The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories, Horror, Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9781501111679
Amazon: 1501111671
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2015-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

VI – Candy Rymer

At five o’clock on a gray Sunday afternoon – as the Lady Meerkats were cutting down basketball nets in a not-too-distant part of the state – Wesley Smith and Robbie Henderson were sitting in Wesley’s modest Chevy Malibu, watching the door of a roadhouse in Eddyville, twenty miles north of Cadiz. The parking lot was oiled dirt and mostly empty. There was almost certainly a TV inside The Broken Windmill, but Wesley guessed discriminating tipplers would rather do their drinking and NFL-watching at home. You didn’t have to go inside the joint to know it was a hole. Candy Rymer’s first stop had been bad, but this second one was worse.

Parked slightly crooked (and blocking what appeared to be the fire exit) was a filthy, dinged-up Ford Explorer with two bumper stickers on the back. MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT THE STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, one read. The other was even more telling: I BRAKE FOR JACK DANIELS.

‘Maybe we oughta do it right here,’ Robbie said. ‘While she’s inside slopping it up and watching the Titans.’

It was a tempting idea, but Wesley shook his head. ‘We’ll wait. She’s got one more stop to make. Hopson, remember?’

‘That’s miles from here.’

‘Right,’ Wesley said. ‘But we’ve got time to kill, and we’re going to kill it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because what we’re up to is changing the future. Or trying to, at least. We have no idea how tough that is. Waiting as long as possible improves our chances.’

‘Wesley, that is one drunk chick. She was drunk when she got out of that first juke joint in Central City, and she’s going to be a lot drunker when she comes out of yonder shack. I can’t see her getting her car repaired in time to rendezvous with the girls’ bus forty miles from here. And what if we break down while we’re trying to follow her to her last stop?’

Wesley hadn’t considered this. Now he did. ‘My instincts say wait, but if you have a strong feeling that we should do it now, we will.’

Robbie sat up. ‘Too late. Here comes Miss America.’

Candy Rymer emerged from The Broken Windmill in a kind of slalom. She dropped her purse, bent down to get it, almost fell over, cursed, picked it up, laughed, and then continued to where her Explorer was parked, digging her keys out as she went. Her face was puffy, not quite hiding the remains of what must once have been very good looks. Her hair, blond on top and black at the roots, hung around her cheeks in lank curls. Her belly pooched out the front of elastic-waist jeans just below the hem of what had to be a Kmart smock top.

She got in her beat-to-shit SUV, kicked the engine into life (it sounded in desperate need of a tune-up) and drove forward into the roadhouse’s fire door. There was a crunch. Then her backup lights came on and she reversed so fast that for one sickening moment Wesley thought she

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