Rose Madder by Stephen King

WHO RESPECTS WOMEN, it said.

And that’s true enough, he thought, taking another quick check of the parking lot to make sure there was no one observing the cripple as he climbed spryly into his wheelchair. As long as they behave themselves, I respect them fine.

He saw no one at all, let alone anyone watching him specifically. He pivoted the wheelchair and looked at his reflection in the side of the freshly washed Tempo. Well? he asked himself. What do you think? Will it work?

He thought it would. Since disguise was out of the question, he had tried to go beyond disguise — to create a real person, the way a good actor can create a real person on stage.

He had even come up with a name for this new guy: Hump Peterson. Hump was an army vet who’d come back home and ridden with an outlaw biker gang for ten years or so, one of the ones where the women have only two or three very limited uses. Then the accident had happened. Too many beers, wet pavement, a bridge abutment. He’d been paralyzed from the waist down, but had been nursed back to health by a saintly young woman named . . .

‘Marilyn,’ Norman said, thinking of Marilyn Chambers, who for years had been his favorite porn star. His second favorite was Amber Lynn, but Marilyn Lynn sounded fake as hell. The next name to occur to him was McCoo, but that was no good, either; Marilyn McCoo was the bitch who had sung with the Fifth Dimension, back in the seventies, when life hadn’t been as weird as it was these days.

There was a sign in a vacant lot across the street — ANOTHER QUALITY DELANEY

CONSTRUCTION PROJECT WILL GO UP IN THIS SPACE NEXT YEAR! it said — and Marilyn Delaney was as good a name as any. He would probably not be asked to tell his life’s story by any of the women from Daughters and Sisters, but to paraphrase the sentiment on the shirt the clerk in The Base Camp had been wearing, it was better to have a story and not need one than to need one and not have one.

And they would believe in Hump Peterson. They would have seen more than a few guys just like him, guys who’d had some sort of life-changing experience and were trying to atone for their past behavior. And the Humps of the world, of course, atoned the way they had done everything else in their lives, by going right to the firewall. Hump Peterson was trying to turn himself into a kind of honorary woman, that was all. Norman had similar scagbags turn themselves into passionate anti-drug advocates, Jesus freaks, and Perotistas. At the bottom they were really just the same one-note assholes they’d always been, singing the same old tune in a different key. That wasn’t the important thing, though. The important thing was that they were always around, hanging on the fringes of whatever scene it was they wanted to be in. They were like tumbleweeds in the desert or icicles in Alaska. So yes — he thought Hump would be accepted as Hump, even if they were on the lookout for Inspector Daniels. Even the most cynical of them would be apt to dismiss him as no more than a horny crip using the old

‘sensitive, caring man’ routine to get himself laid on a Saturday night. With just a smidge of luck, Hump Peterson would be both as visible and as little noticed as the guy on stilts who plays Uncle Sam in the Fourth of July parade.

Beyond this, his plan was simplicity itself. He would find the main concentration of women from the group home, and he would watch them as Hump from the sidelines — their games and conversational groups, their picnic. When someone brought him a hamburger or a corndog or a slice of pie, as some helpful cunt undoubtedly would (you couldn’t propagandize their deep need to bring food to the menfolks out of them — that was instinct, by God), he’d take it with thanks, and he’d eat every bite. He would speak when spoken to, and if he should chance to win a stuffed animal playing ringtoss or Pitch Til U Win, he’d give

it to some little kid . . . always being careful not to pat the rugmuffin on the head; even that could get you busted for molestation these days.

But mostly he’d just watch. Watch for his rambling Rose. He could do that with no problem at all, once he had been accepted as a valid part of the scene; he was a champ at the art of surveillance. After he spotted her, he could take care of his business right here on the Pier, if he wanted to; just wait until she had to use the potty, follow her, and snap her neck like a chickenbone. It would be over in seconds, and that, of course, was just the problem. He didn’t want it to be over in seconds. He wanted to be able to take his time. Have a nice, leisurely chat with her. Get a complete rundown on her activities since she’d walked out on him with his ATM card in her pocket. The full report, so to speak, from chowder to cashews. He could ask her how it had felt to punch in his pin-number, for instance, and find out if she’d gotten off when she’d bent down to scoop the cash out of the slot — the cash he’d worked for, the cash he’d earned by staying up until all hours and busting scumholes who’A do anything to anybody if there weren’t guys like him around to stop them. He wanted to ask her how she’d ever thought she could get away with it. How she’d thought she could get away from him.

And after she’d told him everything he wanted to hear, he would talk to her.

Except maybe talk wasn’t exactly the right word for what he had in mind.

Step one was to spot her. Step two was to keep an eye on her from a discreet distance. Step three was to follow her when she’d finally had enough and left the party . . . probably after the concert,but maybe earlier if he was lucky. He could ditch the wheelchair once he was clear of the amusement park. There would be fingerprints on it (a pair of studded biker gauntlets would have taken care of that problem and also added to the Hump Peterson image, but he’d only had so much time, not to mention one of his horrible headaches, his specials), but that was all right. He had an idea that fingerprints were going to be the least of his problems from here on out.

He wanted her at her place, and Norman thought he was probably going to get what he wanted. When she got on the bus (and it would be the bus; she had no car and wouldn’t want to waste money on a cab), he would get on right behind her. If she happened to spot him at some point along the line between Ettinger’s Pier and the crib where she was turning her tricks, he’d kill her on the spot, and devil take the consequences. If things went well, though, he’d follow her right in through her door, and on the other side of that door she was going to suffer as no woman on the face of the earth had ever suffered before.

Norman wheeled his way to the booth marked ALL-DAY PASSES, saw that adult admission was twelve bucks, handed the money to the guy in the booth, and started into the park. The way was clear; it was early and Ettinger’s wasn’t really bustling yet. Of course, that had its downside, too. He’d have to be very careful not to attract the wrong sort of attention. But he could do that. He —

‘Buddy! Hey, buddy! Come back here!’

Norman stopped at once, his hands frozen on the wheels of his chair, blank eyes staring at the Haunted Ship and the giant robot in old-time ship’s captain’s clothes that stood out in front. ‘Ahoy for terror, matey!’ the robot ship’s captain called over and over again in his mechanical drone of a voice. No, he didn’t want to attract the wrong sort of attention . . . and here he was, doing precisely that.

‘Hey baldy! You in the wheelchair!’

People turning to look at him. One was a fat black bitch in a red jumper who looked about half as bright as The Base Camp clerk with the harelip. She also looked vaguely familiar, but Norman dismissed that as plain paranoia — he didn’t know anyone in this city. She turned and walked on, clutching a bag the size of a briefcase, but plenty of other people were still looking. Norman’s crotch suddenly felt humid with sweat.

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