Ace and Buster plant bombs throughout the town

Ace Merrill and Danforth Keeton’s bombing operation converts the town’s private resentments and Gaunt’s manipulation into an immediate, town-wide threat. In a rainstorm, the two men load commercial dynamite into a van, plant a timed charge beneath Tin Bridge, and leave more explosives at businesses and public places along Main Street; Keeton’s confused suspicions have become a plan to blow Castle Rock apart, while Ace provides the means and keeps the operation moving.

Causes and Preparation

The operation begins with a cache of commercial dynamite. Keeton produces a key to a locked shed marked with red diamond-shaped explosives signs; inside, an air conditioner keeps the room cool and crates of dynamite are stacked for access. The supply is not an abstract threat but a specific stockpile, and its availability changes the scale of what the two men can attempt.

As Alan Pangborn approaches Castle Rock, and Norris Ridgewick sits at home making a hangman’s noose, Ace searches the crates by flashlight beneath the shed roof while rain drums overhead. The parallel actions place the bombing plot alongside other crises already unfolding in town. Ace calls for a break, uses the cocaine Gaunt has supplied, and shares it with Keeton. The drug serves as a practical inducement as well as part of their arrangement: Keeton accepts it, and the men return to the explosives with heightened urgency.

They load the crates in less than ten minutes. Keeton drives the van back toward town, while Ace sits in the rear connecting Hotpoint timers to blasting caps. Cocaine intensifies Keeton’s sense that he can finally understand the supposed plots against him. He explains his beliefs to Ace, including the conviction that Alan is the ringleader of the group he calls Them, but his attention has shifted toward destroying Castle Rock. Ace encourages him and listens as Keeton describes the imagined conspiracy. The shift from confusion to certainty gives the operation its immediate motive, though that certainty rests on delusion rather than evidence.

Tin Bridge and the First Charge

Before setting out through town, the pair stop at Tin Bridge. They cross it while Alan is still three miles away, get out in the pouring rain, and prepare one of their packages. Ace wraps a bundle of dynamite and a timer in a blanket, then descends the wet bank beneath the bridge. The blanket conceals the parcel during the approach; the charge and blasting caps themselves have been waterproofed.

Under the bridge, Ace wedges the package into the bend formed by two struts, attaches the blasting cap by inserting its stripped wires into a stick of dynamite, and turns the timer’s large white dial to forty. It starts ticking. He climbs back up to Keeton, who waits anxiously for confirmation that the charge will work. They leave about seven minutes before Alan crosses; the timer’s marker is then at thirty. The precise interval makes the bridge a timed hazard on Alan’s route, not merely one more target in the town.

Bombs Along Main Street

Ace and Keeton drive slowly up Main Street in the rain, leaving bundles as they go. State Police cars pass them twice without recognizing the van as anything more than a television news vehicle. Their apparent ordinariness provides cover while Gaunt’s activity elsewhere keeps the authorities occupied.

At the Samuels Funeral Home, they leave a timer and five sticks of dynamite in the doorway. Ace protects his arm with a piece of blanket, breaks the glass in the door, and throws the bomb inside, where it comes to rest near the barber shop’s number-one chair with the timer set at twenty-five. The choice of an exposed doorway and a nearby shop puts the charge among ordinary destinations, turning familiar commercial spaces into sites of concealed danger.

They divide their next placements: Ace tosses a bundle into Galaxia, while Keeton pushes another into the bank’s night-deposit slot. Lightning and a falling elm briefly make them think the bridge charge has exploded early, but no fireball appears. They continue. At Nan’s, Ace breaks the door glass with his elbow and leaves another dynamite package with a ticking timer just inside, near the cash register. A flash of lightning then knocks out the streetlights. Keeton takes the blackout as an opportunity to propose attacking the Municipal Building, suggesting entry through the courthouse by means of a master key. The episode therefore ends with the pair expanding their intended targets rather than treating the existing placements as the end of the campaign.

Consequences and Significance

The placements establish a coordinated bombing campaign across several kinds of civic and commercial space: a bridge, funeral home, barber shop, gallery, bank, and restaurant. Their different locations and timers create multiple points of danger while the two perpetrators remain mobile. The city’s storm and power failure compound the threat, and the passing State Police cars demonstrate how easily the operation can move through the town without being detected.

The partnership is sharply unequal in function. Keeton supplies access to the dynamite and embraces the fantasy that destruction will defeat the people he imagines conspiring against him. Ace handles the timers, blasting caps, placements, and practical decisions, while using cocaine to sustain the pace and reinforce their bond. Their familiar, joking address as father and son overlays a conspiracy neither understands in the same way: Keeton’s paranoia finds a destructive outlet, and Ace turns that impulse into a sequence of timed devices. The bombing operation makes the novel’s larger chain of manipulated grievance materially dangerous, leaving the town vulnerable to the explosives even as Alan approaches.