The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,73
on the HOME slot of the hopscotch grid, smacks it, and holds it up to the bright blue sky, laughing.
"You want to pass the dice, Mr. Lucky?" one of the other players asks.
"When I'm on a roll like this?" Bill Gelb leans forward and snatches the dice. "No fuckin way." The bones feel warm in his hand. Someone hands him a bottle of Boone's Farm and he takes a hit. "No fuckin way am I passing," he repeats. "Gents, I'm going to roll these bones until the spots fall off."
11:05 A. M.
The kadath has infiltrated Kenton's office right through the cracks at the edges of the door, growing exuberantly up the walls, but Carlos barely notices. The ivy is nothing to him, one way or the other. Not now. It might have been fun to sit back and watch it work if not for Tina Barfield, but the bitch stole his owl's beak and time has grown short. Let Zenith take care of the rest if it wants to; Kenton is his.
"You mocker," he says again. "You thief."
As in Herb's office, there are pictures on the walls of Kenton with various authors. Carlos cares nothing for the authors (they look like wankers to him, too), but he looks fixedly at the repetitions of Kenton himself, memorizing the lean face with its shock of too-long black hair. What does he think he is? Carlos asks himself indignantly. A damned old rock star? A Beatle? A Rolling Stone? The name of a rock and roll group Kenton could belong to occurs to him: Johnny and the Poop-Shits.
As always, Carlos is startled by his own wit. He is serious so much of the time that he's always shocked at what a good sense of humor he has. Now he barks laughter.
Still chuckling, he tries Kenton's desk drawers, but, unlike Herb's, they are locked. There is an IN/OUT box on top of the desk, but, also unlike Herb's, it is almost completely empty. The one sheet of paper has several lines jotted on it that Carlos doesn't understand in the slightest:
Leper hockey game: face off in the corner
7: 6 to carry the coffin, 1 to carry the boombox
Never mind the jam on your mouth, what's that peanut butter doing on your forehead?
"Fuck the mailman, give him a dollar and a sweet roll."
Orange manhole cover in France=Howard Johnson's.
What in the name of Demeter is all that crap about? Carlos doesn't know and decides he doesn't care, either.
He goes to Kenton's file cabinets, expecting them to be locked as well, but he has a long weekend ahead of him, and if he gets bored, he can open both the desk and the files. He has plenty of tools in the Sakrifice Case that will do the job. But the drawers of the file cabinets turn out to be unlocked - go figure.
Carlos begins searching the files with a high degree of interest that quickly fades. Poop-Shit's files are alphabetized, but after CURRAN, JAMES (author of four paperback originals in 1978 and '79, with titles like Love's Strange Delight and Love's Strange Obsession), comes DORCHESTER, ELLEN (six brief manuscript reports, each signed by Kenton and each attached to a rejection letter). There's no file marked DETWEILLER, CARLOS.
Such a file by then existed, of course, and it contained material that might well have caused Detweiller to explode with rage, but it was in the publishing house safe, behind a picture in Roger Wade's office. Neither Hecksler nor Detweiller so much as entered that office. That file also contained material concerning the General and the company's new mascot.
The one item of interest Carlos discovers is in the bottom drawer, lying behind the few hanging files marked W-Z. It's a framed photograph which undoubtedly graced Kenton's desk until recently. In it, Kenton and a pretty young Oriental woman are standing on the rink at Rockefeller Plaza with their arms around each other, laughing into the camera.
A smile of surpassing nastiness dawns on Carlos's face. The woman is in California, but for a genuine Psykik Savant, a few thousand miles presents absolutely no problem. Miss Ruth Tanaka is already discovering that she has backed the wrong horse in the Romance Sweepstakes. Carlos knows she'll be back in New York before long, and thinks that she may stop by Zenith House shortly after she arrives. Kenton will be dead by then, but she will have questions, won't she? Yes. The ladies always have questions.
And when she comes...
"Innocent blood," Carlos murmurs. He tosses