Rose Madder by Stephen King

‘Maybe I better call an ambulance,’ the younger cop said, and suddenly Norman knew who the young cop reminded him of: Jerry Mathers, the kid who’d played Beaver on Leave It to Beaver. He’d watched all those shows in reruns on Channel 11, some of them five and six times.

The older cop didn’t look a bit like the Beav’s brother Wally, though.

‘Hang on a sec,’ the older cop said, and then, incredibly, gave away the store. ‘Let me take a look. I was a medic in the army.’

‘Coat . . . buttons . . .’ Norman said, keeping an eye on the Beavfrom the corner of his eye.

The older cop took another step forward. He was now standing right in front of Norman.

The Beav also took a step forward. The older cop undid the top button of Norman’s newfound London Fog. Then the second one. When he undid the third one, Norman pulled the letter-opener out and plunged it into the man’s throat. Blood burst out in a torrent, gushing down his uniform. In the foggy darkness it looked like steak sauce.

The Beav turned out not to be a problem. He stood, paralyzed with horror, as his partner raised his hands and beat weakly at the handle of the thing in his throat. He looked like a man trying to rid himself of some exotic leech. ‘Bluh!’ he choked. ‘Ahk! Bluh!’

The Beav turned to Norman. In his shock he seemed totally unaware that Norman had had anything to do with what had just befallen his partner, and this didn’t surprise Norman at all.

It was a reaction he had seen before. In his shock and surprise, the cop looked about ten years old, now not just something like the Beav, but a dead ringer.

‘Something happened to Al!’ the Beav said. Norman knew something else about this young man who was about to join the city’s Roll of Honor: inside his head he thought he was shouting, he really did, when what was actually coming out was only a little bitty whisper.

‘Something happened to Al!’

‘I know,’ Norman said, and delivered an uppercut to the kid’s chin, a dangerous punch if your opponent is dangerous, but a sixth-grader could have dealt with the Beav as he was now. The blow connected squarely, knocking the young cop back into the iron railing Norman had been clutching not thirty seconds ago. The Beav wasn’t as out as Norman had hoped, but his eyes had gone cloudy and vague; there was going to be no trouble here. His hat had tumbled off. The hair beneath was short, but not too short to grab. Norman got a handful and yanked the kid’s head sharply down as he brought his knee up. The sound was muffled but terrific; the sound of a man with a mallet whacking a padded bag full of china.

The Beav dropped like a lead bar. Norman looked around for his partner, and here was something incredible: the partner was gone.

Norman wheeled around, eyes glaring, and spotted him. He was walking up the sidewalk very slowly, with his hands held out in front of him like a zombie in a fright-film. Norman turned a complete circle on his heels, looking for witnesses to this comedy. He didn’t see any.

There was a lot of hooting and hollering drifting over from the park, teenagers running around in there, playing grab-ass in the fog, but that was all right. So far his luck had been fantastic. If it held for another forty-five seconds, a minute at most, he’d be home free.

He ran after the older cop, who had now stopped to have another go at pulling Anna Stevenson’s letter-opener out of his throat. He had actually managed to get about twenty-five yards.

‘Officer!’ Norman said in a low peremptory voice, and touched the cop’s elbow.

The cop turned jerkily. His eyes were glassy and bulging from their sockets, the eyes of something that belonged mounted on the wall of a hunting lodge, Norman thought. His uniform was drenched scarlet from neck to knees. Norman didn’t have the slightest idea how this man could still be alive, let alone conscious. I guess they must build cops tougher in the midwest, he thought.

‘Caw!’ the cop said urgently. ‘Caw! Fuh! Bah-up!’ The voice was bubbly and choked, but still amazingly strong. Norman even knew what the guy was saying. He’d made a bad mistake back there, a rookie’s mistake, but Norman thought this was a man he could have been proud to serve with, just the same. The letter-opener handle sticking out of his throat bobbed up and down when he tried to talk, in a way that reminded Norman of how the bullmask looked when he manipulated the lips from the inside.

‘Yes, I’ll call for backup.’ Norman spoke with soft, urgent sincerity. He closed one hand on the cop’s wrist. ‘But for now, let’s get you back to the car. Come on. This way, Officer!’ He would have used the cop’s name, but didn’t know what it was; the name-tag on his uniform shirt was covered with blood. He couldn’t very well call him Officer Al. He gave the cop’s arm another gentle tug, and this time got him moving.

Norman led the staggering, bleeding Charlie-David cop with the letter-opener in his throat back to his own black-and-white, expecting someone to come out of the steadily thickening fog at any moment — a man who’d gone to get a sixpack, a woman who’d been to the movies, a couple of kids on their way home from a date (maybe, God save the King, an amusement-park date at Ettinger’s) — and when that happened he’d have to kill them, too. Once you got started killing people it never seemed to stop; the first one spread like ripples on a pond.

But no one came. There were only the disembodied voices floating across from the park. It was a miracle, really, like how Officer Al could still be on his feet even though he was bleeding like a stuck pig and had left a trail of blood behind him so wide and thick it was starting to puddle up in places. The puddles gleamed like engine oil in the fog-faded glow of the streetlamps.

Norman paused to pluck the Beav’s fallen hat off the steps, and when they passed the open driver’s-side window of the black -and-white, he leaned through quickly to drop it on the seat and pluck the keys from the ignition. There were a formidable number of them on the ring, so many that they couldn’t lie flat against one another but stuck out like sunrays in a child’s crayon drawing, but Norman had no trouble picking out the one which opened the trunk of the car.

‘Come on,’ he whispered comfortingly. ‘Come on, just a little further, then we can get backup rolling.’ He kept expecting the cop to collapse, but he didn’t. He had given up on trying to pull the letter-opener out of his throat, though.

‘Watch the curb here, Officer, whoops-a-daisy.’

The cop stepped off the curb. When his black uniform shoe came down in the gutter, the wound in his throat gaped open around the blade like the gill of a fish and more blood squirted onto the collar of his shirt.

Now I’m a cop-killer, too, Norman thought. He expected the idea to be devastating, but it wasn’t. Perhaps because a deeper, wiser part of him knew that he really hadn’t killed this fine, tough police officer; someone else had. Something. Most likely it had been the bull. The longer Norman thought about it, the more plausible that sounded.

‘Hold it, Officer, here we are.’

The cop stopped where he was, at the back of the car. Norman used the key he had picked out to open its boot. There was a spare tire in there (bald as a baby’s ass, too, he saw), a jack, two flak vests — kapok, not Kevlar — a pair of boots, a grease-stained copy of Penthouse, a toolkit, a police radio with half its guts spilling out. A pretty full boot, in other words, like the boot of every other police-car he’d ever seen. But like the boot of every other police-car he’d ever seen, there was always room for one more thing. He moved the toolkit to one side and the police radio to the other while the Beav’s partner stood swaying beside him, now completely silent, his eyes seemingly fixed on some distant point, as if he now saw the place where his new journey would begin. Norman tucked the jack behind the spare tire, then looked from the empty space to the person for whom he had created it.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Good. But I need to borrow your hat, okay?’

The cop said nothing, simply swayed back and forth on his feet, but Norman’s sly bag of a mother had been fond of saying ‘Silence gives consent,’ and Norman thought it a good motto, certainly better than his father’s favorite, which had been ‘If they’re old enough to pee, they’re old enough for me.’ Norman took off the cop’s hat and put it on his own bald head. The baseball cap went into the trunk.

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