Is there a way you can damp out their transmissions from town? Bobbi asked.

Andy Baker suddenly cut in, gleeful: I got a better idea. Get Buck Peters to shuck his fat ass over to the gas station right now.

Yes! Bobbi overrode him, her thought shrill with excitement. Good! Great! And when they leave town, someone… Beach, I think…

Beach was honored to be chosen.

Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons of the Maine state police arrived in Haven at five-fifteen. They came expecting to find the smoky, uninteresting aftermath of a furnace explosion-one old pumper-truck idling at the curb, twenty or thirty onlookers idling on the sidewalk. Instead, they found the entire Haven town-hall clock tower blown off like a Roman candle. Bricks littered the street, windows were blown out, there were dismembered dolls everywhere… and too damned many people going about their business.

Dick Allison greeted them with weird cordiality, as if this was a Republican bean supper instead of what now looked like a disaster of real magnitude.

“Christ almighty, man, what happened here?” Bent asked him.

“Well, I guess maybe it was a little worse than I made out over the phone,”

Dick said, surveying the brick-littered street and then giving the two troopers

an incongruous ain't-I-a-bad-boy? smile. “Guess I didn't think anyone would

believe it unless they saw it.”

Jingles muttered, “I'm seeing it and I don't believe it.” They had both dismissed Dick Allison as a small-town bumbler, probably crazy in the bargain. That was all right. He stood behind them, watching them stare at the wreckage. The smile faded gradually from his face and his expression became cold.

Rhodes spotted the human arm amid all the tiny make-believe limbs. When he turned back to Dick, his face was whiter than it had been, and he looked considerably younger.

“Where's Mrs McCausland?” he asked. His voice rose uncontrollably and broke on the last syllable.

“Well, you know, I think that might be part of our problem,” Dick began. “You see…”

Dick did hold them in town as long as he could without being conspicuous about it. lt was a quarter to eight before they left, and by then twilight was drawing down. Also, Dick knew, if they didn't leave soon, they would start wondering how come none of the backup units they had requested were arriving.

They had both talked on their cruiser's radio to Derry Base, and both hung the mike up again looking puzzled and distracted. The responses they were getting from the other end were right; it was the voice that seemed a little off. But neither of them could be bothered with such a minor matter, at least not for the time being. There were too many other things to cope with. The magnitude of the accident, for one thing. The fact that they had known the victim, for another. Trying to lay the groundwork of a potentially big case without committing any of the procedural fuckups that would muddy the waters later on, for a third.

Also, they were beginning to feel the effects of being in Haven.

They were like men applying vinyl seal to a big wooden floor in a room with no ventilation; getting stoned without even knowing it. They weren't hearing thoughts-it was too early for that and they would be gone before it could happen-but they were feeling very strange. lt was slowing them down, making ordinary routine something they had to fight their way through.

Dick Allison got all this from their minds as he sat across the street drinking a cup of coffee in the Haven Lunch. Ayuh, they were too busy and too screwed-up to think about the fact that

(Tug Ellender)

their dispatcher didn't exactly sound like himself tonight. The reason why was very simple. They weren't talking to Tug Ellender. They were talking to Buck Peters; their radio transmissions were not going to and coming from Derry but to and from the garage of Elt Barker's Shell, where Buck Peters was hunched, sweating, over a microphone, with Andy Baker beside him. Buck sent out fresh instructions and information on Andy's radio (a little something he had scrambled together in his spare time, a little something that could have contacted life on Uranus, had there been any goodbuddies up there to send back a big ten-four). Several townspeople were concentrating hard on the minds of Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons. They relayed to Buck everything they were able to pick up about Ellender, from whom the cops just naturally expected to hear. Buck Peters had some natural mimicry (he was a great hit doing whoever happened to be President that year, plus such favorites as Jimmy Cagney and John Wayne, at each year's Grange Stage Spectacular). He was not Rich Little, never would be, but when he “did” somebody, you knew who it was. Usually.

More important, the listeners were able to relay to Buck how he should respond to each transmission, since almost every speaker knows in his own mind what response he expects to get from his questions or statements. If Bent and Jingles bought the impersonation-and to a large extent they really did-it wasn't so much due to Buck's talents as to their own fulfilled expectations in “Tug's” replies. Andy had further been able to blur Buck's voice by overlaying some static-not as much as they would hear on their way back to Derry, but enough so that “Tug's” voice grew a little blurred whenever that oddness

(Jesus that doesn't sound like Tug much at all I wonder does he have a cold) surfaced in one of their minds.

At a quarter past seven, when Beach brought him a fresh cup of coffee, Dick asked: “You all set?”

“Sure am.”

“And you're sure that gadget will work?”

“It works fine… want to see it?” Beach was almost fawning.

“No. There isn't time. What about the deer? You got that?”

“Ayuh. Bill Elderly kilt it and Dave Rutledge dressed it out.”

“That's good. Get going.”

“Okay, Dick.” Beach took off his apron and hung it on a nail behind the counter. He turned over the sign which hung above the door from OPEN to CLOSED. Ordinarily it would just have hung there, but tonight, because the glass was broken, it stirred and twisted in the mild breeze.

Beach paused and looked back at Dick with narrow, sunken anger.

“She wasn't supposed to do nothing like that,” he said.

Dick shrugged. lt didn't matter; it was done. “She's gone. That's the important thing. The kids are doing fine with that picture. As for Ruth… there's no one else like her in town.”

“There's that fellow out at the old Garrick place.”

“He's drunk all the time. And he wants to dig it up. Go on, Beach. They'll

be leaving soon, and we want it to happen as far out of the village as you can make it happen.”

“Okay, Dick. Be careful.”

Dick smiled. “We all got to be careful now. This is touchy.”

He watched Beach get into his truck and back out of the space in front of the Haven Lunch that had been that old Chevy's home for the last twelve years. As the truck started up the street, Beach driving slowly and weaving to avoid the litters of broken glass, Dick could see the shape under the tarp in the truck's bed, and, near the back, something else, wrapped in a sheet of heavy plastic. The biggest deer Bill Elderly had been able to find on such short notice. Deer hunting was most definitely against the law during July in the State of Maine.

When Beach's pickup was out of sight (MAKE LOVE NOT WAR BE READY FOR BOTH NRA, the bumper sticker on the tailgate read), Dick turned back to the counter and picked up his coffee cup. As always, Beach's coffee was strong and good. He needed that. Dick was more than tired; he was worn out. Although there was still good light left in the sky and although he had always been the sort of person who found it impossible to go to sleep until the National Anthem had played on the last available TV channel, all he wanted now was his own bed. This had been a tense, frightening day, and it wouldn't be over until Beach reported in. Nor would the mess Ruth McCausland had succeeded in making be cleaned up when the two cops were erased. They could hide a lot of things, but not the simple fact that those cops had been on their way back from Haven where another cop (just a town constable, true, but a cop was a cop, and this one had just happened to be married to a State Bear, just to add to the fun) had been erased from the equation.