The Regulators Read online

  They began to retreat down the hall on their hands and knees. Johnny went backward at first, then swung around, brushing the splinters of the fallen Hummel figure with his moccasins. Brad was already past the doorway to the Carver dining room and most of the way to the kitchen, where his wife, also on her knees, waited for him. Brad’s considerable rear end wagged back and forth in a way Johnny might have considered comical under other circumstances.

  Something caught his eye and he stopped. There was a small decorative table by the entrance to the dining room where David Carver would never preside over another Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas goose. This table had been loaded down with, gee, what a surprise, a dozen or so Hummel figures. The table wasn’t standing flat but leaning back against the wall to the right of the door, like a drunk dozing against a lamppost. One of its legs had been sheared off. The Hummel shepherdesses and milkmaids and farmboys were now mostly on their backs or faces, and there were more china fragments under the table where one or more had fallen off and shattered. Among the painted pieces there was something else, something black. In the gloom, Johnny first took it for the corpse of some huge dead bug. Another crawling pace disabused him of that idea.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the fist-sized hole in the upper panel of the screen door. If a slug had made that, one running the last part of a downward trajectory—

  He traced the course such a hypothetical slug might have taken and saw that, yes, it could have sheared off the table-leg, knocking the table itself back into that posture of leaning drunken surprise. And then, its force spent, come to rest?

  Johnny reached into the litter of china, hoping he wouldn’t cut himself (his hand was shaking badly, and concentration would not still it), and picked up the black object.

  “What you got?” Brad asked, crawling toward Johnny.

  “Brad, you get back here!” Belinda whispered fiercely.

  “Hush, now,” Brad told her. “What you got there, John?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and held it up. He supposed he did know, actually, had known almost as soon as he had determined that it wasn’t the remains of some weird summer beetle. But it was like no fired slug he had ever seen in his life. It wasn’t the one that had taken the girl’s life, that much seemed certain; it would have been flattened and twisted out of shape. This thing didn’t seem to have so much as a scratch on it, although it had been fired, had gone through a panel of the screen door, and had sheared off the table-leg.

  “Let me see,” Brad said. His wife had crawled up beside him and was looking over his shoulder.

  Johnny dropped it into Brad’s pale palm, a black cone about seven inches long from its tip, which looked sharp enough to cut skin, to its circular base. He guessed it was about two inches in diameter at its widest point. It was solid black metal, and completely unmarked, so far as Johnny could see. There were no concentric rings stamped into the base, no sign of a firing point (no bright nick left by the firing pin of the gun which had thrown it, for that matter), no manufacturer’s name, no caliber stamp.

  Brad looked up. “What in the hell?” he asked, sounding as bewildered as Johnny felt.

  “Let me see,” Belinda said in a low voice. “My father used to take me shooting, and I was his good little helper when he did reloads. Give it over.”

  Brad passed it to her. She rolled the metal cone between her fingers, then held it up to her eyes. Thunder banged outside, the sharpest peal in the last few minutes, and they all jumped.

  “Where’d you find it?” she asked Johnny.

  He pointed at the litter of china under the leaning table.

  “Yeah?” She looked skeptical. “How come it didn’t go into the wall?”

  Now that she posed the question, he realized what a good one it was. It had only gone through a screen and a flimsy table-leg; why hadn’t it gone into the wall, leaving just a hole behind?

  “I’ve never seen anything like this puppy in my life,” Belinda said. “Of course, I haven’t seen everything, far from it, but I can tell you that this didn’t come from a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun.”

  “Shotguns are what they were firing, though,” Johnny said. “Double-barrelled shotguns. You’re sure this couldn’t—”

  “I don’t even know how it was launched,” she said. “There’s no firing nipple on the bottom, that’s for sure. And it’s so clunky. Like a kid’s idea of what a bullet looks like.”

  The swing-door between the hall and the kitchen opened, banging against the wall and startling them even more badly than the thunder had done. It was Susi Geller. Her face was horribly white, and to Johnny she looked all of eleven years old. “There’s someone screaming next door, at Billingsley’s,” she said. “It sounds like a woman, but it’s hard to tell. It’s scaring the kids.”

  “All right, honey,” Belinda said. She sounded perfectly calm, and Johnny admired her for that. “You go on back in the kitchen, now. We’ll be along in a second.”

  “Where’s Debbie?” Susi asked. Her view down the hall to the stoop was mercifully blocked by the wide-bodied Josephsons. “Did she go next door? I thought she was right behind me.” She paused. “You don’t think that’s her screaming, do you?”

  “No, I’m sure it’s not,” Johnny said, and was appalled to find himself once more on the edge of crazy laughter. “Go on, now, Suze.”

  She went back into the kitchen, letting the door close behind her. The three of them looked at one another for a moment with sick conspirators’ eyes. None of them said anything. Then Belinda handed the gawky-looking black cone back to Johnny, duck-walked past him to the kitchen door, and pushed it open. Brad followed on his hands and knees. Johnny looked at the slug a moment longer, thinking of what the woman had said, that it was like a kid’s idea of a bullet. She was right. He had visited his share of lower-elementary-school classrooms since beginning to chronicle the adventures of Pat the Kitty-Cat, and he had seen a lot of drawings, big grinning mommies and daddies standing under yellow Crayola suns, weird green landscapes festooned with bold brown trees, and this looked like something that had fallen out of one of those pictures, whole and intact, somehow made real.

  Little bitty baby Smitty, a voice said way back in his mind, but when he tried to chase after that voice, wanting to ask if it really knew something or was just blowing off its bazoo, it was gone.

  Johnny put the slug in his right front pants pocket with his car keys and then followed the Josephsons into the kitchen.

  4

  Steven Jay Ames, pretty much of a scratched entry in the great American steeplechase, had a motto, and this motto was

  NO PROBLEM, MAN.

  He had gotten D’s in his first semester at MIT—this in spite of SAT scores somewhere in the ionosphere—but, hey,

  NO PROBLEM, MAN.

  He had transferred from electrical engineering to general engineering, and when his grades still hadn’t risen past the magical 2.0 point, he had packed his bags and gone down the road to Boston University, having decided to give up the sterile halls of science for the green fields of English Lit. Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, a little T. S. Eliot. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of the universe, here we go round the prickly pear; twentieth-century angst, man. He had done okay at BU for awhile, then had flunked out in his junior year, as much a victim of obsessive bridge-playing as of booze and Panama Red. But

  NO PROBLEM, MAN.

  He had drifted around Cambridge, hanging out, playing guitar and getting laid. He wasn’t much of a guitar-player and did better at getting laid, but

  NO PROBLEM, MAN,

  really. When Cambridge began to get a tad elderly, he had simply cased his guitar and ridden his thumb down to New York City.

  In the years since, he had scuttled his ragged claws through salesman’s jobs, gone around the prickly pear as a disc jockey at a short-lived heavy-metal station in Fishkill, New York, gone around again as a radio-station engineer, a rock-show promoter (six go
od shows followed by a nightmarish exit from Providence in the middle of the night—he’d left owing some pretty hard guys about $60,000, but

  NO REAL PROBLEM, MAN),

  as a palmistry guru on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, and then as a guitar tech. That felt like home, somehow, and he became a gun for hire in upstate New York and eastern Pennsylvania. He liked tuning and repairing guitars—it was peaceful. Also, he was a lot better at repairing them than he was at playing them. During this period he had also quit smoking dope and playing bridge, which simplified things even further.

  Two years before, living in Albany, he had become friends with Deke Ableson, who owned Club Smile, a good roadhouse where you could get a bellyful of blues almost any night you wanted. Steve had first shown up at Smile in his capacity as a freelance guitar tech, then had stepped up when the guy running the board had a minor heart attack. At first that had been a problem, maybe the first real one of Steve’s adult life, but for some reason he had stuck with it in spite of his fear of fucking up and being lynched by drunk cycle-wolves. Part of it was Deke, who was unlike every club owner Steve had known up until then: he was not a thief, a lecher, or a fellow who could validate his own existence only by making others miserable and afraid. Also, he actually liked rock and roll, while most club owners Steve had known loathed it, preferring Yanni or Zanfir and his Pan Flute when they were alone in their cars. Deke was exactly the sort of guy that Steve, who had remembered to file a 1040 form exactly once in his life, really liked: a

  ZERO PROBLEMS

  kind of guy. His wife was also a good sort, easygoing and equipped with mild, sleepy eyes, a good sense of humor, beautiful breasts, and not, so far as Steve could tell, an unfaithful bone in her body. Best of all, Sandy was also a recovering bridge addict. Steve had had many deep conversations with her about the almost uncontrollable urge to overbid, especially in a money game.

  In May of this year, Deke had purchased a very large club—a House of Blues kind of deal—in San Francisco. He and Sandy had left the East Coast three weeks ago. He had promised Steve a good job if Steve would pack up all their shit (albums, mostly, over two thousand of them, anachronisms like Hot Tuna and Quicksilver Messenger Service and Canned Heat) and drive it out in a rental truck. Steve’s response:

  NO PROBLEM, DEKE.

  Hey, he hadn’t been out to the West Coast in almost seven years, and he reckoned the change would do him good. Recharge those old Duracells.

  It had taken him a little longer than he had expected to settle his Albany shit, get the truck, load the truck, and get rolling. There had been several phone calls from Deke, the last one sort of testy, and when Steve had mentioned this, Deke had said well, that was what three weeks of sleeping bags and making do with the same half a dozen tee-shirts did to a person—was he coming or not? I’m coming, I’m coming, Steve had replied. Cool it, big guy. And he had. Left three days ago, in fact. Everything groovy at first. Then, this afternoon, he had blown a hose or something, he had taken the Wentworth exit in search of the Great American Service Station, and then—whoa, dude—there had come a big bang from under the hood and all the dials on the dashboard started showing bad news. He hoped it was just a blown seal, but it had actually sounded more like a piston. In any case, the Ryder truck, which had been a beauty ever since he had left New York, had suddenly turned into a beast. Still,

  NO PROBLEM;

  just find Mr. Goodwrench and let him do his thing.

  Steve had taken a wrong turn, though, away from the turnpike business area and into a much more suburban neighborhood, not the sort of place where Mr. Goodwrench was apt to hang out during working hours. He had really been babying the truck by then, steam coming out through the grille, oil-pressure dropping, temperature rising, an unpleasant fried smell coming in through the air vents . . . but really

  NO PROBLEM, MAN.

  Well . . . maybe a

  VERY SMALL PROBLEM

  for the Ryder people, that was true, but Steve had an idea they’d be able to bear up under the burden. Then—hey, beautiful, baby—a little neighborhood store with a blue pay-phone sign hung over the door . . . and the number to call if you had engine trouble was right up there on the driver’s-side sun-visor.

  ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM,

  story of his life.

  Only now there was a problem. One that made learning the soundboard at Club Smile look like a minor annoyance in comparison.

  He was in a little house that smelled of pipe tobacco, he was in a living room with framed photos of animals—pretty special ones, according to the captions—on the walls, a living room where only the huge, shapeless chair in front of the TV looked really used, and he had just tied his bandanna around his leg where he had sustained a bullet-wound, shallow but a bona fide bullet-wound just the same, and people were yelling, scared and yelling, and the skinny woman in the sleeveless blouse was also wounded (nothing shallow about hers, either) and outside people were dead, and if all this wasn’t a problem, then Steve guessed that “problem” was a concept without meaning.

  His arm was grabbed above the wrist, and painfully. He wasn’t just being grabbed, actually; he was being pinched. He looked down and saw the girl in the blue store duster, the one with the crazed hair. “Don’t you freak on me,” she said in a ragged voice. “That lady needs help or she’s going to die, so do not freak on me.”

  “No problem, cookie,” he said, and just hearing the words—any words—coming out of his mouth made him feel a little stronger.

  “Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake,” she said in a prim little no-nonsense voice.

  He burst out laughing. It sounded extremely weird in this room, but he didn’t care. She didn’t seem to, either. She was looking back at him with just the faintest touch of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t call you cookie, and don’t you call me cake, and neither of us’ll freak, fair enough?”

  “Yeah. What about your leg?”

  “It’s okay. Looks more like a floor-burn than a bullet-wound.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Yeah. I might dump a little disinfectant on it if I get a chance, but compared to her—”

  “Gary!” the object of comparison bawled. The arm, Steve saw, was now hardly attached to the rest of her body at all; it seemed to be hanging by a thin strap of flesh. Her husband, also skinny (but with a blooming suburban potbelly just beginning to take shape), did a kind of helpless, panicky dance around her. He reminded Steve of a native in an old jungle flick doing the Cool Jerk around a brooding stone idol.

  “Gary!” she screamed again. Blood was running out of her mangled shoulder in a steady stream, turning the left side of her pink top to a muddy maroon. Her paper-white face was drenched with sweat; her hair clung to the curve of her skull in clumps. “Gary, quit acting like a dog looking for a place to piss and help me—”

  She collapsed back against the wall between the living room and the kitchenette, panting for breath. Steve expected her knees to buckle, but they didn’t. Instead, she grasped her left wrist with her right hand and lifted her wounded arm carefully toward Steve and Cynthia. The blood-glistening twist of gristle that was still connecting it to the rest of her made a squelchy sound, like a wet dishrag when you wring it out, and Steve wanted to tell her not to do that, to stop fooling with herself before she tore the goddam thing off like a wing off a baked chicken.

  Then Gary was doing the Cool Jerk in front of Steve, going up and down like a man on a pogo stick, patches of hectic red standing out on his pale face. Gimme a little bass with those eighty-eights, Steve thought.

  “Help her!” Gary cried. “Help my wife! Bleeding to death!”

  “I can’t—” Steve began.

  Gary reached out and seized the front of Steve’s tee-shirt. When there’s no more room in hell, this artifact said, the dead will walk the earth. He thrust his thin and feverish face up toward Steve’s. His eyes glittered with gin and panic. “Are you with th
em? Are you one of them?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Are you with the shooters? Tell me the truth!”

  Angrier than he would have believed possible (anger was not, ordinarily, his thing at all), Steve knocked the man’s hands away from his old and much-loved tee-shirt, then pushed him. Gary took a stagger-step backward, his eyes first widening, then narrowing again.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, yeah. You asked for it. You asked for it and now you’re gonna get it.” He started forward.

  Cynthia got between them, glancing at Steve for a moment—probably to assure herself that he wasn’t in attack-mode yet—and then glaring at Gary. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” she asked him.

  Gary smiled tightly. “He’s not from around here, is he?”

  “Christ, neither am I! I’m from Bakersfield, California—does that make me one of them?”

  “Gary!” It sounded like the yap of a dog that has run a long way on a dusty road and pretty much barked itself out. “Stop fucking around and help me! My arm . . .” She continued to hold it out, and what Steve thought of now—he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it—was Mucci’s Fine Meats in Newton. Guy in a white shirt, white cap, and bloodstained apron, holding out a peeled joint of meat to his mother. Serve it medium-rare with a little mint jelly on the side, Mrs. Ames, and your family will never ask for roast chicken again. I guarantee it.

  “Gary!”

  The skinny guy with the gin on his breath took a step toward her, then looked back at Steve and Cynthia. The tight, knowing smile was gone. Now he only looked sick. “I don’t know what to do for her,” he said.

  “Gary, you diseased ratbrain,” Marielle said in a low, hopeless voice. “You total dumbwit.” Her face was growing ever whiter. She had gone, in fact, that fabled faded whiter shade of pale. There were brown patches beneath her eyes—they seemed to be unfurling like wings—and her left sneaker was now a solid red instead of white.

  She’s going to die if she doesn’t get help right away, Steve thought. The idea made him feel both amazed and somehow stupid. Professional help was what he was thinking about, he supposed, E.R. guys in green suits who said things like “ten cc’s of epi, stat.” But there were no guys like that around, and apparently none coming. He could still hear no sirens, only the sound of thunder retreating slowly into the east.