get to Highway 21. He also served him and his entire family their death-warrants without even knowing it.
The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in the Big Apple's 87th Precinct. This was his first real vacation in five years. He and his family had had a fine time. The kids had been in seventh heaven at Disney World in Orlando, and not knowing the whole family would be dead by the second of July, Norris planned to tell that sour sonofabitch Steve Carella that it was possible to take your wife and kids someplace by car and have a good time. Steve, he would say, you may be a fine detective, but a man who can't police his own family ain't worth a pisshole drilled in a snowbank.
The Norris family had a kwik-eat at Babe's, then followed Harry Trent's admirable directions to Highway 21. Ed and his wife Trish marveled over southern hospitality while the three kids colored in the back seat. Christ only knew, Ed thought, what Carella's pair of monsters would have been up to.
That night they stayed in a Eustace, Oklahoma, travel court. Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infected the kids they played with on the tourist court's playground - kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Trish infected the two women who were washing clothes at the Laundromat two blocks away. Ed, on his way down the motel corridor to get some ice, infected a fellow he passed in the hallway. Everybody got into the act.
Trish woke Ed up in the early morning hours to tell him that Heck, the baby, was sick. He had an ugly, rasping cough and was running a fever. It sounded to her like the croup. Ed Norris groaned and told her to give the kid some aspirin. If the kid's goddam croup could only have held off another four or five days, he could have had it in his very own house and Ed would have been left with the memory of a perfect vacation (not to mention the anticipation of all that gloating he planned to do). He could hear the poor kid through the connecting door, hacking away like a hound dog.
Trish expected that Hector's symptoms would abate in the morning - croup was a lying-down sickness - but by noon of the twentieth, she admitted to herself that it wasn't happening. The aspirin wasn't controlling the fever; poor Heck was just glass-eyed with it. His cough had taken on a booming note she didn't like, and his respiration sounded labored and phlegmy. Whatever it was, Marsha seemed to be coming down with it, too, and Trish had a nasty little tickle in the back of her own throat that was making her cough, although so far it was only a light cough she could smother in a small hankie.
"We've got to get Heck to a doctor," she said finally.
Ed pulled into a service station and checked the map paperclipped to the station wagon's sun-visor. They were in Hammer Crossing, Kansas. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe we can at least find a doctor who'll give us a referral." He sighed and ran an aggravated hand through his hair. "Hammer Crossing, Kansas! Jesus! Why'd he have to get sick, enough to need a doctor at some goddam nothing place like this?"
Marsha, who was looking at the map over her father's shoulder, said: "It says Jesse James robbed the bank here, Daddy. Twice."