Free Desperation by Stephen King Page B

her almost tenderly. She responded with the blackest glance Ralph had ever seen in his life.
    â€œCan you walk?” the cop asked her. “Is anything broken?”
    â€œWhat difference does it make?” She spat at him. “Kill me if you’re going to, get it over with.”
    â€œKill you? Kill you?” He looked stunned, the expression of a man who has never killed anything bigger than a wasp in his whole life. “I’m not going to kill you, Mare!” He hugged her to him briefly, then looked around at Ralph and Ellie, David and the white-haired man. “Gosh, no!” he said. “Not when things are just getting interesting.”

Chapter 3
    1
    The man who had once been on the cover of People and Time and Premiere (when he married the actress with all the emeralds), and the front page of The New York Times (when he won the National Book Award for his novel Delight ), and in the center-spread of Inside View (when he was arrested for beating up his third wife, the one before the actress with the emeralds), had to take a piss.
    He pulled his motorcycle over to the westbound edge of Highway 50, working methodically down through the gears with a stiff left foot, and finally rolling to a stop on the edge of the tar. Good thing there was so little traffic out here, because you couldn’t park your scoot off the road in the Great Basin even if you had once fucked America’s most famous actress (although she had admittedly been a little long in the tooth by then) and been spoken of in connection with the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you tried it, your bike was apt to first heel over on her kickstand and then fall flat on her roadbars. The shoulder looked hard, but that was mostly attitude—not much different from the attitudes of certain people he could name, including the one he needed a mirror to get a good look at. And try picking up a seven-hundred-pound Harley-Davidson once you’d dumped it, especially when you were fifty-six and out of shape. Just try.
    I don’t think so, he thought, looking at the red-and-cream Harley Softail, a street bike at which any purist would have turned up his nose, listening to the engine tick-tock in the silence. The only other sounds were the hot wind and the minute sound of sand spacking against his leather jacket—twelve hundred dollars at Barneys in New York. A jacket meant to be photographed by a fag from Interview magazine if ever there had been one. I think we’ll skip that part entirely, shall we?
    â€œFine by me,” he said. He took off his helmet and put it on the Harley’s seat. Then he rubbed a slow hand down his face, which was as hot as the wind and at least twice as sunburned. He thought he had never felt quite so tired or so out of his element in his whole life.

2
    The literary lion walked stiffly into the desert, his long gray hair brushing against the shoulders of his motorcycle jacket, the scrubby mesquite and paintbrush ticking against his leather chaps (also from Barneys). He looked around carefully but saw nothing coming in either direction. There was something parked off the road a mile or two farther west—a truck or maybe a motor home—but even if there were people in it, he doubted that they could watch the great man take a leak without binoculars. And if they were watching, so what? It was a trick most people knew, after all.
    He unzipped his fly—John Edward Marinville, the man Harper’s had once called “the writer Norman Mailer always wanted to be,” the man Shelby Foote had once called “the only living American writer of John Steinbeck’s stature”—and hauled out his original fountain pen. He had to piss like a racehorse but for almost a minute nothing happened; he just stood there with his dry dick in his hand.
    Then, at last, urine arced out and turned the tough and dusty leaves of the mesquite a darker, shiny green.
    â€œPraise Jesus, thank you,