Rose Madder by Stephen King

He’d handled some fairly scary people during his years as a cop — the PCP addicts he and Harley Bissington had had to deal with from time to time were probably the scariest — and you developed a sense of their presence after awhile. Norman was feeling that now. Someone was coming up behind him, and he never doubted for a moment that it was someone dangerous.

‘I repay,’ a woman’s voice whispered. It was a sweet voice, and soft, but it was terrifying, just the same. There was no sanity in it.

‘Good for you, bitch,’ Norman said in his dream. ‘You try to repay me and I’ll change your whole fucking outlook.’

She screamed, a sound that seemed to go directly to the center of his head without even passing through his ears, and he sensed her lunging toward him with her hands out. He drew in a deep breath and blew the cigarette smoke apart. The woman disappeared. Norman felt her go. For a little while after that there was only darkness, with him floating peacefully in the middle of it, untouched by the fears and desires which haunted him when he was awake.

He woke up at ten past ten on Friday morning and shifted his eyes from the clock by the bed to the hotel room ceiling, almost expecting to see phantom figures moving through decaying stacks of cigarette smoke. There were no figures, of course, phantom or otherwise.

No smoke, for that matter — just the lingering smell of Pall Malls, in hoc signo vinces. There

was only Detective Norman Daniels, lying here in a sweaty bed that smelled of tobacco and used booze. His mouth tasted as if he had spent the previous evening sucking the end of a freshly polished cordovan shoe, and his left hand hurt like a mad bastard. He opened it and saw a shiny blister in the center of his palm. He looked at it for a long time, while pigeons fluttered and cooed at each other on the shit-encrusted ledge that ran past his window. At last the memory of blistering himself with the cigarette came back, and he nodded. He’d done it because he couldn’t see Rose no matter how hard he tried . . . and then, as if in compensation, he’d had crazy dreams about her all night long.

He placed two fingers on the sides of the blister and squeezed, slowly increasing the pressure until it popped. He wiped his hand on the sheet, relishing the waves of stinging pain.

He lay looking at his hand — watching it throb, almost — for a minute or so. Then he reached under his bed for his traveling bag. There was a Sucrets tin at the bottom, and in it were a dozen or so assorted pills. A few were speedy, but most were downers. As a general rule, Norman found he could get up with no pharmacological help at all; it was getting back down again that sometimes presented a problem.

He took a Percodan with a small swallow of Scotch, then lay back, looking up at the ceiling and once again smoking one cigarette after another, stubbing them out in the overflowing ashtray when they were done.

This time it wasn’t Rose he was thinking of, at least not directly; this time it was the picnic he was considering, the one being thrown by her new friends. He had been to Ettinger’s Pier, and what he saw there wasn’t encouraging. It was large — a combination beach, picnic area, and amusement park — and he didn’t see any way he could stake it out with any confidence of seeing her arrive or leave. If he’d had six men (even four, if they knew what they were doing), he would have felt differently, but he was on his own. There were three ways in, assuming she didn’t come by boat, and he could hardly watch all three of them at the same time. That meant working the crowd, and working the crowd would be a bitchkitty. He wished he could believe that Rose would be the only one there tomorrow who would recognize him, but if wishes were pigs, bacon would always be on sale. He had to assume they would be looking for him, and he would also have to assume they had received pictures of him from one of their sister groups back home. He didn’t know about the x, but he was coming to believe that the first two letters in fax stood for Fucked Again.

That was one part of the problem. The other part was his own belief, backstopped by more than one bitter experience, that disguises were a recipe for disaster in situations like this. The only quicker, surer route to failure in the field was probably wearing the ever-popular wire, where you could lose six months’ worth of surveillance and setup if a kid happened to be running a radio-controlled boat or racecar in the area where you were planning to bring the hammer down on some shitbag.

All right, he thought. Don’t bitch about it. Remember what old Whitey Slater used to say

— the situation is what the situation is. How you’re going to work around it is the only question. And don’t even think of putting it off. Their goddam party is just twenty-four hours away, and if you miss her there, you could hunt for her until Christmas and not find her. In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a big city.

He got up, walked into the bathroom, and showered with his blistered hand stuck out through the shower curtain. He dressed in faded jeans and a nondescript green shirt, putting on his CHISOX cap and tucking the cheap sunglasses into his shirt pocket, at least for the time being. He took the elevator down to the lobby and went to the newsstand to get a paper and a box of Band-Aids. While he was waiting for the dope behind the counter to figure out his change, he looked over the guy’s shoulder and through a glass panel at the back of the newsstand alcove. He could see the service elevators through this panel, and as he watched, one of them opened. Three chattering, laughing chambermaids stepped out. They were

carrying their bags, and Norman guessed they were on their way to lunch. He had seen the one in the middle — slim, pretty, fluffy blonde hair — someplace else. After a moment it came to him. He had been on his way to check out Daughters and Sisters. The blonde had walked beside him for a little while. Red slacks. Cute little ass.

‘Here you are, sir,’ the counterman said. Norman stuffed his change into his pocket without looking at it. Nor did he look at the trio of maids as he shouldered past them, not even at the one with the cute tush. He had cross-referenced her automatically, that was all — it was a cop reflex, a knee that jerked on its own. His conscious mind was fixed on one thing and one thing only: the best way to spot Rose tomorrow without being spotted himself.

He was heading up the corridor toward the doors when he heard two words which he at first thought must have come out of his own head: Ettinger’s Pier.

His stride faltered, his heart kicked into overdrive, and the blister in the palm of his hand began to throb fiercely. It was a single missed step, that was all — that one little hesitation, and then he went on heading toward the revolving doors with his head down. Someone looking at him might have thought he’d felt a brief muscle -twinge in his knee or calf, no more than that, and that was good. He didn’t dare falter, that was the hell of it. If the woman who’d spoken was one of the cunts from their clubhouse over on Durham Avenue, she might recognize him if he drew attention to himself. . . might have already recognized him, if the speaker of those two magic words was the little honey he’d crossed the street beside the other day. He knew it was unlikely — as a cop he’d had first-hand experience of how amazingly, numbingly unobservant most civilians were — but from time to time it did happen. Killers and kidnappers and bank-thieves who had eluded capture long enough to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List suddenly found themselves back in the slam, dropped by a 7-Eleven clerk who read True Detective or a meter maid who watched all the reality-crime shows on TV. He didn’t dare stop, but —

— but he had to stop.

Norman knelt abruptly to the left of the swinging door with his back to the women. He dropped his head and pretended to tie his shoe.

‘ — sorry to miss the concert, but if I want that car, I can’t pass up the — ‘

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