Free Thinner by Richard Bachman Page A

He looked for a long, long time.
    195.

    Chapter Nine

    188

    The next day he went out and bought clothes; he bought them feverishly, as if new clothes, clothes that fit him well, would solve everything. He bought a new, smaller Niques belt as well. He became aware that people had stopped complimenting him on his weight loss; when had that started? He didn't know.
    He put on the new clothes. He went to work and came home. He drank too much, ate second helpings that he ,didn't want and which sat heavily in his stomach. A week passed, and the new clothes did not look trim and neat anymore; they had begun to bag.
    He approached the bathroom scales, his heart thudding so heavily that it made his eyes throb and his head ache. He would discover later that he had bitten his lower lip hard enough to make it bleed. The image of the scale had taken on childish overtones of terror in his mind - the scale had become the goblin of his life. He stood before it for perhaps as long as three minutes, biting down hard on his lower lip, unaware of either the pain or the salty taste of blood in his mouth. It was evening. Downstairs, Linda was watching Three's Company on TV, and Heidi was running the weekly household accounts on the Commodore in Halleck's study.
    With a kind of lunge, he got onto the scale.
    188.
    He felt his stomach roll over in a single giddy tumble, and for one desperate moment it seemed impossible that he would not vomit. He struggled grimly to keep his supper down - he needed that nourishment, those warm healthy calories. At last the nausea passed. He looked down at the calibrated dial, dully remembering what Heidi had said It doesn't weigh heavy, it weighs light. He remembered Michael Houston saying that at 217 he was still thirty pounds over his optimum weight. Not now, Mikey, he thought tiredly. Now I'm ... I'm thinner.
    He got off the scales, aware that he now felt a certain measure of relief - the relief a Death Row prisoner might feel, seeing the warden and the priest appear at two minutes of twelve, knowing that the end had come and there was going to be no call from the governor. There were certain formalities to be gone through, of course, yes, but that was all. It was real. If he talked about it to people, they would think he was either joking or crazy - no one believed in Gypsy curses anymore, or maybe never had - they were definitely declasse in a world that had watched hundreds of marines come home from Lebanon in coffins, in a world that had watched five IRA prisoners starve themselves to death, among other dubious wonders - but it was true, all the same. He had killed the wife of the old Gypsy with the rotting nose, and his sometime golf partner, good old tit-grabbing Judge Cary Rossington, had let him off without even so much as a tap on the wrist, and so the old Gypsy had decided to impose his own sort of justice on one fat Fairview lawyer whose wife had picked the wrong day to give him his first and only handjob in a moving car. The sort of justice a man like his sometime friend Ginelli might appreciate. Halleck turned off the bathroom light and went downstairs, thinking of Death Row convicts walking down the last mile. No blindfold, Faddah ... but who's got a cigarette? He smiled wanly.
    Heidi was sitting at his desk, the bills on her left, the glowing screen in front of her, the Marine Midlands checkbook propped on the keyboard like sheet music. A common enough sight on at least one night during the first week of the new month. But she wasn't writing checks or running figures. She was only sitting there, a cigarette between her fingers, and when she turned to him, Billy saw such woe in her eyes that he was almost physically staggered. He thought of selective perception again, the funny way your mind had of not seeing what it didn't want to see ... like the way you kept pulling your belt smaller and smaller to hold your oversized pants up around your shrinking waistline, or the brown circles under your