The Regulators (5 page)

Brad looked up at him and smiled painfully. His face was running with sweat. “Maybe,” he said.

Collie walked over to the yellow rental truck, noting the red wagon nearby. There were a couple of unopened sodas lying inside it. A 3 Musketeers candybar lay beside one of the rear wheels. Someone had stepped on it and squashed it.

Screams from behind him. He turned and saw the Reed twins, their faces very pale beneath their summer tans, looking past their dog to the boy crumpled on his lawn. The twin with the blond hair—Jim, he thought—began to cry. The other one took a step backward, grimaced, then bent forward and vomited onto his own bare feet.

Crying loudly, Mrs. Carver lifted her son back out of the truck. The boy, also bawling at maximum volume, threw his arms around her neck and clung like a limpet.

“Hush,” the woman in the jeans and the misbuttoned shirt said. “Hush, lovey, it's over. The bad man's gone.”

David Carver took his daughter from the arms of the man lying awkwardly over the seat and enfolded her.

“
Dad-dy,
you're getting me all soapy!” the girl protested.

Carver kissed her brow between the eyes. “Never mind,” he said. “Are you all right, Ellie?”

“Yes,” she said. “What happened?”

She tried to look toward the street, and her father shielded her eyes.

Collie went to the woman and the little boy. “Is he okay, Mrs. Carver?”

She looked at him, not seeming to recognize him, and then turned her attention back to the squalling kid again, caressing his hair with one hand, seeming to devour him with her eyes. “Yes, I think so,” she said. “
Are
you okay, Ralphie? Are you?”

The kid drew in a deep, hitching breath and bellowed:
“Margrit's spozed to pull me up the hill! That was the deal!”

The little snot sounded okay to Collie. He turned back toward the crime-scene, noted the dog lying in a spreading pool of blood, noted that the blond Reed twin was tentatively approaching the body of the unfortunate paperboy.

“Stay away!” Collie called sharply across the street.

Jim Reed turned toward him. “But what if he's still alive?”

“What if he is? Have you got any healing fairy-dust to sprinkle on him? No? Then stand back!”

The boy stepped toward his brother, then winced. “Oh man, Davey, look at your
feet,
” he said, then turned aside and threw up himself.

Collie Entragian suddenly felt tumbled back into the job he thought he had left behind for good the previous October, when he had been bounced from the Columbus Police Department after a positive drug test. Cocaine and heroin. A good trick, since he had never taken either drug in his life.

First priority: protect the citizenry. Second priority: aid the wounded. Third priority: secure the crime-scene. Fourth priority . . .

Well, he'd worry about the fourth priority after he'd taken care of one, two, and three.

The store's new day-clerk—a skinny girl with double-colored hair that made Collie's eyes hurt—slid out of the truck and straightened her blue smock, which was badly askew. The truck's driver followed her. “You a cop?” he asked Collie.

“Yes.”
Easier than trying to explain. The Carvers would know different, of course, but they were occupied with their kids, and Brad Josephson was still behind him, bent over and trying to catch his breath. “You folks get in the store. All of you. Brad? Boys?” He raised his voice a little on the last word, so that the Reed twins would know he meant them.

“No, I'd better get on back home,” Brad said. He straightened up, glanced across the street at Cary's body, then looked back at Collie. His expression was apologetic but determined. At least he was getting his breath back; for a minute or two there, Collie had been reviewing what he remembered of his CPR classes. “Belinda's up there, and . . .”

“Yes, but it'd be better for you to come on in the store, Mr. Josephson, at least for the time being. In case the van comes back.”

“Why would it?” David Carver asked. He was still holding his little girl in his arms and staring at Collie over the top of her head.

Collie shrugged. “I don't know. I don't know why it was here in the first place. Better to be safe. Get inside, folks.”

“Do you have any authority here?” Brad asked. His voice, although not exactly challenging, suggested that he knew Collie didn't. Collie folded his arms over his bare chest. The depression which had surrounded him since he'd been busted off the force had begun to lift a little in the last few weeks, but now he could feel it threatening again. After a moment he shook his head. No. No authority. Not these days.

“Then
I am going to my wife. No offense to you, sir.”

Collie had to smile a little at the careful dignity of the man's tone. You don't diss me and I don't diss you, it said. “None taken.”

The twins looked at each other uncertainly, then at Collie.

He saw what they wanted and sighed. “All right. But go with Mr. Josephson. And when you get home, you and your friends go inside. Okay?”

The blond boy nodded.

“Jim—you
are
Jim, right?”

The blond boy nodded, wiping self-consciously at his red eyes.

“Is your mom home? Or your dad?”

“Mom,” he said. “Dad's still at work.”

“Okay, boys. Go on. Hurry up. You too, Brad.”

“I'll do the best I can,” Brad said, “but I think I have pretty well fulfilled my hurrying quota for the day.”

The three of them started up the hill, along the west side of the street, where the odd-numbered houses were.

“I'd like to take our kids home, too, Mr. Entragian,” Kirsten Carver said.

He sighed, nodded. Sure, what the hell, take them anywhere. Take them to Alaska. He wanted a cigarette, but they were back in the house. He had managed to quit for almost ten years before the bastards downtown had first shown him the door and then run him through it. He had picked up the habit again with a speed that was spooky. And now he wanted to
smoke because he was nervous. Not just cranked up because of the dead kid on his lawn, which would have been understandable, but
nervous.
Nervous like-a de
vitch,
his mother would have said. And why?

Because there are too many people on this street, he told himself, that's why.

Oh, really? And what exactly does
that
mean?

He didn't know.

What's wrong with you? Too long out of work? Getting squirrely? Is
that
what's buggin you, booby?

No. The silver thing on the roof of the van. That's what's buggin me, booby.

Oh? Really?

Well, maybe not really . . . but it would do for a start. Or an excuse. In the end a hunch was a hunch, and either you believed in your hunches and played them or you didn't. He himself had always believed, and apparently a minor matter like getting fired hadn't changed the power they held over him.

David Carver set his daughter down on her feet and took his blatting son from his wife. “I'll pull you in the wagon,” he told the boy. “All the way up to the house. How's that?”

“Margrit the Maggot loves Ethan Hawke,” his son confided.

“Does she? Well, maybe so, but you shouldn't call her that,” David said. He spoke in the absent tones of a man who will forgive his child—
one
of his children, anyway—just about anything. And his wife was looking at the kid with the eyes of one who regards a saint, or a boy prophet. Only Collie Entragian saw the
look of dull hurt in the girl's eyes as her revered brother was plumped down into the wagon. Collie had other things to think of, lots of them, but that look was just too big and too sad to miss. Yow.

He looked from Ellie Carver to the girl with the crazed hair and the aging hippie-type from the rental truck. “Do you suppose I could at least get you to step inside until the police come?” he asked.

“Hey,” the girl said, “sure.” She was looking at him warily. “You're a cop, right?”

The Carvers were drawing away, Ralph sitting cross-legged in his wagon, but they might still be close enough to overhear anything he said . . . and besides, what was he going to do? Lie? You start down that road, he told himself, and maybe you can wind up on Freak Street, an ex-cop with a collection of badges in your basement, like Elvis, and a couple of extras pinned inside your wallet for good measure. Call yourself a private detective, although you never quite get around to applying for the license. Ten or fifteen years from now you'll still be talking the talk and at least trying to walk the walk, like a woman in her thirties who wears miniskirts and goes braless in an effort to convince people (most of whom don't give a shit anyway) that her cheerleading days aren't behind her.

“Used to be,” he said. The clerk nodded. The guy with the long hair was looking at him curiously but not disrespectfully. “You did a good job with the kids,” he added, looking at her but speaking to both of them.

Cynthia considered this, then shook her head. “It was the dog,” she said, and began walking toward the
store. Collie and the aging hippie followed her. “The guy in the van—the one with the shotgun—he meant to throw some fire at the kids.” She turned to the longhair. “Did you see that? Do you agree?”

He nodded. “There wasn't a thing either of us could do to stop him, either.” He spoke in an accent too twangy to be deep southern. Texas, Collie thought. Texas or Oklahoma. “Then the dog distracted him—isn't that what happened?—and he shot it, instead.”

“That's it,” Cynthia said. “If it
hadn't
distracted the guy . . . well . . . I think we'd be as dead as him now.” She lifted her chin in the direction of Cary Ripton, still dead and dampening on Collie's lawn. Then she led them into the E-Z Stop.

Poplar Street/3:58
P.M
./July 15, 1996

Moments after Collie, Cynthia, and the longhair from the Ryder truck go inside the store, a van pulls up on the southwestern corner of Poplar and Hyacinth, across from the E-Z Stop. It's a flaked metallic blue with dark polarized windows. There's no chrome gadget on its roof, but its sides are flared and scooped in a futuristic way that makes it look more like a scout-vehicle in a science-fiction movie than a van. The tires are entirely treadless, as smooth and blank as the surface of a freshly washed blackboard. Deep within the darkness behind the tinted windows, dim colored lights flash rhythmically, like telltales on a control panel.

Thunder rumbles, closer and sharper now. The summer brightness begins to fade from the sky; clouds, purple-black and threatening, are piling in
from the west. They reach for the July sun and put it out. The temperature begins to sink at once.

The blue van hums quietly. Up the block, at the top of the hill, another van—this one the bright yellow of a fake banana—pulls up at the southeast corner of Bear Street and Poplar. It stops there, also humming quietly.

The first really sharp crack of thunder comes, and a bright shutter-flash of lightning follows. It shines in Hannibal's glazing right eye for a moment, making it glow like a spirit-lamp.

Gary Soderson was still standing in the street when his wife joined him. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked. “You look like you're in a trance, or something.”

“You didn't hear it?”

“Hear what?” she asked irritably. “I was in the shower, what'm I gonna hear in there?” Gary had been married to the lady for nine years and knew that, in Marielle, irritation was a dominant trait. “The Reed kids with their Frisbee, I heard them. Their damn dog barking. Thunder. What else'm I gonna hear? The Norman Dickersnackle Choir?”

He pointed down the street, first toward the dog (she wouldn't have Hannibal to complain about anymore, at least), then toward the twisted shape on the lawn of 240. “I don't know for sure, but I
think
someone just shot the kid who delivers the
Shopper.
”

She peered in the direction of his finger, squinting, shading her eyes even though the sun had now disappeared (to Gary it felt as if the temperature had already dropped at least ten degrees). Brad Josephson was trudging up the sidewalk toward them. Peter Jackson was out in front of his house, looking curiously down the hill. So was Tom Billingsley, the vet most people called Old Doc. The Carver family was crossing the street from the store side to the side their house was on, the girl walking next to her mother and holding her hand. Dave Carver (looking to Gary like a boiled lobster in the bathing suit he was wearing—a soap-crusted boiled lobster, at that) was pulling his son in a little red wagon. The boy, who was sitting cross-legged and staring around with the imperious disdain of a pasha, had always struck Gary as about a 9.5 on the old Shithead-Meter.