The Dark Half by Stephen King

landlady who had once been the capital city’s most sought-after fuck would just have to hang on.
    Which she always had.
    Which she intended to keep on doing.
    And God help anyone who got in her way.
    Like Frederick “Mr. Bigshot” Clawson, for instance.
    She reached the second-floor landing. Guns n’ Roses was bellowing out of the Shulmans’ apartment.
    â€œTURN THAT FUCKING RECORD-PLAYER DOWN!” she yelled at the top of her lungs . . . and when Dodie Eberhart raised her voice to its maximum decibel level, windows cracked, the eardrums of small childen ruptured, and dogs fell dead.
    The music went from a scream to a whisper at once. She could sense the Shulmans quivering against each other like a pair of scared poppies in a thunderstorm and praying it was not them the Wicked Witch of L Street had come to see They were afraid of her. That was not an unwise way to feel. Shulman was a corporate lawyer with a high-powered firm, but he was still two ulcers away from being high-powered enough to give Dodie pause. If he should cross her at this stage of his young life, she would wear his guts for garters, and he knew it, and that was very satisfactory.
    When the bottom dropped out of both your bank accounts and your investment portfolio, you had to take your satisfactions where you found them.
    Dodie turned the corner without breaking stride and started up the stairs to the third floor, where Frederick “Mr. Bigshot” Clawson lived in solitary splendor. She walked with that same even rhino-crossing-the-veldt stride, head up, not in the least out of breath in spite of her poundage, the staircase shaking the tiniest bit in spite of its solidity.
    She was looking forward to this.
    Clawson wasn’t even on a low rung of a corporate-law ladder. As of now, he wasn’t on the ladder at all. Like all the law students she had ever met (mostly as tenants; she had certainly never fucked any in what she now thought of as her “other life”), he was composed chiefly of high aspirations and low funds, both of them floating on a generous cushion of bullshit. Dodie did not, as a rule, confuse any of these elements. Falling for a law student’s line of bull was, in her mind, as bad as turning a trick for free. Once you started in with behavior like that, you might as well hang up your jock.
    Figuratively speaking, of course.
    Yet Frederick “Mr. Bigshot” Clawson had partially breached her defenses. He had been late with the rent four times in a row and she had allowed this because he had convinced her that in his case the tired old scripture was really the truth (or might come to be): he did have money coming in.
    He could not have done this to her if he had claimed Sidney Sheldon was really Robert Ludlum, or Victoria Holt was really Rosemary Rogers, because she didn’t give a shit about those people or their billions of writealikes. She was into crime novels, and if they were real gutbucket crime novels, so much the better. She supposed there were plenty of people out there who went for the romantic slop and the spy shit, if the Post Sunday best-seller list was any indication, but she had been reading Elmore Leonard for years before he hit the lists, and she had also formed strong attachments for Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Horace McCoy, Charles Willeford, and the rest of those guys. If you wanted it short and sweet, Dodie Eberhart liked novels where men robbed banks, shot each other, and demonstrated how much they loved their women mostly by beating the shit out of them.
    George Stark, in her opinion, was—or had been—the best of them. She had been a dedicated fan from Machine’s Way and Oxford Blues right up to Riding to Babylon, which looked to be the last of them.
    The bigshot in the third-floor apartment had been surrounded by notes and Stark novels the first time she came to dun him about the rent (only three days overdue that time, but of course if you gave