Dolan's Cadillac

Dolan's Cadillac is a short story by Stephen King. It is included in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, King's third collection of short stories. There were plans to adapt it into a feature film starring Kevin Bacon and Sylvester Stallone, with Stacy Title in the director's chair, but the project never came to fruition.

The story is narrated by the protagonist, a schoolteacher, and there is only one other main character, Dolan (the villain).

The narrator, Robinson, no first name given, finds himself a childless widower when Dolan, a wealthy crime-boss, has Robinson's wife murdered in order to prevent her from testifying against him. The murder (by ignition bomb) is never solved, and Robinson, unskilled in the arts of revenge, has no recourse. Over a seven-year period, however, haunted mentally by his wife's voice, Robinson devises a scheme of retaliation. Discovering that Dolan regularly makes the same cross-country road trip in his silver Cadillac, Robinson sets an elaborate trap on a desert road in Nevada: he excavates a funnel-shaped ditch just wide enough to contain the car, but not so wide as to allow escape through the doors. Robinson even takes on a summer job with a road paving crew just so that he can learn to operate the heavy equipment he needs to execute his plan. In the end, the plan is successful, and Dolan is buried alive in his Cadillac. Robinson pays a relatively small price of undergoing much physical and mental exhaustion, but he feels satisfied that he has done a great service to the memory of his late wife, whose voice finally falls silent.

The story is a homage to Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado.