Avenue, and that did not bode well for Bill McGovern's old Carriville schoolmate. He hadn't seen any blood on the scissors in Doc #1's hand, but given the iffy quality of the old Zeiss-ikon binocs, that didn't prove much. Also, the guy could have wiped them clean before leaving the house. The thought had no more than crossed Ralph's mind before his imagination added a bloody handtowel lying beside the dead companion in the pink nightgown.
"Come on, you two!" Ralph cried in a low voice. "Jesus Christ, you gonna stand there all night?" More headlights splashed up Harris Avenue. The new arrival was an unmarked Ford sedan with a flashing red dashboard bubble. The man who got out was wearing plain clothes-gray poplin windbreaker and blue knitted watchcap. Ralph had maintained momentary hopes that the newcomer would turn out to be John Leydecker, even though Leydecker had told him he wouldn't be coming on until noon, but he didn't have to check with the binoculars to make sure it wasn't.
This man was much slimmer, and wearing a dark mustache.
Cop #2 went down the walk to meet him while Chris-orjess Nell went around the corner of Mrs. Locher's house.
One of those pauses which the movies so conveniently edit out then ensued. Cop #2 reholstered his gun. He and the newly arrived detective stood at the foot of Mrs. Locher's stoop, apparently talking and glancing at the closed door every now and then. Once the uniformed cop took a step or two in the direction Nell had gone. The detective reached out, grasped his arm, detained him. They talked some more.
Ralph clutched his upper thighs tighter and made a small, frustrated noise in his throat.
A few minutes crawled by, and then everything happened at once in that confusing, overlapping, inconclusive way with which emergency situations seem to develop. Another police car arrived (Mrs. Locher's house and those neighboring it on the right and left were now bathed in streaks of comforting red and yellow light). Two more uniformed cops got out of it, opened the trunk, and removed a bulky contraption that looked to Ralph like a portable torture device.
He believed this gadget was known as the Jaws of Life. Following the huge storm in the spring of 1985, a storm which had resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred people-many of whom had been trapped and drowned in their cars-Derry's schoolchildren had mounted a penny-drive to buy one.
As the two new cops were carrying the Jaws of Life across the sidewalk, the front door of the house on the uphill side of Mrs, Locher's opened and the Eberlys, Stan and Georgina, stepped out onto their stoop. They wore matching his n hers bathrobes, and Stan's gray hair was standing up in wild tufts that made Ralph think of Charlie Pickering. He raised the binoculars, scanned their curious, excited faces briefly, then put them back in his lap again.
The next vehicle to appear was an ambulance from Derry Home Hospital.
Like the police cars which had already arrived, its howler was off in deference to the hour, but it had a full roofrack of red lights, and they were strobing wildly. To Ralph, the developments across the street looked like a scene from one of his beloved Dirty Harry movies, only with the sound turned off.
The two cops got the jaws of Life halfway across the lawn and then dropped it. The detective in the windbreaker and the watchcap turned to them and raised his hands to shoulder-level, palms out, as if to say What did you think you were going to do with that thing?
Break down the goddam door with it? At the same second, Officer Nell came back around the house. He was shaking his head.
The detective in the watchcap abruptly turned, brushed past Nell and his partner, mounted the steps, raised one foot, and kicked in May Locher's front door. He paused to unzip his jacket, probably to free access to his gun, and then walked in without looking back.
Ralph felt like applauding.
Nell and his partner looked at each other uncertainly, then followed the detective up the steps and through the door. Ralph leaned forward even farther in his chair, now close enough to the window for his nostrils to make little fog-roses on the glass.
Three men, their white hospital pants looking orange in the glare of the hi-intensity streetlamps, got out of the ambulance. One of them opened the rear doors and then all three of them