Misery

to be good, Paul?”
“Yes,” he said.
Her eyes searched his face.
“I’m going to trust you,” she said finally and turned away, closing the door but not bothering to lock it.
The car turned into the driveway, the smooth, sleepy beat of that big 442 Plymouth engine almost like a trademark. He heard the kitchen screen door bang shut and eased the wheelchair close enough to the window so he could remain in an angle of shadow and still peek out. The cruiser pulled up to where Annie stood, and the engine died. The driver got out and stood almost exactly where the young trooper had been standing when he spoke his last four words… but there all resemblance ended. That trooper had been a weedy young man hardly out of his teens, a rookie cop pulling a shit detail, chasing the cold trail of some numbnuts writer who had wrecked up his car and then either staggered deeper into the woods to die or walked blithely away from the whole mess with his thumb cocked.
The cop currently unfolding himself from behind the cruiser’s wheel was about forty, with shoulders seemingly as wide as a barnbeam. His face was a square of granite with a few narrow lines carved into it at the eyes and the corners of the mouth. Annie was a big woman, but this fellow made her look almost small.
There was another difference as well. The trooper Annie killed had been alone. Getting out of the shotgun seat of this cruiser was a small, slope-shouldered plainsclothesman with lank blonde hair. David and Goliath, Paul thought. Mutt and Jeff. Jesus.
The plainclothesman did not so much walk around the cruiser as mince around it. His face looked old and tired, the face of a man who is half-asleep… except for his faded blue eyes. The eyes were wide-awake, everywhere at once. Paul thought he would be quick.
They bookended Annie and she was saying something to them, first looking up to speak to Goliath, then half-turning and looking down to reply to David. Paul wondered what would happen if he broke the window again and screamed for help again. He thought the odds were maybe eight in ten that they would take her. Oh, she was quick, but the big cop looked as if he might be quicker in spite of his size, and strong enough to uproot middling-sized trees with his bare hands. The plainclothesman’s self-conscious walk might be as deliberately deceptive as his sleepy look. He thought they would take her… except what surprised them wouldn’t surprise her, and that gave her an outside chance, anyway.
The plainclothesman’s coat. It was buttoned in spite of the glaring heat. If she shot Goliath first, she might very well be able to put a slug in David’s face before he could get that oogy goddam coat unbuttoned and his gun out. More than anything else, that buttoned coat suggested that Annie had been right: so far, this was just a routine check-back.
So far.
I didn’t kill him, you know. You killed him. If you had kept your mouth shut, I would have sent him on his way. He’d be alive now…
Did he believe that? No, of course not. But there was still that strong, hurtful moment of guilt — like a quick deep stab-wound. Was he going to keep his mouth shut because there were two chances in ten that she would off these two as well if he opened it?
The guilt stabbed quickly again and was gone. The answer to that was also no. It would be nice to credit himself with such selfless motives, but it wasn’t the truth. The fact was simple: he wanted to take care of Annie Wilkes himself. They could only put you in jail, bitch, he thought. I know how to hurt you.

There was always the possibility, of course, that they would smell a rat. Rat-catching was, after all, their job, and they would know Annie’s background. If that was the way things turned out, so be it… but he thought Annie might just be able to wriggle past the law this one last time.
Paul now knew as much of the story as he needed to know, he supposed. Annie had listened to the radio constantly since her long sleep, and the missing state cop, whose name was Duane Kushner, was big news. The fact that he had been searching for traces of a hotshot writer named Paul Sheldon was reported, but Kushner’s disappearance had not been linked, even speculatively, with Paul’s own. At least, not yet.
The spring runoff had sent his Camaro rolling and tumbling five miles down the wash. It might have lain undiscovered in the forest for another month or another year but for merest coincidence. A couple of National Guard chopper-jockeys sent out as part of a random drug-control sweep (looking for back-country pot-farmers, in other words) had seen a sunflash on what remained of the Camaro’s windshield and set down in