Free Desperation by Stephen King

maniac cop on the loose, or six flat tires, or a family of four crammed into a hot police-car with no handles on the back doors, or my daughter’s favorite doll lying face-down in the dirt eight miles back? What could possibly be funny about any of those things?
    He didn’t know. But the cop had sounded as if he were smiling.
    â€œA state trooper, did you say?” Ralph asked as they drove beneath the blinker.
    â€œLook, Mummy!” Kirsten said brightly, Melissa Sweetheart at least temporarily forgotten. “Bikes! Bikes in the street, and standing on their heads! See down there? Isn’t that funny?”
    â€œYes, honey, I see them,” Ellie said. She didn’t sound as if she found the upside-down bikes in the street anywhere near as hilarious as her daughter did.
    â€œTrooper? No, I didn’t say that.” The big man behind the wheel still sounded as if he were smiling. “Not a state trooper, a town cop.”
    â€œReally,” Ralph said. “Wow. How many cops do you have in a little place like this, Officer?”
    â€œWell, there were two others,” the cop said, the smile in his voice more obvious than ever, “but I killed them.”
    He turned his head to look back through the mesh, and he wasn’t smiling after all. He was grinning. His teeth were so big they looked more like tools than bones. They showed all the way to the back of his mouth. Above and below them were what seemed like acres of pink gum.
    â€œNow I’m the only law west of the Pecos.”
    Ralph stared at him, mouth gaping. The cop grinned back, driving with his head turned, pulling up neatly in front of the Desperation Municipal Building without ever looking once at where he was going.
    â€œCarvers,” he said, speaking solemnly through his grin, “welcome to Desperation.”

5
    An hour later the cop ran at the woman in the jeans and the workshirt, his cowboy boots rattling on the hardwood floor, his hands outstretched, but his grin was gone and Ralph felt savage triumph leap up his throat, like something ugly on a spring. The cop was coming hard, but the woman in the jeans had managed—probably due more to luck than to any conscious decision on her part—to keep the desk between them, and that was going to make the difference. Ralph saw her pull back the hammers of the shotgun which had been lying on the desk, saw her raise it to her shoulder as her back struck the bars of the room’s largest cell, saw her curl her finger around the double triggers.
    The big cop was going like hell, but it wasn’t going to do him any good.
    Shoot him, lady, Ralph thought. Not to save us but because he killed my daughter. Blow his motherfucking head off.
    The instant before Mary pulled the triggers, the cop fell to his knees on the other side of the desk, his head dropping like the head of a man who has knelt to pray. The double roar of the shotgun was terrific in the closed holding area. Flame licked out of the barrels. Ralph heard his wife scream—in triumph, he thought. If so, it was premature. The cop’s Smokey Bear hat flew off his head, but the loads went high. Shot hit the back wall of the room and thudded into the plastered stairwell outside the open door with a sound like wind-driven sleet hitting a windowpane. There was a bulletin-board to the right of the doorway, and Ralph saw round black holes spatter across the papers tacked up there. The cop’s hat was a shredded ruin held together only by a thin leather hatband. It had been buckshot in the gun, not bird. If it had hit the cop in the midsection, it would have torn him apart. Knowing that made Ralph feel even worse.
    The big cop threw his weight against the desk and shoved it across the room toward the cell Ralph had decided was the drunk-tank—toward the cell and the woman pressed against the cell’s bars. The chair was penned in the kneehole. It swivelled back and forth, casters squalling.