pop! and a twisting skyrocket of sparks from one of them. Some of the sparks landed on his arm, stinging, and he brushed them off. The green fire coming from the end of the culvert winked out. The policemen were gone. Well ... almost gone.
Beach jumped over the tailgate of the truck, moving just as fast as he could. This wasn't the turnpike, God knew, and no one from the country headed into Derry to go shopping this late, but someone would be along sooner or later. He should
Sitting on the pavement was a single smoking shoe. He picked it up, almost dropped it. He hadn't expected it to be so heavy. Looking inside, he saw why. A sock-encased foot was still inside of it.
Beach carried it back to his truck and tossed it into the cab. When he got back to town he would get rid of it. No need to bury it; there were more efficient ways of getting rid of things in Haven. If the Mayfia knew what us Yankee hicks got up here, I guess they'd want to buy them the franchise, Beach thought, and tittered again.
He pulled the pins on the tailgate. lt fell flat open with a rusty crash. He grabbed the plastic-wrapped carcass of the deer. Whose idea had this been? he wondered. Old Dave's? Didn't really matter. In Haven all ideas were now becoming one.
The plastic-wrapped bundle was heavy and awkward. Beach got his arms around the buck's rear legs and pulled. It came out of the truck, its head thudding onto the tarvy. Beach looked around again for brightening headlights on either horizon, saw none, and dragged the deer across the road as fast as he could. He put it down with a grunt and flipped the carcass over so he could free the plastic. Now he got the deer, which had been neatly gutted and cleaned, in both arms and picked it up. Cords stood out in his neck like cables; his skinned-back lips would have shown his teeth, had any been left in his gums. The deer's head with its half-grown antlers hung down below his right forearm. Its dusty eyes stared off into the night.
Beach staggered three steps down the sloping soft shoulder and threw the deer's body into the ditch, where it landed with a thud. He stepped away and picked up the plastic. He carried it back to the truck and bundled it into the passenger side of the cab. He would have liked it better in back - it stank but there was always a chance it would blow out and be found. He hurried around to the driver's side of the truck, plucking his blood-dampened shirt away from his chest with a little grimace as he did. He'd change as soon as he got home.
He got in and started Betsy's motor. He backed and filled until he was pointed back toward Haven and then paused for just a moment, surveying the scene, trying to see if the story it told was the one it was supposed to tell. He thought it did. Here was a Bearmobile sitting dead-empty in the middle of the road at the end of a long skid. Engine off, flashers going. There was the gutted carcass of a good-sized buck in the ditch. That wouldn't go unnoticed long, not in July.
Was there anything in this story that whispered Haven?
Beach didn't think so. This story was about two cops returning to barracks after investigating a single-fatality accident. They just happened to run on a gang of men jacklighting deer. What happened to the cops? Ah, that was the question, wasn't it? And the possible answers would look more and more ominous as the days passed. There were jacklighters in the story, jacklighters who'd perhaps panicked, shot a couple of cops, and then buried them in the woods. But Haven? Beach really believed they would think that was a completely different story, one nowhere near as interesting.
Now, in his rearview mirror, he could see approaching headlights. He put his truck in low and skirted the police cruiser. Its flashers bathed him in half a dozen blue pulsebeats, and then it was behind him. Beach glanced to his right, saw the regulation-issue black shoe with its runner of regulation blue sock poking out like the tail of a kite, and cackled. Bet when you put that shoe on this mornin', Mr Smartass State Bear, you didn't have no idea where it would finish