Two uniformed policemen got out and approached the walk leading up to the house, oblivious of both the man watching from a darkened second-floor window across the street and the fading green-gold footprints over which they were walking. They conferred, and Ralph raised the binoculars again to get a closer look. He was almost positive that the younger of the two men was the uniformed cop who had shown up with Leydecker at Ed’s house on the day Ed had been arrested.
KnoB? Had that been his name?
“No,” Ralph murmured. “Nell. Chris Nell. Or maybe it was Jess.”
Nell and his partner seemed to be having a serious discussion about something-much more serious than the one the little bald doctors had been having before they strolled away. This one ended with the cops drawing their sidearms and then climbing the narrow steps to Mrs. Locher’s stoop in single file, with Nell in front. He pressed the doorbell, waited, then pressed it again. This time he leaned on the button for a good five seconds. They waited a little more, and then the second cop brushed past Nell and had a go at the button himself.
Maybe that one knows The Secret Art of Doorbell-Ringing, Ralph thought. Probably learned it by answering a Rosicrucians ad.
If so, the technique failed him this time. There was still no response, and Ralph wasn’t surprised. Strange bald men with scissors notwithstanding, he doubted May Locher could even get out of bed.
But if she’s bedridden, she might have a companion, someone to get her her meals, help her to the toilet or give her the bedpanChris Nell-or maybe it was Jess-stepped up to the plate again.
This time he forwent the doorbell in favor of the old wham-wham wham, open-in-the-name-of-the-law technique. He used his left fist to do this. He was still holding his gun in his right, the barrel pressed against the leg of his uniform pants.
A terrible image, every bit as clear and persuasive as the auras he had been seeing, suddenly filled Ralph’s mind. He saw a woman lying in bed, with a clear plastic oxygen. mask over her mouth and nose.
Above the mask, her glazed eyes bulged sightlessly from their sockets.
Below it, her throat had been opened in a wide, ragged smile. The bedclothes and the bosom of the woman’s nightgown were drenched with blood. Not far away, lying on the floor, was the facedown corpse of another woman-the companion. Marching up the back of this second woman’s pink flannel nightgown were half a dozen stab-wounds, made by the points of Doc #1’s scissors. And, Ralph knew, if you raised the nightgown for a closer look, each would look a lot like the wound under his own arm… like the sort of oversized period made by children just learning to print.
Ralph tried to blink the grisly vision away. It wouldn’t go. He felt dull pain in his hands and saw he had closed them into tight fists; the nails were digging into his palms. He forced his hands open and clamped them on his thighs. Now the eye in his mind saw the woman in the pink nightgown twitching slightly-she was still alive. But maybe not for long. Almost certainly not for long unless these two oafs decided to try something a little more productive than just standing on the stoop and taking turns knocking or Jazzing the doorbell.
“Come on, you guys Ralph said, squeezing at his thighs. “Come on, come on, let’s get with it, what do you say?”
You know the things you’re seeing are all in your head, don’t -you?
he asked himself uneasily. I mean, there might be a couple of women living dead over there, sure, there might be, but you don’t know that, right? It’s not like the auras, or the tracks…
No, it wasn’t like the auras or the tracks, and yes, he did know that. He also knew that no one was answering the door over there at 86 Harris Avenue, and that did not bode well for Bill McGovern’s old Carriville schoolmate. He hadn’t seen any blood on the scissors in Doc #1’s hand, but given the iffy quality of the old Zeiss-ikon binocs, that didn’t prove much. Also, the guy could have wiped them clean before leaving the house. The thought had no more than crossed Ralph’s mind before his imagination added a bloody handtowel lying beside the dead companion in the pink nightgown.
“Come on, you two!” Ralph cried in a low voice. “Jesus Christ, you gonna stand there all night?” More headlights splashed up Harris Avenue. The new arrival was an unmarked Ford sedan with a flashing red dashboard bubble. The man who got out was wearing plain clothes-gray poplin windbreaker and blue knitted watchcap. Ralph had maintained momentary hopes that the newcomer would turn out to be John Leydecker, even though Leydecker had told him he wouldn’t be coming on until noon, but he didn’t have to check with the binoculars to make sure it wasn’t.
This man was much slimmer, and wearing a dark mustache.
Cop #2 went down the walk to meet him while Chris-orjess Nell went around the corner of Mrs. Locher’s house.
One of those pauses which the movies so conveniently edit out then ensued. Cop #2 reholstered his gun. He and the newly arrived detective stood at the foot of Mrs. Locher’s stoop, apparently talking and glancing at the closed door every now and then. Once the uniformed cop took a step or two in the direction Nell had gone. The detective reached out, grasped his arm, detained him. They talked some more.
Ralph clutched his upper thighs tighter and made a small, frustrated noise in his throat.
A few minutes crawled by, and then everything happened at once in that confusing, overlapping, inconclusive way with which emergency situations seem to develop. Another police car arrived (Mrs. Locher’s house and those neighboring it on the right and left were now bathed in streaks of comforting red and yellow light). Two more uniformed cops got out of it, opened the trunk, and removed a bulky contraption that looked to Ralph like a portable torture device.
He believed this gadget was known as the Jaws of Life. Following the huge storm in the spring of 1985, a storm which had resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred people-many of whom had been trapped and drowned in their cars-Derry’s schoolchildren had mounted a penny-drive to buy one.
As the two new cops were carrying the Jaws of Life across the sidewalk, the front door of the house on the uphill side of Mrs, Locher’s opened and the Eberlys, Stan and Georgina, stepped out onto their stoop. They wore matching his n hers bathrobes, and Stan’s gray hair was standing up in wild tufts that made Ralph think of Charlie Pickering. He raised the binoculars, scanned their curious, excited faces briefly, then put them back in his lap again.
The next vehicle to appear was an ambulance from Derry Home Hospital.
Like the police cars which had already arrived, its howler was off in deference to the hour, but it had a full roofrack of red lights, and they were strobing wildly. To Ralph, the developments across the street looked like a scene from one of his beloved Dirty Harry movies, only with the sound turned off.
The two cops got the jaws of Life halfway across the lawn and then dropped it. The detective in the windbreaker and the watchcap turned to them and raised his hands to shoulder-level, palms out, as if to say What did you think you were going to do with that thing?
Break down the goddam door with it? At the same second, Officer Nell came back around the house. He was shaking his head.
The detective in the watchcap abruptly turned, brushed past Nell and his partner, mounted the steps, raised one foot, and kicked in May Locher’s front door. He paused to unzip his jacket, probably to free access to his gun, and then walked in without looking back.
Ralph felt like applauding.
Nell and his partner looked at each other uncertainly, then followed the detective up the steps and through the door. Ralph leaned forward even farther in his chair, now close enough to the window for his nostrils to make little fog-roses on the glass.