Under the Dome

“I can keep this quiet,” Rusty said. “And I can give you something that will take care of your PAT better than Valium. The quid pro quo is that you step down. Announce your resignation—for medical reasons—in favor of Andrea tomorrow night at the big meeting. You’ll go out a hero.”

There was no way he could refuse, Rusty thought; the man was backed into a corner.

Rennie turned to the open bathroom door again and said, “Now you can come out.”

Carter Thibodeau and Freddy Denton emerged from the bathroom where they had been hiding—and listening.

8

“Goddam,” Stewart Bowie said.

He and his brother were in the basement workroom of the funeral parlor. Stewart had been doing a makeup job on Arletta Coombs, The Mill’s latest suicide and the Bowie Funeral Home’s latest customer. “Goddam sonofabitch fucking shitmonkey. ”

He dropped his cell phone onto the counter, and from the wide front pocket of his rubberized green apron removed a package of peanut butter–flavored Ritz Bits. Stewart always ate when he was upset, he had always been messy with food (“The pigs ate here,” their dad was wont to say when young Stewie left the table), and now Ritz crumbs showered down on Arletta’s upturned face, which was far from peaceful; if she’d thought quaffing Liquid-Plumr would be a quick and painless way to escape the Dome, she had been badly deceived. Darn stuff had eaten all the way through her stomach and out through her back.

“What’s wrong?” Fern asked.

“Why did I ever get involved with fucking Rennie?”

“For money?”

“What good’s money now?” Stewart raved. “What’m I gonna do, go on a fuckin shopping spree at Burpee’s Department Store? That’d give me a fuckin hardon for sure!”

He yanked open the elderly widow’s mouth and slammed the remaining Ritz Bits inside. “There you go, bitch, it’s fucking snack-time.”

Stewart snatched up his cell, hit the CONTACTS button, and selected a number. “If he isn’t there,” he said—perhaps to Fern, more likely to himself—“I’m going to go out there, find him, and stick one of his own chickens right up his fucking a—”

But Roger Killian was there. And in his goddam chickenhouse. Stewart could hear them clucking. He could also hear the swooping violins of Mantovani coming through the chickenhouse sound system. When the kids were out there, it was Metallica or Pantera.

“Lo?”

“Roger. It’s Stewie. Are you straight, brother?”

“Pretty,” Roger agreed, which probably meant he’d been smoking glass, but what the fuck.

“Get down here to town. Meet me n Fern at the motor pool. We’re gonna take two of the big trucks—the ones with the hoists—out there to WCIK. All the propane’s got to be moved back to town. We can’t do it in one day, but Jim says we gotta make a start. Tomorrow I’ll recruit six or seven more guys we can trust—some of Jim’s goddam private army, if he’ll spare em—and we’ll finish up.”

“Aw, Stewart, no—I got to feed these chickens! The boys I got left has all gone to be cops!”

Which means, Stewart thought, you want to sit in that little office of yours, smoking glass and listening to shit music and looking at lesbian makeout videos on your computer. He didn’t know how you could get horny with the aroma of chickenshit so thick you could cut it with a knife, but Roger Killian managed.

“This is not a volunteer mission, my brother. I got ordered, and I’m ordering you. Half an hour. And if you do happen to see any of your kids hanging around, you shanghai em along.”

He hung up before Roger could recommence his whiny shit and for a moment just stood there, fuming. The last thing on earth he wanted to do with what remained of this Wednesday afternoon was muscle propane tanks into trucks… but that was what he was going to be doing, all right. Yes he was.

He snatched the spray hose from the sink, stuck it between Arletta Coombs’s dentures, and triggered it. It was a high-pressure hose, and the corpse jumped on the table. “Wash them crackers down, gramma,” he snarled. “Wouldn’t want you to choke.”

“Stop!” Fern cried. “It’ll squirt out the hole in her—”

Too late.

9

Big Jim looked at Rusty with a see what it gets you smile. Then he turned to Carter and Freddy Denton. “Did you fellows hear Mr. Everett try to coerce me?”

“We sure did,” Freddy said.

“Did you hear him threaten to withhold certain lifesaving medication if I refused to step down?”

“Yeah,” Carter said, and favored Rusty with a black look. Rusty wondered how he ever could have been so stupid.

It’s been a long day—chalk it up to that.

“The medication in question might have been a drug called verapamil, which that fellow with the long hair administered by IV.” Big Jim exposed his small teeth in another unpleasant smile.

Verapamil. For the first time, Rusty cursed himself for not taking Big Jim’s chart from its slot on the door and examining it. It would not be the last.