“Sure. I left my guys back in the Hamptons, came here alone. Be it on my own head, man.” He smiled. “But if we should ever catch you in a similar position, you want to hope your kidneys are wearing combat boots.”
“I’ll chance it,” Greg said. He measured Elliman. They were both big men. He reckoned Elliman had forty pounds on him, but a lot of it was beer muscle. “I could take you, Sonny.”
Elliman’s face crinkled in amiable good humor again. “Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s not the way we play it, man. All that good American John Wayne stuff.” He leaned forward, as if to impart a great secret. “Me personally, now, whenever I get me a piece of mom’s apple pie, I make it my business to shit on it.”
“Foul mouth, Sonny,” Greg said mildly.
“What do you want with me?” Sonny asked. “Why don’t you get down to it? You’ll miss your Jaycee’s meeting.”
“No,” Greg said, still serene. “The Jaycees meet Tuesday nights. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
Elliman made a disgusted blowing sound.
“Now what I thought,” Greg went on, “is that you’d want something from me.” He opened his desk drawer and from it took three plastic Baggies of marijuana. Mixed in with the weed were a number of gel capsules. “Found this in your sleeping bag,” Greg said. “Nasty, nasty, nasty, Sonny. Bad boy. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to New Hampshire State Prison.”
“You didn’t have any search warrant,” Elliman said. “Even a kiddy lawyer could get me off, and you know it.”
“I don’t know any such thing,” Greg Stillson said. He leaned back in his swivel chair and cocked his loafers, bought across the state line at L.L. Bean’s in Maine, up on his desk. “I’m a big man in this town, Sonny. I came into New Hampshire more or less on my uppers a few years back, and now I’ve got a nice operation here. I’ve helped the town council solve a couple of problems, including just what to do about all these kids the chief of police catches doing dope ... oh, I don’t mean bad-hats like you, Sonny, drifters like you we know what to do with when we catch them with a little treasure trove like that one right there on my desk ... I mean the nice local kids. Nobody really wants to do anything to them at all, you know? I figured that out for them. Put them to work on community projects instead of sending them to jail, I said. It worked out real good. Now we’ve got the biggest head in the tri-town area coaching Little League and doing a real good job at it.”
Elliman was looking bored. Greg suddenly brought his feet down with a crash, grabbed a vase with a UNH logo on the side, and threw it past Sonny Elliman’s nose. It missed him by less than an inch, flew end over end across the room, and shattered against the file cabinets in the corner. For the first time Elliman looked startled. And for just a moment the face of this older, wiser Greg Stillson was the face of the younger man, the dog-bludgeoner.
“You want to listen when I talk,” he said softly. “Because what we’re discussing here is your career over the next ten years or so. Now if you don’t have any interest in making a career out of stamping LIVE FREE OR DIE on license plates, you want to listen up, Sonny. You1 want to pretend this is the first day of school again, Sonny. You want to get it all right the first time. Sonny.”
Elliman looked at the smashed fragments of vase, then back at Stillson. His former uneasy calm was being replaced by a feeling of real interest. He hadn’t been really interested in anything for quite a while now. He had made the run for beer because he was bored. He had come by himself because he was bored. And when this big guy had pulled him over, using a flashing blue light on the dashboard of his station wagon, Sonny Elliman had assumed that what he had to deal with was just another small-town Deputy Dawg, protecting his territory and rousting the big bad biker on the modified Harley-Davidson. But this guy was something else. He was ... was...
He’s crazy! Sonny realized, with dawning delight at the discovery. He’s got two public