The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,21

he's ended up piloting such a leaky craft as Zenith House.

"She's got something called the Rainy Night Friend," he said, still laughing. "It's silver-plated, and almost the size of a mortar shell. Fucking thing fills her whole purse. There's a flashlight set into the blunt end. The tapered end emits a cloud of tear-gas when you press a button-only Sandra says that she spent an extra ten bucks to have the tear-gas canister replaced with Hi-Pro-Gas, which is a hopped-up version of Mace. In the middle of this device, Johnny boy, is a pull-ring that sets off a high-decibel siren. I did not ask for a demonstration. They would have evacuated the building."

"The way you describe it, it sounds as if she could use it as a dildo when there were no muggers around," I said. He went off into gales of half-hysterical laughter. I joined him-it would have been impossible not to-but I was concerned for him, as well. He's very tired and very close to the edge of his endurance, I think-the parent corporation's steadily eroding support for the house has really started to get to him.

I asked him if something like the Rainy Night Friend was legal.

"I'm not a lawyer so I couldn't tell you for sure," Roger said. "My impression is that a woman who uses a tear-gas pen on a potential mugger or rapist is in a gray area. But Sandra's toy, loaded up with a Mace hybrid... no, I don't think something like that can be kosher."

"But she's got it, and she's carrying it," I said.

"Not only that, but she seems fairly calm about it all," Roger agreed. "Funny-she was the one who was so scared when the General was sending his poison pen letters, and Herb hardly seemed aware any of it was going on... at least until the bus driver got stabbed. I think what freaked Sandra out before was that she'd never seen him."

"Yes," I said. "She even told me that once."

He paid the tab, waving away my offer to pay my half. "It's the revenge of the flower-people," he said. "First Detweiller, the mad gardener from Central Falls, and then Hecksler, the mad gardener from Oak Cove."

That gave me what the British mystery writers like to call a nasty start-talk about not making obvious connections! Roger, who is far from being anyone's fool, saw my expression and smiled.

"Didn't think of that, did you?" he asked. "It's just a coincidence, of course, but I guess it was enough to set off a little paranoid chime in Herb Porter's head-I can't imagine him getting so fashed otherwise. We could have the basis of a good Robert Ludlum novel here. The Horticultural Somethingor-Other. Come on, let's get out of here."

"Convergence," I said as we hit the street.

"Huh?" Roger looked like someone coming back from a million miles away.

"The Horticultural Convergence," I said. "The perfect Ludlum title. Even the perfect Ludlum plot. It turns out, see, that Detweiller and Hecksler are actually brothers-no, considering the ages, I guess father and son would be better-in the pay of the NKVD. And - "

"I've got to catch my bus, John," he said, not unkindly. Well, I have my problems, dear Ruth (who knows better than you?), but realizing when I'm being a bore has never been one of them (except when I'm drunk). I saw him down to the bus stop and headed home.

The last thing he said was that the next we heard of General Hecksler would probably be a report of his capture... or his suicide. And Herb Porter would be disappointed as well as relieved.

"It isn't General Hecksler Herb and the rest of us have to be worried about," he said-his little burst of good humor had left him and he looked slumped and small, standing there at the bus stop with his hands jammed into the pockets of his trenchcoat. "It's Harlow Enders and the rest of the accountants who are going to get us. They'll stab us with their red pencils. When I think about Enders, I almost wish I had Sandra Jackson's Rainy Night Friend."

No progress on my novel this week-looking back over this epistle I see why-all this narrative that should have gone into Maymonth tonight went ended up here instead. But if I went on too long and in too much novelistic detail, don't chalk it all up to prolixity, my dear-over the last six months or so I have become a genuine Lonely Guy. Writing to you