the way Bannerman was looking at him, with a kind of weary contempt. It upset him. “If any of those three are there, call me here. And if I’m not here, I’ll leave a number. Understand?”
The telephone rang. Bannerman picked it up, listened, and offered it to Andy Masen. “For you, hotshot.”
Their eyes locked over the telephone. Masen thought that Bannerman would drop his, but he didn’t. After a moment Andy took the phone. The call was from the State Police barracks in Scarborough. Steve Kemp had been picked up. His van had been spotted in the courtyard of a small motel in the Massachusetts town of Twickenham. The woman and the boy were not with him. After receiving the Miranda, Kemp had given his name and had since been standing on his right to remain silent.
Andy Masen found that extremely ominous news.
“Townsend, you come with me,” he said. “You can handle the Camber place by yourself, can’t you, Sheriff Bannerman?”
“It’s my town,” Bannerman said.
Andy Masen lit a cigarette and looked at Bannerman through the shifting smoke. “Have you got a problem with me, Sheriff?”
Bannerman smiled. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
Christ, I hate these hicks, Masen thought, watching Bannerman leave. But he’s out of the play now, anyway. Thank God for small favors.
Bannerman got behind the wheel of his cruiser, fired it up, and backed out of the Trenton driveway. It was twenty minutes after seven. He was almost amused at how neatly Masen had shunted him off onto a siding. They were headed toward the heart of the matter; he was headed nowhere. But ole Hank Townsend was going to have to listen to a whole morning’s worth of Masen’s bullshit, so maybe he had gotten off well at that.
George Bannerman loafed out Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road, siren and flashers off. It surely was a pretty day. And he saw no need to hurry.
Donna and Tad Trenton were sleeping.
Their positions were very similar: the awkward sleeping positions of those forced to spend long hours on interstate buses. Their heads lolled against the sockets of their shoulders, Donna’s turned to the left, Tad’s to the right. Tad’s hands lay in his lap like beached fish. Now and again they would twitch. His breathing was harsh and stertorous. His lips were blistered, his eyelids a purplish color. A line of spittle running from the corner of his mouth to the soft line of his jaw had begun to dry.
Donna was in middle sleep. As exhausted as she was, her cramped position and the pain in her leg and belly and now her fingers (in his seizure Tad had bitten them to the bone) would let her sink no deeper. Her hair clung to her head in sweaty strings. The gauze pads on her left leg had soaked through again, and the flesh around the superficial wounds on her belly had gone an ugly red. Her breathing was also harsh, but not as uneven as Tad’s.
Tad Trenton was very close to the end of his endurance. Dehydration was well advanced. He had lost electrolytes, chlorides, and sodium through his perspiration. Nothing had replaced them. His inner defenses were being steadily rolled back, and now he had entered the final critical stage. His life had grown light, not sunken firmly into his flesh and bones but trembling, ready to depart on any puff of wind.
In his feverish dreams his father pushed him on the swing, higher and higher, and he did not see their back yard but the duckpond, and the breeze was cool on his sunburned forehead, his aching eyes, his blistered lips.
Cujo also slept.
He lay on the verge of grass by the porch, his mangled snout on his forepaws. His dreams were confused, lunatic things. It was dusk, and the sky was dark with wheeling, red-eyed bats. He leaped at them again and again, and each time he leaped he brought one down, teeth clamped on a leathery, twitching wing. But the bats kept biting his tender face with their sharp little rat-teeth. That was where the pain came from. That was where all the hurt came from. But he would kill them all. He would—
He woke suddenly, his head lifting from his paws, his head cocking.
A car was coming.
To his hellishly alert ears, the sound of the approaching car was dreadful, insupportable; it was the sound of some great stinging insect coming to fill him with poison.
He lurched to his feet, whining. All his joints seemed filled with