He sat smoking a Pall Mall cigarette and looking at the man sprawled comfortably in the chair opposite. Greg was looking at this man the way a zoologist might look at an interesting new specimen.
‘See anything green?’ Sonny Elliman asked. Elliman topped six feet, five inches. He wore an ancient, grease-stiffened jeans jacket with the arms and buttons cut off. There was no shirt beneath. A Nazi iron cross, black dressed in white chrome, hung on his bare chest.
The buckle of the belt running just below his considerable beer-belly was a great ivory skull. From beneath the pegged cuffs of his jeans poked the scuffed, square toes of a pair of Desert Driver boots. His hair was shoulder-length, tangled, and shining with an accumulation of greasy sweat and engine oil. From one earlobe there dangled a swastika earring, also black dressed in white chrome. He spun a coal-scuttle helmet on the tip of one blunt finger. Stitched on the back of his jacket was a leering red devil with a forked tongue. Above the devil was The Devil’s Dozen. Below it: Sonny Elliman, Prez.
‘No,’ Greg Stillson said. ‘I don’t see anything green, but I do see someone who looks suspiciously like a walking asshole.’
Elliman stiffened a little, then relaxed and laughed. In spite of the dirt, the almost palpable body odor, and Nazi regalia, his eyes, a dark green, were not without intelligence and even a sense of humor.
‘Rank me to the dogs and back, man,’ he said. ‘It’s been done before. You got the power now.
‘You recognize that, do you?’
‘Sure. I left my guys back in the Hamptons, came here alone. Be it on my own head, man.’ He smiled. ‘But if we should ever catch you in a similar position, you want to hope your kidneys are wearing combat boots.’
‘I’ll chance it,’ Greg said. He measured Elliman. They were both big men. He reckoned Elliman had forty pounds on him, but a lot of it was beer muscle. ‘I could take you, Sonny.’
Elliman’s face crinkled in amiable good humor again. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s not the way we play it, man. All that good American John Wayne stuff.’ He leaned forward, as if to impart a great secret. ‘Me personally, now, whenever I get me a piece of mom’s apple pie, I make it my business to shit on it.’
‘Foul mouth, Sonny,’ Greg said mildly.
‘What do you want with me?’ Sonny asked. ‘Why don’t you get down to it? You’ll miss your Jaycee’s meeting.’
‘No,’ Greg said, still serene. ‘The Jaycees meet Tuesday nights. We’ve got all the time in the world.’
Elliman made a disgusted blowing sound.
‘Now what I thought,’ Greg went on, ‘is that you’d want something from me.’ He opened his desk drawer and from it took three plastic Baggies of marijuana. Mixed in with the weed were a number of gel capsules. ‘Found this in your sleeping bag,’ Greg said. ‘Nasty, nasty, nasty, Sonny. Bad boy. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to New Hampshire State Prison.’
‘You didn’t have any search warrant,’ Elliman said. ‘Even a kiddy lawyer could get me off, and you know it.’
‘I don’t know any such thing,’ Greg Stillson said. He leaned back in his swivel chair and cocked his loafers, bought across the state line at L.L. Bean’s in Maine, up on his desk.
‘I’m a big man in this town, Sonny. I came into New Hampshire more or less on my uppers a few years back, and now I’ve got a nice operation here. I’ve helped the town council solve a couple of problems, including just what to do about all these kids the chief of police catches doing dope … oh, I don’t mean bad-hats like you, Sonny, drifters like you we know what to do with when we catch them with a little treasure trove like that one right there on my desk … I mean the nice local kids. Nobody really wants to do anything to them at all, you know? I figured that out for them. Put them to work on community projects instead of sending them to jail, I said. It worked out real good. Now we’ve got the biggest head in the town area coaching Little League and doing a real good job at it.’