Dolan's Cadillac (numbered ed.)

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STEPHEN

KING

Dolan's Cadillac

Dolan's Cadillac was released in a limited deluxe edition of

250 copies, and another limited edition of 1,000 copies.

This special limited edition is signed by author Stephen

King. This edition is limited to 250 copies.

This is copy 183183

Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

Spanish proverb

I waited and watched for seven years. I saw him come and go -

Dolan. I watched him stroll into fancy restaurants dressed in a

tuxedo, always with a different woman on his arm, always with his

pair of bodyguards bookending him. I watched his hair go from

iron-gray to a fashionable silver while my own simply receded

until I was bald. I watched him leave Las Vegas on his regular

pilgrimages to the West Coast; I watched him return. On two or

three occasions I watched from a side road as his Sedan DeVille,

the same color as his hair, swept by on Route 71 toward Los

Angeles. And on a few occasions I watched him leave his place in

the Hollywood Hills in the same gray Cadillac to return to Las

Vegas - not often, though. I am a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers

and high-priced hoodlums do not have the same freedom of

movement; it's just an economic fact of life.

He did not know I was watching him - I never came close enough

for him to know that. I was careful.

He killed my wife or had her killed; it comes to the same, either

way. Do you want details? You won't get them from me. If you

want them, look them up in the back issues of the papers. Her

name was Elizabeth. She taught in the same school where I taught

and where I teach still. She taught first-graders. They loved her,

and I think that some of them may not have forgotten their love

still, although they would be teenagers now. I loved her and love

her still, certainly. She was not beautiful but she was pretty. She

was quiet, but she could laugh. I dream of her. Of her hazel eyes.

There has never been another woman for me. Nor ever will be.

He slipped - Dolan. That's all you have to know. And Elizabeth

was there, at the wrong place and the wrong time, to see the slip.

She went to the police, and the police sent her to the FBI, and she

was questioned, and she said yes, she would testify. They promised

to protect her, but they either slipped or they underestimated

Dolan. Maybe it was both. Whatever it was, she got into her car

one night and the dynamite wired to the ignition made me a

widower. He made me a widower - Dolan.

With no witness to testify, he was let free.

He went back to his world , I to mine. The penthouse apartment in

Vegas for him, the empty tract home for me. The succession of

beautiful women in furs and sequined evening dresses for him, the

silence for me. The gray Cadillacs, four of them over the years, for

him, and the aging Buick Riviera for me. His hair went silver while

mine just went.

But I watched.

I was careful - oh, yes! Very careful. I knew what he was, what he

could do. I knew he would step on me like a bug if he saw or

sensed what I meant for him. So I was careful.

During my summer vacation three years ago I followed him (at a

prudent distance) to Los Angeles, where he went frequently. He

stayed in his fine house and threw parties (I watched the comings

and goings from a safe shadow at the end of the block, fading back

when the police cars made their frequent patrols), and I stayed in a

cheap hotel where people played their radios too loud and neon

light from the topless bar across the street shone in the windows. I

fell asleep on those nights and dreamed of Elizabeth's hazel eyes,

dreamed that none of it had ever happened, and woke up

sometimes with tears drying on my face.

I came close to losing hope.

He was well guarded, you see; so well guarded. He went nowhere

without those two heavily armed gorillas with him, and the

Cadillac itself was armor plated. The big radial tires it rolled on

were of the self-sealing type favored by dictators in small, uneasy

countries.

Then, that last time, I saw how it could be done - but I did not see

it until after I'd had a very bad scare.

I followed him back to Las Vegas, always keeping at least a mile

between us, sometimes two, sometimes three. As we crossed the

desert heading east his car was at times no more than a sunflash on

the horizon and I thought about Elizabeth, how the sun looked on

her hair.

I was far behind on this occasion. It was the middle of the week,

and traffic on US 71 was very light. When traffic is light, tailing

becomes dangerous - even a grammar-school teacher knows that. I

passed an orange sign which read DETOUR 5 MILES and dropped

back even farther. Desert detours slow traffic to a crawl , and I

didn't want to chance coming up behind the gray Cadillac as the

driver babied it over some rutted secondary road.

DETOUR 3 MILES, the next sign read, and below that:

BLASTING AREA AHEAD TURN OFF 2-WAY RADIO.

I began to muse on some movie I had seen years before. In this

film a band of armed robbers had tricked an armored car into the

desert by putting up false detour signs. Once the driver fell for the

trick and turned off onto a deserted dirt road (there are thousands

of them in the desert, sheep roads and ranch roads and old

government roads that go nowhere), the thieves had removed the

signs, assuring isolation, and then had simply laid siege to the

armored car until the guards came out.

They killed the guards.

I remembered that.

They killed the guards.

I reached the detour and turned onto it. The road was as bad as I

had imagined -packed dirt, two lanes wide, filled with potholes that

made my old Buick jounce and groan. The Buick needed new

shock absorbers, but shocks are an expense a schoolteacher

sometimes has to put off, even when he is a widower with no

children and no hobbies except his dream of revenge.

As the Buick bounced and wallowed along, an idea occurred to

me. Instead of following Dolan's Cadillac the next time it left

Vegas for LA or LA for Vegas, I would pass it - get ahead of it. I

would create a false detour like the one in the movie, luring it out

into the wastes that exist, silent and rimmed by mountains, west of

Las Vegas. Then I would remove the signs, as the thieves had done

in the movie

I snapped back to reality suddenly. Dolan's Cadillac was ahead of

me, directly ahead of me, pulled off to one side of the dusty track.

One of the tires, self-sealing or not, was flat. No - not just flat. It

was exploded, half off the rim. The culprit had probably been a

sharp wedge of rock stuck in the hardpan like a miniature tank-

trap. One of the two bodyguards was working a jack under the

front end. The second - an ogre with a pig-face streaming sweat

under his brush cut - stood protectively beside Dolan himself. Even

in the desert, you see, they took no chances.

Dolan stood to one side, slim in an open-throated shirt and dark

slacks, his silver hair blowing around his head in the desert breeze.

He was smoking a cigarette and watching the men as if he were

somewhere else, a restaurant or a ballroom or a drawing room

perhaps.

His eyes met mine through the windshield of my car and then slid

off with no recognition at all, although he had seen me once, seven

years ago (when I had hair!), at a preliminary hearing, sitting

beside my wife.

My terror at having caught up with the Cadillac was replaced with

an utter fury.

I thought of leaning over and unrolling the passenger window and

shrieking: How dare you forget me? How dare you dismiss me?

Oh, but that would have been the act of a lunatic. It was good that

he had forgotten me, it was fine that he had dismissed me, better to

be a mouse behind the wainscoting, nibbling at the wires. Better to

be a spider, high up under the eaves, spinning its web.

The man sweating the jack flagged me, but Dolan wasn't the only

one capable of dismissal. I looked indifferently beyond the arm-

waver, wishing him a heart attack or a stroke or, best of all, both at

the same time. I drove on - but my head pulsed and throbbed, and

for a few moments the mountains on the horizon seemed to double

and even treble.

If I'd had a gun! I thought. If only Id had a gun! I could have

ended his rotten, miserable life right then if I'd only had a gun!

Miles later some sort of reason reasserted itself If I'd had a gun, the

only thing I could have been sure of was getting myself killed. If

I'd had a gun I could have pulled over when the man using the

bumper-jack beckoned me, and gotten out, and begun spraying

bullets wildly around the deserted landscape. I might have

wounded someone. Then I would have been killed and buried in a

shallow grave, and Dolan would have gone on escorting the

beautiful women and making pilgrimages between Las Vegas and

Los Angeles in his silver Cadillac while the desert animals

unearthed my remains and fought over my bones under the cold

moon. For Elizabeth there would have been no revenge - none at

all.

The men who travelled with him were trained to kill. I was trained

to teach third-graders.

This was not a movie, I reminded myself as I returned to the

highway and passed an orange END CONSTRUCTION THE

STATE OF NEVADA THANKS YOU! sign. And if I ever made

the mistake of confusing reality with a movie, of thinking that a

balding third-grade teacher with myopia could ever be Dirty Harry

anywhere outside of his own daydreams, there would never be any

revenge, ever.

But could there be revenge, ever? Could there be?

My idea of creating a fake detour was as romantic and unrealistic

as the idea of jumping out of my old Buick and spraying the three

of them with bullets - me, who had not fired a gun since the age of

sixteen and who had never fired a handgun.

Such a thing would not be possible without a band of conspirators -

even the movie I had seen, romantic as it had been, had made that

clear. There had been eight or nine of them in two separate groups,

staying in touch with each other by walkie-talkie. There had even

been a man in a small plane cruising above the highway to make

sure the armored car was relatively isolated as it approached the

right spot on the highway.

A plot no doubt dreamed up by some overweight screenwriter

sitting by his swimming pool with a pina colada by one hand and a

fresh supply of Pentel pens and an Edgar Wallace plot-wheel by

the other. And even that fellow had needed a small army to fulfill

his idea. I was only one man.

It wouldn't work. It was just a momentary false gleam, like the

others I'd had over the years - the idea that maybe I could put some

sort of poison gas in Dolan's air-conditioning system, or plant a

bomb in his Los Angeles house, or perhaps obtain some really

deadly weapon - a bazooka, let us say - and turn his damned silver

Cadillac into a fireball as it raced east toward Vegas or west

toward LA along 71.

Best to dismiss it.

But it wouldn't go.

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摘要：

STEPHENKINGDolan'sCadillacDolan'sCadillacLordJohnPress,©1989Dolan'sCadillacwasreleasedinalimiteddeluxeeditionof250copies,andanotherlimitededitionof1,000copies.ThisspeciallimitededitionissignedbyauthorStephenKing.Thiseditionislimitedto250copies.Thisiscopy183183Revengeisadishbesteatencold.Spanishprove...

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Dolan's Cadillac (numbered ed.)

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