Desperation   ::   Кинг Стивен

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. The skin was as cool as clay beneath his lips.

“It’ll be all right. We’ll straighten this out.”

“Word of honor.”

“‘Word of honor.

After putting them into the back seat of the cruiser, the cop had returned to the Acura. He had been looking into the trunk for at least two minutes now. Not searching it, not even moving anything around, just staring in with his hands clasped behind his back, as if mesmerized. Now he jerked like a man waking suddenly from a nap, slammed the Acura’ s trunk shut and walked back to the Caprice. It canted to the left when he got in, and from the springs beneath there came a tired but somehow resigned groan. The back seat bulged a little fuither, and Peter grimaced at the sudden pressure on his knees.

Mary should have taken this side, he thought, but it was too late now. Too late for a lot of things, actually.

The cruiser’s engine was running. The cop dropped the transmission into gear and pulled back onto the road. Mary turned to watch the Acura drop behind them. When she faced front again, Peter saw that the tears which had been standing in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks.

“Please listen to me,” she said, speaking to the cropped blond hair on the back of that enormous skull. The cop had laid his Smokey Bear hat aside again, and to Peter the top of his head looked to be no more than a quarter of an inch — from the Caprice’s roof. “Please, okay. Try to understand. That isn’t our car. You have to understand that much at least, I know you do, because you saw the registration. It’s my sister-in-law’s. She’s a pothead. Half her brain-cells—”

“Mare—” Peter laid a hand on her arm. She shook it off.

“No! I’m not going to spend the rest of the day answer-ing questions in some dipshit police station, maybe in a jail cell, because your sister’s selfish and forgetful and and… all fucked up!”

Peter sat back—his knees were still being pinched pretty severely but he thought he could live with it—and looked out the dust-coated side window. They were a mile or two east of the Acura now, and he could see something up ahead, pulled over on the shoulder of the westbound lane. Some sort of vehicle. Big. A truck, maybe.

Mary had switched her gaze from the back of the cop’s head to the rearview minor, trying to make eye contact with him. “Half of Deirdre’s brain-cells are fried and the other half are on permanent vacation in the Emerald City. The technical term is ‘burnout,’ and I’m sure you ye seen people like her, Officer, even out here.