Stephen King - From a Buick 8 (2002)

VIP免费

2024-12-22 0 0 913.6KB 269 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

By Stephen King and published by

Hodder & Stoughton

FICTION:

Carrie

'Salem's Lot

The Shining

Night Shift

The Stand

Christine

The Talisman (with Peter Straub)

Pet Sematary

Misery

The Tommy knockers

The Dark Half

Four Past Midnight

Needful Things

Gerald's Game

Dolores Claiborne

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Insomnia

Rose Madder

Desperation

The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass

Bag of Bones

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Hearts in Atlantis

Dreamcatcher

By Stephen King as Richard Bachman

Thinner

The Bachman Books The Regulators

NON-FICTION:

On Writing (A Memoir of the Craft)

Permissions to follow

The right of Stephen King to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by

him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of

the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent

purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons,

living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardcover edition ISBN 0 340 77069 4

Trade paperback edition ISBN 0 340 79234 5

Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Hodder & Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

This is for Surendra and Geeta Patel

NOW:

Sandy

Curt Wilcox's boy came around the barracks a lot the year after his father died, I mean a lot,

but nobody ever told him get out the way or asked him what in hail he was doing there again.

We understood what he was doing: trying to hold on to the memory of his father. Cops know

a lot about the psychology of grief; most of us know more about it than we want to.

That was Ned Wilcox's senior year at Statler High. He must have quit off the football team;

when it came time for choosing, he picked D Troop instead. Hard to imagine a kid doing that,

choosing unpaid choring over all those Friday night games and Saturday night parties, but

that's what he did. I don't think any of us talked to him about that choice, but we respected

him for it. He had decided the time had come to put the games away, that's all. Grown men

are frequently incapable of making such decisions; Ned made his at an age when he still

couldn't buy a legal drink. Or a legal pack of smokes, for that matter. I think his dad would

have been proud. Know it, actually.

Given how much the boy was around, I suppose it was inevitable he'd see what was out in

Shed B, and ask someone what it was and what it was doing there. I was the one he was most

likely to ask, because I'd been his father's closest friend. Closest one that was still a Trooper,

at least. I think maybe I wanted it to happen. Kill or cure, the oldtimers used to say. Give that

curious cat a serious dose of satisfaction.

What happened to Curtis Wilcox was simple. A veteran county drunk, one Curt himself knew

well and had arrested six or eight times, took his life. The drunk, Bradley Roach, didn't mean

to hurt anyone; drunks so rarely do. That doesn't keep you from wanting to kick their numb

asses all the way to Rocksburg, of course.

Toward the end of a hot July afternoon in the year oh-one, Curtis pulled over one of those

big sixteen-wheelers, an interstate landcruiser that had left the fourlane because its driver was

hoping for a home-cooked meal instead of just another dose of I-87 Burger King or Taco

Bell. Curt was parked on the tarmac of the abandoned Jenny station at the intersection of

Pennsylvania State Road 32 and the Humboldt Road — the very place, in other words, where

that damned old Buick Roadmaster showed up in our part of the known universe all those

years ago. You can call that a coincidence if you want to, but I'm a cop and don't believe in

coincidences, only chains of event which grow longer and ever more fragile until either bad

luck or plain old human mean-heartedness breaks them.

Ned's father took out after that semi because it had a flapper. When it went by he saw

rubber spinning out from one of the rear tires like a big black pinwheel. A lot of independents

run on recaps, with the price of diesel so high they just about have to, and sometimes the

tread peels loose. You see curls and hunks of it on the interstate all the time, lying on the

highway or pushed off into the breakdown lane like the shed skins of giant blacksnakes. It's

dangerous to be behind a flapper, especially on a twolane like SR 32, a pretty but neglected

stretch of state highway running between Rocksburg and Statler. A big enough chunk might

break some unlucky follow-driver's windshield. Even if it didn't, it might startle the operator

into the ditch, or a tree, or over the embankment and into Redfern Stream, which matches 32

twist for twist over a distance of nearly six miles.

Curt lit his bar lights, and the trucker pulled over like a good boy. Curt pulled over right

behind him, first calling in his 20 and the nature of his stop and waiting for Shirley to

acknowledge. With that done, he got out and walked toward the truck.

If he'd gone directly to where the driver was leaning out and looking back at him, he might

still be on Planet Earth today. But he stopped to examine the flapper on the rear outside tire,

even gave it a good yank to see if he could pull it off. The trucker saw all of it, and testified to

it in court. Curt stopping to do that was the last link save one in the chain of events that

brought his boy to Troop D and eventually made him a part of what we are. The very last

link, I'd say, was Bradley Roach leaning over to get another brewski out of the six-pack

sitting on the floor in the passenger footwell of his old Buick Regal (not the Buick, but

another Buick, yes — it's funny how, when you look back on disasters and love affairs,

things seem to line up like planets on an astrologer's chart). Less than a minute later, Ned

Wilcox and his sisters were short a daddy and Michelle Wilcox was short a husband.

Not very long after the funeral, Curt's boy started showing up at the Troop D House. I'd come

in for the three-to-eleven that fall (or maybe just to check on things; when you're the

wheeldog, it's hard to stay away) and see the boy, before I saw anyone else, like as not. While

his friends were over at Floyd B. Clouse Field behind the high school, running plays and

hitting the tackling dummies and giving each other high-fives, Ned would be out on the front

lawn of the barracks by himself, bundled up in his green and gold high school jacket, making

big piles of fallen leaves. He'd give me a wave and I'd return it: right back atcha, kid.

Sometimes after I'd parked, I'd come out front and shoot the shit with him. He'd tell me about

the foolishness his sisters were up to just lately, maybe, and laugh, but you could see his love

for them even when he was laughing at them. Sometimes I'd just go in the back way and ask

Shirley what was up. Law enforcement in western Pennsylvania would fall apart without

Shirley Pasternak, and you can take that to the bank.

Come winter, Ned was apt to be around back in the parking lot, where the Troopers keep

their personal vehicles, running the snowblower. The Dadier brothers, two local wide boys,

are responsible for our lot, but Troop D sits in the Amish country on the edge of the Short

Hills, and when there's a big storm the wind blows drifts across the lot again almost as soon

as the plow leaves. Those drifts look to me like an enormous white ribcage. Ned was a match

for them, though. There he'd be, even if it was only eight degrees and the wind still blowing a

gale across the hills, dressed in a snowmobile suit with his green and gold jacket pulled on

over the top of it, leather-lined police-issue gloves on his hands and a ski-mask pulled down

over his face. I'd wave. He'd give me a little right-back-atcha, then go on gobbling up the

drifts with the snowblower. Later he might come in for coffee, or maybe a cup of hot

chocolate. Folks would drift over and talk to him, ask him about school, ask him if he was

keeping the twins in line (the girls were ten in the winter of oh-one, I think). They'd ask if his

mom needed anything. Sometimes that would include me, if no one was hollering too loud or

if the paperwork wasn't too heavy. None of the talk was about his father; all of the talk was

about his father. You understand.

Raking leaves and making sure the drifts didn't take hold out there in the parking lot was

really Arky Arkanian's responsibility. Arky was the custodian. He was one of us as well,

though, and he never got shirty or went territorial about his job. Hell, when it came to

snowblowing the drifts, I'll bet Arky just about got down on his knees and thanked God for

the kid. Arky was sixty by then, had to have been, and his own football-playing days were

long behind him. So were the ones when he could spend an hour and a half outside in ten-

degree temperatures (twenty-five below, if you factored in the wind chill) and hardly feel it.

And then the kid started in with Shirley, technically Police Communications Officer

Pasternak. By the time spring rolled around, Ned was spending more and more time with her

in her little dispatch cubicle with the phones, the TDD (telephonic device for the deaf), the

Trooper Location Board (also known as the D-map), and the computer console that's the hot

center of that high-pressure little world. She showed him the bank of phones (the most

important is the red one, which is our end of 911). She explained about how the traceback

equipment had to be tested once a week, and how it was done, and how you had to confirm

the duty-roster daily, so you'd know who was out patrolling the roads of Statler, Lassburg,

and Pogus City, and who was due in court or off-duty.

'My nightmare is losing an officer without knowing he's lost,' I overheard her telling Ned

one day.

'Has that ever happened?' Ned asked. 'Just . . . losing a guy?'

'Once,' she said. 'Before my time. Look here, Ned, I made you a copy of the call-codes. We

don't have to use them anymore, but all the Troopers still do. If you want to run dispatch, you

have to know these.'

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ByStephenKingandpublishedbyHodder&StoughtonFICTION:Carrie'Salem'sLotTheShiningNightShiftTheStandChristineTheTalisman(withPeterStraub)PetSemataryItMiseryTheTommyknockersTheDarkHalfFourPastMidnightNeedfulThingsGerald'sGameDoloresClaiborneNightmaresandDreamscapesInsomniaRoseMadderDesperationTheDarkTowe...

展开>> 收起<<

Stephen King - From a Buick 8 (2002).pdf

共269页,预览54页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stephen King - From a Buick 8 (2002)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: