out of his hand and shattered on the floor. Things keep breaking in here, he thought, and then: She saw the marks. Of course. Probably a long time ago. That was the only way he could account for this bizarre behavior—she had seen the marks after all, and this was the beginning of some new and spectacular punishment.
“Shut up, stupid,” she hissed, and then his hands were pinned behind him, and just as he heard the click of the handcuffs, he also heard a car turning into the driveway.
He opened his mouth, meaning to speak or perhaps scream again, and she stuffed the rag into it before he could do either. There was some ghastly dead taste on the rag. Pledge, he supposed, or Endust, or something like that.
“Make no sound,” she said, leaning over him with one hand on either side of his head, strands of her hair tickling his cheeks and forehead. “I warn you, Paul. If whoever that is hears something—or even if I hear something and think he might have heard something—I will kill him, or them, then you, then myself.”
She stood up. Her eyes were bulging. There was sweat on her face and dried egg-yolk on her lips.
“Remember, Paul.”
He was nodding but she didn’t see. She was already running out.
An old but well-preserved Chevy Bel Air had pulled up behind Annie’s Cherokee. Paul heard a door open somewhere off the parlor and then bang shut. It gave off the oddly interrogative squeak that told him it was the closet where she kept her outdoors stuff.
The man getting out of the car was as old and well preserved as the car itself—a Colorado Type if ever Paul had seen one. He looked sixty-five but might be eighty; he might be the senior partner of a law firm or the semi-retired patriarch of a construction company, but was more likely a rancher or a realtor. He would be a Republican of the sort who would no more put a bumper sticker on his car than he would put a pair of pointy-toed Italian shoes on his feet; he must also be some sort of town official, and here on town business, because it was only on town business that a man like this and a reclusive woman like Annie Wilkes would have occasion to meet.
Paul watched her hasten down the walk to the driveway, intent not on meeting but intercepting him. Here was something much like his earlier fantasy come true. Not a cop but someone IN AUTHORITY. AUTHORITY had arrived at Annie’s, and its arrival here could do nothing but shorten his own life.
Why not invite him in, Annie? he thought, trying not to choke on the dusty rag. Why not invite him in and show him your African bird?
Oh, no. She would no more invite Mr. Rocky Mountain Businessman in than she would drive Paul to Stapleton International and put a first-class ticket back to New York in his hand.
She was talking even before she reached him, the breath pluming out of her mouth in shapes like cartoon balloons with no words written inside them. He held out a hand dressed in a narrowly elegant black leather glove. She looked at it briefly, contemptuously, then began to shake a finger in his face, more of those empty white balloons puffing from her mouth. She finished struggling into her coat and stopped shaking her finger long enough to rake the zipper up.
He reached into the pocket of his topcoat and brought out a sheet of paper. He held it out to her almost apologetically. Although Paul had no way of knowing exactly what it was, he was sure that Annie had an adjective for it. Cockadoodie, maybe.
She led him along the driveway, still talking. They passed beyond his sightline. He could see their shadows lying like construction-paper cutouts on the snow, but that was all. She had done it on purpose, he realized dully. If he, Paul, couldn’t see them, then there was no chance that Mr. Rancho Grande might look in through the guest-room window and see him.
The shadows remained on the melting snowpack of Annie’s driveway for about five minutes. Once Paul actually heard Annie’s voice, raised in an angry, hectoring shout. Those were a long five minutes for Paul. His shoulders ached. He found he couldn’t move to ease the ache. After cuffing his hands together, she had somehow bound them to the bedstead.