Later - Stephen King Page 0,39

to me and don’t say a word. I’m going to keep this to myself, for reasons that should be obvious to you. But if you ever bother my son again, if he even sees you, I will burn your life to the ground. You know I can do it. All it would take is one single push. Stay away from Jamie.”

I scurried back to the couch and pretended to be absorbed in the next commercial. Which turned out to be as useless as tits on a bull.

“You heard that?”

Her eyes were burning, telling me not to lie. I nodded.

“Good. If you see her again, you run like hell. Home. And tell me. Do you understand?”

I nodded again.

“Okay, right right right. I’m ordering take-out. Do you want pizza or Chinese?”

29

The cops found and defused Thumper’s last bomb that Wednesday night, around eight o’clock. Mom and me were watching Person of Interest on TV when the station broke in with a special bulletin. The sniffer dogs had made lots of passes without finding anything, and their Bomb Squad handlers were about to take them out when one of them alerted in the housewares aisle. They’d been in that one several times before and there was no place on the shelves to hide a bomb, but one of the cops happened to look up and saw a ceiling panel just slightly out of place. That’s where the bomb was, between the ceiling and the roof. It was tied to a girder with stretchy orange cord, like the kind bungee jumpers use.

Therriault really blew his wad on that one—sixteen sticks of dynamite and a dozen blasting caps. He’d moved far beyond alarm clocks; the bomb was hooked up to a digital timer very much like the ones in those movies I’d been thinking about (one of the cops took a picture after it was disarmed, and it was in the next day’s New York Times). It was set to go off at 5 PM on Friday, when the store was always busiest. The next day on NY1 (we were back to Mom’s fave) one of the Bomb Squad guys said it would have brought the whole roof down. When asked how many people might have been killed in such a blast, he only shook his head.

That Thursday night as we ate dinner, my mother said, “You did a good thing, Jamie. A fine thing. Liz did too, whatever her reasons might have been. It makes me think of something Marty said once.” She meant Mr. Burkett, actually Professor Burkett, still Emeritus and still hanging in.

“What did he say?”

“‘Sometimes God uses a broken tool.’ It was from one of the old English writers he used to teach.”

“He always asks me what I’m learning in school,” I said, “and he always shakes his head like he’s thinking I’m getting a bad education.”

Mom laughed. “There’s a man who’s stuffed with education, and he’s still totally sharp and in focus. Remember when we had Christmas dinner with him?”

“Sure, turkey sandwiches with cranberry dressing, the best! Plus hot chocolate!”

“Yes, that was a good night. It will be a shame when he passes on. Eat up, there’s apple crisp for dessert. Barbara made it. And Jamie?”

I looked at her.

“Could we not talk about this anymore. Just kind of…put it behind us?”

I thought she wasn’t just talking about Liz, or even Therriault; she was also talking about how I could see dead folks. It was what our computer teacher might have called a global request, and it was all right with me. More than all right, actually. “Sure.”

Right then, sitting in our brightly lit kitchen nook and eating pizza, I really thought we could put it behind us. Only I was wrong. I didn’t see Liz Dutton for another two years, and hardly ever thought about her, but I saw Ken Therriault again that very night.

As I said at the beginning, this is a horror story.

30

I was almost asleep when two cats started yowling their heads off and I jerked fully awake. We were on the fifth floor and I might not have heard it—and the clatter of a trashcan that followed—if my window hadn’t been cracked to let in some fresh air. I got up to shut it and froze with my hands on the sash. Therriault was standing across the street in the spreading glow of a streetlamp, and I knew right away that the cats hadn’t been yowling because they were fighting. They had been yowling because they