The Dark Half by Stephen King Page B

the evening of June 2nd, some thirty-five hours after the discovery of Homer Gamache’s body in a Maine town Trooper Hamilton had never heard of.
    He was in the lot of the Westport 1-95 McDonald’s (southbound). He made it a habit to swing into the lots of the food-and-gas stops when he was cruising the Interstate; if you crawled up the last row of the parking spots at night with your lights off, you sometimes made some good busts. Better than good. Awesome. When he sensed he might have come upon such an opportunity, he very often talked to himself. These soliloquies often started with Hold it, hold it, then progressed to something like Let’s check this sucker out or Ask Mamma if she believes this . Trooper Hamilton was very big on asking Mamma if she believed this when he was on the scent of something juicy.
    â€œWhat have we got here?” he murmured this time, and reversed the cruiser. Past a Camaro. Past a Toyota which looked like a slowly aging horseturd in the beaten copper glare of the arc-sodium lights. And . . . ta-DA! An old GMC pick-up truck that looked orange in the glare, which meant it was—or had been—white or light gray.
    He popped his spotlight and trained it on the license plate. License plates, in Trooper Hamilton’s humble opinion, were getting better. One by one, the states were putting little pictures on them. This made them easier to identify at night, when varying light conditions transformed actual colors into all sorts of fictional hues. And the worst light of all for plate ID were these goddam orange hi-intensity lamps. He didn’t know if they foiled rapes and muggings as they were designed to do, but he was positive they had caused hardworking cops such as himself to bugger plate IDs on stolen cars and fugitive vehicles without number.
    The little pictures went a long way toward fixing that. A Statue of Liberty was a Statue of Liberty in both bright sunlight and the steady glare of these copper-orange bastards. And no matter what the color, Lady Liberty meant New York.
    Same as that fucked-up crawdaddy he had the spot trained on right now meant Maine. You didn’t have to strain your eyes for VACATIONLAND anymore, or try to figure out if what looked pink or orange or electric: blue was really white. You just looked for the fucked-up crawdaddy. It was really a lobster, Hamilton knew that, but a fucked-up crawdaddy by any other name was still a fucked-up crawdaddy, and he would have gobbled shit right out of a pig’s ass before he put one of those fucking crawdads in his mouth, but he was mighty glad they were there, all the same.
    Especially when he had a want on a crawdaddy license plate, as he did tonight.
    â€œAsk Mamma if she believes this, ” he murmured, and put the cruiser in Park. He took his clipboard from the magnetized strip which held it to the center of the dash just above the driveshaft hump, flipped past the blank citation form all cops kept as a shield over the hot-sheet (no need for the general public to be gawking at the license plate numbers the cops were particularly interested in while the cop to whom the sheet belonged was grabbing a hamburger or taking an express dump at a handy filling station), and ran his thumbnail down the list.
    And here it was. 96529Q; State of Maine; home of the fucked-up crawdaddies.
    Trooper Hamilton’s initial pass had shown him no one was in the cab of the truck. There was a rifle-rack, but it was empty. It was possible—not likely, but possible—that there might be someone in the bed of the truck. It was even possible that the someone in the bed of the truck might have the rifle which belonged in the rack. More likely, the driver was either long gone or grabbing a burger inside. All the same . . .
    â€œOld cops, bold cops, but no old bold cops,” Trooper Hamilton said in a low voice. He snapped off the spot and slowly cruised on down the line of cars. He paused twice more,