went on in here, he might take a notion to finish me in Ridgeway.”
The kid’s lips were twitching in a nearly soundless blubber. Greg shook the boy’s head slowly back and forth by the ears, banging their noses together.
“He might not ... he was pretty damn mad about that shirt. But he might. Blood ties are strong ties. So you think about this, son. If you was to tell your uncle what went on here and your uncle squeezed me out, I guess I would come along and kill you. Do you believe that?”
“Yeah,” the kid whispered. His cheeks were wet, gleaming.
“ ‘Yes sir, Mayor Stillson.’ ”
“Yessir, Mayor Stillson.”
Greg let go of his ears. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d kill you, but first I’d tell anybody that’d listen about how you pissed yourself and stood there crying with snot running out of your nose.”
He turned and walked away quickly, as if the kid smelled bad, and went to the cabinet again. He got a box of Band-Aids from one of the shelves and tossed them across to the kid, who flinched back and fumbled them. He hastened to pick them up off the floor, as if Stillson might attack him again for missing.
Greg pointed. “Bathroom over there. You clean yourself up. I’m gonna leave you a Ridgeway PAL sweatshirt. I want it mailed back, clean, no bloodstains. You understand?”
“Yes,” the kid whispered.
“SIR!”Stillson screamed at him. “SIR! SIR! SIR! Can’t you remember that?”
“Sir,” the kid moaned. “Yessir, yessir.”
“They don’t teach you kids respect for nothing,” Greg said. “Not for nothing.”
The headache was trying to come back. He took several deep breaths and quelled it—but his stomach felt miserably upset. “Okay, that’s the end. I just want to offer you one good piece of advice. Don’t you make the mistake of getting back to your damn college this fall or whenever and start thinking this was some way it wasn’t. Don’t you try to kid yourself about Greg Stillson. Best forgotten, kid. By you, me, and George. Working this around in your mind until you think you could have another swing at it would be the worst mistake of your life. Maybe the last.”
With that Greg left, taking one last contemptuous look at the kid standing there, his chest and belly caked with a few minor smears of dried blood, his eyes wide, his lips trembling. He looked like an overgrown ten-year-old who has struck out in the Little League playoffs.
Greg made a mental bet with himself that he would never see or hear from this particular kid again, and it was a bet he won. Later that week, George Harvey stopped by the barbershop where Greg was getting a shave and thanked him for “talking some sense” into his nephew. “You’re good with these kids, Greg,” he said. “I dunno ... they seem to respect you.”
Greg told him not to mention it.
2
While Greg Stillson was burning a shirt with an obscene saying on it in New Hampshire, Walt and Sarah Hazlett were having a late breakfast in Bangor, Maine. Walt had the paper.
He put his coffee cup down with a clink and said, “Your old boyfriend made the paper, Sarah.”
Sarah was feeding Denny. She was in her bathrobe, her hair something of a mess, her eyes still only about a quarter open. Eighty percent of her mind was still asleep. There had been a party last night. The guest of honor had been Harrison Fisher, who had been New Hampshire’s third district congressman since dinosaurs walked the earth, and a sure candidate for reelection next year. It had been politic for her and Walt to go. Politic. That was a word that Walt used a lot lately. He had had lots more to drink than she had, and this morning he was dressed and apparently chipper while she felt buried in a pile of sludge. It wasn’t fair.
“Blue!” Denny remarked, and spat back a mouthful of mixed fruit.
“That’s not nice,” Sarah said to Denny. To Walt: “Are you talking about Johnny Smith?”
“The one and only.”
She got up and came around to Walt’s side of the table. “He’s all right, isn’t he?”
“Feeling good and kicking up dickens by the sound of this,” Walt said dryly.
She had a hazy idea that it might be related to what had happened to her when she went to see Johnny, but the size of the headline shocked her: REAWAKENED COMA PATIENT DEMONSTRATES PSYCHIC ABILITY AT DRAMATIC NEWS CONFERENCE. The story was under David Bright’s by-line. The accompanying