Free The Dark Half by Stephen King

Calls from the two police-band radios crackled out in the warm late-spring air.
    â€œIs Ray coming?” Pangborn asked. Ray was Ray Van Allen, Castle County’s medical examiner and coroner.
    â€œYep,” Norris said.
    â€œWhat about Homer’s wife? Anybody tell her about this yet?”
    Pangborn waved flies away from Homer’s upturned face as he spoke. There was not much left but the beaky, jutting nose. If not for the prosthetic left arm and the gold teeth which had once been in Gamache’s mouth and now lay in splinters on his wattled neck and the front of his shirt, Pangborn doubted if his own mother would have known him.
    Norris Ridgewick, who bore a passing resemblance to Deputy Barney Fife on the old Andy Griffith Show, scuffled his feet and looked down at his shoes as if they had suddenly become very interesting to him. “Well . . . John’s on patrol up in the View, and Andy Clutterbuck’s in Auburn, at district court—”
    Pangborn sighed and stood up. Gamache was—had been—sixty-seven years old. He’d lived with his wife in a small, neat house by the old railroad depot less than two miles from here. Their children were grown and gone away. It was Mrs. Gamache who had called the Sheriff’s office early this morning, not crying but close, saying she’d wakened at seven to find that Homer, who sometimes slept in one of the kids’ old rooms because she snored, hadn’t come home at all last night. He had left for his league bowling at seven the previous evening, just like always, and should have been home by midnight, twelve-thirty at the latest, but the beds were all empty and his truck wasn’t in the dooryard or the garage.
    Sheila Brigham, the day dispatcher, had relayed the initial call to Sheriff Pangborn, and he had used the pay phone at Sonny Jackett’s Sunoco station, where he had been gassing up, to call Mrs. Gamache back.
    She had given him what he needed on the truck—Chevrolet pick-up, 1971, white with maroon primer-paint on the rust-spots and a gun-rack in the cab, Maine license number 96529Q. He’d put it out on the radio to his officers in the field (only three of them, with Clut testifying up in Auburn) and told Mrs. Gamache he would get back to her just as soon as he had something. He hadn’t been particularly worried. Gamache liked his beer, especially on his league bowling night, but he wasn’t completely foolish. If he’d had too much to feel safe driving, he would have slept on the couch in one of his bowling buddies’ living rooms.
    There was one question, though. If Homer had decided to stay at the home of a teammate, why hadn’t he called his wife and told her so? Didn’t he know she’d worry? Well, it was late, and maybe he didn’t want to disturb her. That was one possibility. A better one, Pangborn thought, was that he had called and she had been fast asleep in bed, a closed door between her and the one telephone in the house. And you had to add in the probability that she was snoring like a Jimmy-Pete doing seventy on the turnpike.
    Pangborn had said goodbye to the distraught woman and hung up, thinking her husband would show by eleven o’clock this morning at the latest, shamefaced and more than a little hung-over. Ellen would give the old rip the sandpaper side of her tongue when he did. Pangborn would thus make it a point to commend Homer—quietly—for having the sense not to drive the thirty miles between South Paris and Castle Rock while under the influence.
    About an hour after Ellen Gamache’s call, it had occurred to him that something wasn’t right about his first analysis of the situation. If Gamache had slept over at a bowling buddy’s house, it seemed to Alan that it must have been the first time he ever did so. Otherwise, his wife would have thought of it herself and at least waited awhile longer before calling the Sheriff’s