Free The Dark Half by Stephen King Page A

office. And then it struck Alan that Homer Gamache was a little bit old to be changing his ways. If he had slept over someplace last night, he should have done it before, but his wife’s call suggested he hadn’t. If he had gotten shitfaced at the lanes before and then driven home that way, he probably would have done it again last night . . . but hadn’t.
    So the old dog learned a new trick after all, he thought. It happens. Or maybe he just drank more than usual. Hell, he might even have drunk about the same amount as always and gotten drunker than usual. They say it does catch up with a person.
    He had tried to forget Homer Gamache, at least for the time being. He had yea paperwork on his desk, and sitting there, rolling a pencil back and forth and thinking about that old geezer out someplace in his pick-up truck, that old geezer with white hair buzzed flat in a crewcut and a mechanical arm on account of he’d lost the real one at a place called Pusan in an undeclared war which had happened when most of the current crop of Viet Nam vets were still shitting yellow in their didies . . . well, none of that was moving the paper on his desk, and it wasn’t finding Gamache, either.
    All the same, he had been walking over to Sheila Brigham’s little cubbyhole, meaning to ask her to raise Norris Ridgewick so he could find out if Norris had found anything out, when Norris himself had called in. What Norris had to report deepened Alan’s trickle of unease to a cold and steady stream. It ran through his guts and made him feel lightly numb.
    He scoffed at those people who talked about telepathy and precognition on the call-in radio programs, scoffed in the way people do when hint and hunch have become so much a part of their lives that they barely recognize them when they are using them. But if asked what he believed about Homer Gamache at that moment, Alan would have replied: When Norris called in . . . well, that’s when I started knowing the old man was hurt bad or dead. Probably choice number two.

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    Norris had happened to stop at the Arsenault place on Route 35 about a mile south of Homeland Cemetery. He hadn’t even been thinking about Homer Gamache, although the Arsenault farm and Homer’s place were less than three miles apart, and if Homer had taken the logical route home from South Paris the night before, he would have passed the Arsenaults’. It didn’t seem likely to Norris that any of the Arsenaults would have seen Homer the night before, because if they had, Homer would have arrived home safe and sound ten minutes or so later.
    Norris had only stopped at the Arsenault farm because they kept the best roadside produce stand in the three towns. He was one of those rare bachelors who like to cook, and he had developed a terrific hankering for fresh sugarpeas. He had wanted to find out when the Arsenaults would have some for sale. As an afterthought, he’d asked Dolly Arsenault if she had happened to see Homer Gamache’s truck the night before.
    â€œNow you know,” Mrs. Arsenault had said, “it’s funny you should mention that, because I did . Late last night. No . . . now that I think about it, it was early this morning, because Johnny Carson was still on, but getting toward the end. I was going to have another bowl of ice cream and watch a little of that David Letterman show and then go to bed. I don’t sleep so well these days, and that man on the other side of the road put my nerves up. ”
    â€œWhat man was that, Mrs. Arsenault?” Norris asked, suddenly interested:
    â€œI don’t know—just some man. I didn’t like his looks. Couldn’t even hardly see him and I didn’t like his looks, how’s that? Sounds bad, I know, but that Juniper Hill mental asylum isn’t all that far away, and when you see a man alone on a country road at almost one in the morning, it’s enough to make anyone