Part 21 (1/2)

For three years he had done just that. Then, in 1984, Steve Frazier had retired, and Keeton had been elected Head Selectman. That was when his real troubles began.

He had gone to the track to celebrate his victory, and since he was celebrating, he decided to go whole hog. He bypa.s.sed the two- and five-dollar windows, and went straight to the ten-dollar window. He had lost a hundred and sixty dollars that night, more than he felt comfortable losing (he told his wife the next day that it had been forty), but not more than he could afford afford to lose. Absolutely not. to lose. Absolutely not.

He returned a week later, meaning to win back what he had lost so he could quit evens. And he had almost made it. Almost Almost-that was the key word. The way he had almost made it to the exit turnstiles. The week after, he had lost two hundred and ten dollars. That left a hole in the checking account Myrtle would notice, and so he had borrowed a little bit from the town's petty-cash fund to cover the worst of the shortfall. A hundred dollars. Peanuts, really.

Past that point, it all began to blur together. The pit had greased sides, all right, and once you started sliding you were doomed. You could expend your energy clawing at the sides and succeed in slowing your fall... but that, of course, only drew out the agony.

If there had been a point of no return, it had been the summer of 1989. The pacers ran nightly during the summer, and Keeton was in attendance constantly through the second half of July and all of August. Myrtle had thought for awhile that he was using the racetrack as an excuse, that he was actually seeing another woman, and that was a laugh-it really was. Keeton couldn't have got a hard-on if Diana herself had driven down from the moon in her chariot with her toga open and a f.u.c.k ME DANFORTH sign hung around her neck. The thought of how deep he'd dipped into the town treasury had caused his poor d.i.c.k to shrivel to the size of a pencil eraser.

When Myrtle finally became convinced of the truth, that it was only horse racing after all, she had been relieved. It kept him out of the house, where he tended to be something of a tyrant, and he couldn't be losing too badly, she had reasoned, because the checkbook balance didn't fluctuate that much. It was just that Danforth had found a hobby to keep him amused in his middle age.

Only horse racing after all, Keeton thought as he walked down Main Street with his hands plunged deep into his overcoat pockets. He uttered a strange, wild laugh that would have turned heads if there had been anyone on the street. Myrtle kept her eye on the checking account. The thought that Danforth might have plundered the T-bills which were their life savings never occurred to her. Likewise, the knowledge that Keeton Chevrolet was tottering on the edge of extinction belonged to him alone. Keeton thought as he walked down Main Street with his hands plunged deep into his overcoat pockets. He uttered a strange, wild laugh that would have turned heads if there had been anyone on the street. Myrtle kept her eye on the checking account. The thought that Danforth might have plundered the T-bills which were their life savings never occurred to her. Likewise, the knowledge that Keeton Chevrolet was tottering on the edge of extinction belonged to him alone.

She balanced the checkbook and the house accounts. balanced the checkbook and the house accounts.

He was a CPA. was a CPA.

When it comes to embezzlement, a CPA can do a better job than most... but in the end the package always comes undone. The string and tape and wrapping paper on Keeton's package had begun to fall apart in the autumn of 1990. He had held things together as well as he could, hoping to recoup at the track. By then he had found a bookie, which enabled him to make bigger bets than the track would handle.

It hadn't changed his luck, however.

And then, this summer, the persecution had begun in earnest. Before, They had only been toying with him. Now They were moving in for the kill, and the Day of Armageddon was less than a week away.

I'll get Them, Keeton thought. Keeton thought. I'm not done yet. I've still got a trick or two up my sleeve. I'm not done yet. I've still got a trick or two up my sleeve.

He didn't know what those tricks were, though; that was the trouble.

Never mind. There's a way. I know there's a w- Here his thoughts ceased. He was standing in front of the new store, Needful Things, and what he saw in the window drove everything else slap out of his mind for a moment or two.

It was a rectangular cardboard box, brightly colored, with a picture on the front. A board game, he supposed. But it was a board game about horse racing, and he could have sworn that the painting, which showed two pacers sweeping down on the finish line neck-and-neck, was of the Lewiston Raceway. If that wasn't the main grandstand in the background, he was a monkey.

The name of the game was WINNING TICKET.

Keeton stood looking at it for almost five minutes, as hypnotized as a kid looking at a display of electric trains. Then, slowly, he walked under the dark-green canopy to see if the place kept Sat.u.r.day hours. There was a sign hanging inside the door, all right, but it bore only one word, and the word, naturally, was OPEN.

Keeton looked at it for a moment, thinking-as Brian Rusk had before him-that it must have been left there by mistake. Main Street shops didn't open at seven in Castle Rock, especially not on Sat.u.r.day morning. All the same, he tried the k.n.o.b. It turned easily in his hand.

As he opened the door, a small silver bell tinkled overhead.

4.

”It's not really a game,” Leland Gaunt was saying five minutes later, ”you're wrong about that.”

Keeton was seated in the plush high-backed chair where Nettie Cobb, Cyndi Rose Martin, Eddie Warburton, Everett Frankel, Myra Evans, and a good many other townsfolk had sat before him that week. He was drinking a cup of good Jamaican coffee. Gaunt, who seemed like one h.e.l.l of a nice fellow for a flatlander, had insisted that he have one. Now Gaunt was leaning into his show window and carefully removing the box. He was dressed in a wine-colored smoking jacket, just as natty as you please, and not a hair out of place. He had told Keeton that he often opened at odd hours, because he was afflicted with insomnia.

”Ever since I was a young man,” he had said with a rueful chuckle, ”and that was many years ago.” He looked fresh as a daisy to Keeton, however, except for his eyes-they were so bloodshot they looked as if red were actually their natural color.

Now he brought the box over and set it on a small table next to Keeton.

”The box was what caught my eye,” Keeton said. ”It looks quite a bit like the Lewiston Raceway. I go there once in awhile.”

”You like a flutter, do you?” Gaunt asked with a smile.

Keeton was about to say he never bet, and changed his mind. The smile was not just friendly; it was a smile of commiseration, and he suddenly understood that he was in the presence of a fellow sufferer. Which just went to show how flaky he was getting around the edges, because when he had shaken Gaunt's hand, he'd felt a wave of revulsion so sudden and deep it had been like a muscle spasm. For that one moment he had been convinced that he had found his Chief Persecutor. He would have to watch that sort of thing; there was no sense going overboard.

”I have been known to wager,” he said.

”Sadly, so have I,” Gaunt said. His reddish eyes fixed upon Keeton's, and they shared a moment of perfect understanding... or so Keeton felt. ”I've bet most of the tracks from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I'm quite sure the one on the box is Longacre Park, in San Diego. Gone, of course; there's a housing development there now.”

”Oh,” Keeton said.

”But let me show you this. I think you'll find it interesting.”

He took the cover off the box, and carefully lifted out a tin raceway on a platform about three feet long and a foot and a half wide. It looked like toys Keeton had had as a child, the cheap ones made in j.a.pan after the war. The track was a replica of a two-mile course. Eight narrow slots were set into it, and eight narrow tin horses stood behind the starting line. Each was mounted on a small tin post that poked out of its slot and was soldered to the horse's belly.

”Wow,” Keeton said, and grinned. It was the first time he'd grinned in weeks, and the expression felt strange and out of place.

”You ain't seen nuthin yet, as the man said,” Gaunt replied, grinning back. ”This baby goes back to 1930 or '35, Mr. Keeton-it's a real antique. But it wasn't just a toy to the racing touts of the day.”

”No?”

”No. Do you know what a Ouija board is?”

”Sure. You ask it questions and it's supposed to spell out answers from the spirit world.”

”Exactly. Well, back in the Depression, there were a lot of racing touts who believed that Winning Ticket was the horse-player's Ouija board.”

His eyes met Keeton's again, friendly, smiling, and Keeton was as unable to draw his own eyes away as he had been to leave the track before the last race was run on the one occasion when he had tried.

”Silly, isn't it?”

”Yes,” Keeton said. But it didn't seem silly at all. It seemed perfectly... perfectly...

Perfectly reasonable.

Gaunt felt around in the box and brought out a little tin key. ”A different horse wins each time. There's some sort of random mechanism inside, I suppose-crude but effective enough. Now watch.”

He inserted the key in a hole on the side of the tin platform on which the tin horses stood, and turned it. There were small clicks and clacks and ratchets-winding-up sounds. Gaunt removed the key when it wouldn't turn anymore.

”What's your pick?” he asked.

”The five,” Keeton said. He leaned forward, his heart picking up speed. It was foolish-and the ultimate proof of his compulsion, he supposed-but he could feel all the old excitement sweeping through him.

”Very well, I pick the six-horse. Shall we have a little wager, just to make it interesting?”