Roadwork
Stephen King
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0451197879
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What happens when one good-and-angry man fights back is murder—and then some….
Bart Dawes is standing in the way of progress. A new highway extension is being built right over the laundry plant where he works—and right over his home. The house he has lived in for twenty years…where he has made love with his wife…played with his son…. But before the city paves over that part of Dawes’ life, he’s got one more party to throw—and it’ll be a blast….
With an Introduction by the Author, “The Importance of Being Bachman”
the general manager, who would brood over it. The food came, brought by a waitress in a white nylon pants suit. He estimated her age at three hundred, possibly three hundred and four. Ditto weight. A small card over her left breast said:GAYLE Thanks For Your Patronage Nicky’s Diner Tom had a slice of roast beef that was floating belly up in a plateful of gravy. He had ordered two cheeseburgers, rare, with an order of French fries. He knew the cheeseburgers would be well done. He had eaten
“I’m going to moonlight weekends and you’re going to moonlight afternoons. But what, dear Mary, Oh-not-so-Virgin Mary, are we going to do?” She pounced on him, giggling, her breasts a soft weight on his stomach (flat-enough in those days, Freddy, not a sign of a bay window). “That’s the trick of it!” she said. “What’s today? June eighteenth?” “That’s right.” “Well, you do your weekend things, and on December eighteenth we’ll put our money together—” “—and buy a toaster,” he said, grinning.
bands. He got up, took the two degrees off the wall, and threw them into the wastebasket. The glass covering the Laundry Institute diploma shattered. The squares where the degrees had hung all these years were a little brighter than the rest of the wall, and that was all. The phone rang and he picked it up, thinking it would be Ordner. But it was Ron Stone, calling from downstairs. “Bart?” “Yeah.” “Johnny passed away a half hour ago. I guess he never really had a chance.” “I’m very sorry. I
lined up along the railing like clay ducks in a shooting gallery, the cold vapor pluming from their mouths, gawking at the bulldozers and graders and the surveyors with their sextants and tripods. He could cheerfully have shot all of them. But at night, with the temperatures down in the 20’s, with sunset a bitter orange line in the west and thousands of stars already pricking coldly through the firmament overhead, he could measure the road’s progress alone and undisturbed. The moments he spent
Baker? Barker? Something like that. I saw him at the Stop and Shop last Friday, handing out leaflets about a lettuce boycott or something. That’s something, isn’t it? A fellow can’t hold a job, so he goes out telling everyone how fucking lousy it is that America can’t be like Russia. That breaks my heart.” “You’ll run Howard Johnson next?” Stone looked wounded. “We always run it first thing.” “By nine?” “Bet your ass.” Dave waved to him, and he waved back. He went upstairs, through