The Regulators Read online

  There was a screened window behind the sink. Looking through it to the right, she could see the stake fence separating the Carvers’ plot from Old Doc’s. She could also see the green roof of the Billingsley house. Above it, the clouds already appeared to be unravelling.

  She turned and boosted herself, sitting sidesaddle on the edge of the sink. Then she leaned close to the screen, smelling its metal and all the wet summer straining through its mesh. The combined scents called up a momentary nostalgia for her childhood, a feeling that was both fine and fierce. It was strange, she thought, how it was almost always the smells of things that took you back the hardest.

  “Halloo!” she called, cupping her hands around her mouth. Brad grabbed her shoulder, apparently wanting her to stop, and she shook him off emphatically. “Halloo, Billingsley!”

  “Don’t do that, Bee,” Cammie Reed said. “It’s not wise.”

  And what would be wise? Belinda thought. Just sitting on the kitchen floor and waiting for the cavalry to come?

  “Hell, go on,” Johnny said. “What harm can it do? If the people who did the shooting are still around, I imagine that where we are is hardly a big secret to them.” An idea seemed to strike him at that, and he dropped on his hunkers in front of the late postman’s wife. “Kirsten, did David have a gun? A hunting rifle, or maybe—”

  “There’s a pistol in his desk,” she said. “Second drawer on the left of the kneehole. That drawer’s locked, but the key’s in the wide drawer at the top. It’s on a piece of green yarn.”

  Johnny nodded. “And the desk? Where’s that?”

  “Oh. In his little office. Upstairs, the end of the hall.” She said all this while seeming to contemplate her own knees, then raised desperate, distracted eyes to look at him. “He’s out in the rain, Johnny. So is Susi’s friend. We shouldn’t leave them out in the rain.”

  “It’s stopping,” Johnny said, and his face suggested he knew how inane that sounded. It seemed to satisfy Pie, though, at least temporarily, and Belinda supposed that was the important thing. Perhaps it was Johnny’s tone. The words might be inane, but Belinda had never heard him sound so gentle. “Just take care of your kids, Kirstie, and don’t concern yourself with the rest of it for the time being.”

  He got up and started for the swinging door, walking in a battlefield crouch.

  “Mr. Marinville?” Jim Reed asked. “Can I come with you?” But when he attempted to set Ralphie aside, a panicked look came into the boy’s eyes. His thumb came out of his mouth with an audible pop and he clung to Jim like a barnacle, muttering “No, Jim, no, Jim,” under his breath in a way that made Belinda feel like shivering. She thought mad people probably talked that way when they were alone in their cells at night.

  “Stay where you are, Jim,” Johnny said. “Brad? What about you? Little trip to higher altitudes? Clear the old sinuses?”

  “Sure.” Brad looked at his wife with that expression of love and exasperation that is the sole property of people who have been married over ten years. “You really think it’s okay for this woman of mine to be shooting off her mouth?”

  “I repeat, what harm can it do?”

  “Be careful,” Belinda said. She smoothed a hand briefly across Brad’s chest. “Keep your head down. Promise me.”

  “I promise to keep my head down.”

  She looked at Johnny. “Now you.”

  “Huh? Oh.” He offered a charming grin, and Belinda had a sudden insight: that was the way Mr. John Edward Marinville always grinned when he made promises to women. “I promise.”

  They went out, dropping a little self-consciously to their knees as they passed through the swinging door and once more into the Carvers’ front hall. Belinda leaned toward the screen again. Besides rain and wet grass, she could smell the old Hobart place burning. She realized she could hear it, too—a crackly, whooshing sound. The downpour would probably keep the fire from spreading, but where were the fire trucks, for Christ’s sake? What did they pay their taxes for? “Halloo, Billingsley’s! Who’s there?”

  After a moment, a man’s voice (one she didn’t recognize) called back. “There are seven of us! The couple from up the block—”

  That had to be the Sodersons, Belinda thought.

  —plus the cop, and the guy married to the dead woman. There’s also Mr. Billingsley, and Cynthia, from the store!”

  “Who are you?” Belinda called.

  “Steve Ames! I’m from New York! I was having trouble with my truck, pulled off the Interstate, got lost! I stopped at the store down there to use the phone!”

  “Poor guy,” Dave Reed said. “Like winning the lottery in hell.”

  “What’s going on?” the voice from the other side of the stake fence called. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “No!” Belinda shouted back. She thought furiously. There must be more to say, other things to ask, but she couldn’t think of anything at all.

  “Have you looked up the street? Is it clear?” Ames called.

  Belinda opened her mouth to reply, and then was distracted momentarily by the spider’s web outside the screen. The window’s overhang had protected it from the worst of the squall, but raindrops hung from the gossamer threads like tiny, quivering diamonds. The owner-operator was at the center of the web. Not moving. Maybe dead.

  “Ma’am? I asked—”

  “I don’t know!” she called back. “Johnny Marinville and my husband looked, but now they’ve gone upstairs to—” But she didn’t want to mention the gun. Stupid, maybe—rathole thinking—but it didn’t change the way she felt. “—to get a better look! What about you?”

  “It’s been pretty busy here, ma’am! The woman from up the block—” A pause. “Does your phone work?”

  “No!” Belinda called. “No phone, no electric!”

  Another pause. Then, lower, barely audible over the diminishing hiss of the rain, she heard him say shit. Then there was another voice, one she knew but couldn’t immediately place. “Belinda, is that you?”

  “Yes!” she returned, and looked around at the others for help.

  “It’s Mr. Jackson,” Jim Reed said, speaking around Ralphie’s shoulder. The little boy had not quite managed to join his sister in the refuge of sleep, but Belinda didn’t think it would be long; his thumb had already begun to sag between his lips.

  “I’ve been to the front door!” Peter called. “The street’s deserted all the way down to the corner! Completely deserted! No gawkers or rubberneckers from Hyacinth or the next block of Poplar. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Belinda thought, frowning, then looked around. She saw only puzzled eyes and dropped heads. She turned back to the window. “No!”

  Peter laughed. The sound chilled her the way that little Ralphie Carver’s distraught muttering had chilled her. “Join the club, Bee! Makes no sense to me, either!”

  “Who’d come on the block?” Kim Geller scoffed. “Who in their right minds? With guns going off and people screaming and everything?”

  Belinda didn’t know how to respond to that. It was logical, but it still didn’t hold water . . . because people didn’t behave logically when trouble broke out. They came and they gawked. Usually they did it at what they hoped was a safe distance, but they came.

  “Are you sure there aren’t people down below the corner?” she called.

  This time the pause was so long she was about to repeat the question when a third voice spoke up. She had no trouble recognizing Old Doc. “None of us sees anyone, but the rain has started a mist off the pavement! Until it clears, we can’t tell for sure!”

  “But there are no sirens!” Peter again. “Do you hear any coming from the north?”

  “No!” she returned. “It must be the storm!”

  “I don’t think so,” Cammie Reed said. She spoke for herself, to herself, not the group; if YE OLDE PANTRIE hadn’t been in close proximity to the sink, Belinda wouldn’t have heard her. “Nope, I don’t think so at all.”

  “
I’m going out to get my wife!” Peter Jackson called. Other voices were immediately raised in protest against this idea. Belinda couldn’t make out the words, but the emotional tone was unmistakable.

  Suddenly the spider—the one she had assumed was dead—scuttered from the center of its web and, mounting one of the silk strands, scrambled up until it had disappeared under the eave. Not dead after all, Belinda thought. Only playing possum.

  Then Kirsten Carver was leaning past her, bumping Belinda so hard with her shoulder that Belinda would have gone ass-deep into the sink if she hadn’t managed to grab the corner of an overhead cabinet. Pie’s face was parchment-pale, her eyes blazing with fear.

  “Don’t you go out there!” she screamed. “They’ll come back and kill you! They’ll come back and kill us all!”

  No answer from the other house for several moments, and then Collie Entragian spoke up in a voice that sounded both apologetic and bemused: “No good, ma’am! He’s gone!”

  “You should have stopped him!” Kirsten screamed. Belinda put an arm around the woman’s shoulders and was frightened by the steady high vibration she felt. As if Kirsten was on the verge of exploding. “What kind of policeman are you!”

  “He’s not,” Kim said. She spoke in a just-what-the-hell-did-you-expect tone. “He got kicked off the force. He was running a hot-car ring.”

  Susi raised her head. “I don’t believe it.”

  “What do you know about it, a girl your age?” her mother asked.

  Belinda was about to slide off the edge of the sink when she saw something on the back lawn that made her freeze. It was caught against one leg of the kids’ swing set, and like the spiderweb, jeweled with hanging drops of rain.

  “Cammie?”

  “What?”

  “Come here.”

  If anyone would know, Cammie would; she had a garden in her backyard, a jungle of potted plants inside her house, and a library’s worth of books on growing things.

  Cammie got up from her place by the pantry door, and came over. Susi and her mother joined her; so did Dave Reed.

  “What?” Pie Carver asked, turning a wild gaze on Belinda. Pie’s daughter had her arms wrapped around her mother’s leg as if it were a treetrunk, and was still trying to hide her face against the hip of Pie’s denim shorts. “What is it?”

  Belinda ignored her and spoke to Cammie. “Look over there. By the swings. Do you see?”

  Cammie started to say she didn’t, then Belinda pointed and she did. Thunder mumbled to the east of them, and the breeze kicked up a brief gust. The spiderweb outside the window shivered and shed tiny droplets of rain. The thing Belinda had seen got free of the swing set and rolled partway across the Carvers’ backyard, in the direction of the stake fence.

  “That’s impossible,” Cammie said flatly. “Russian thistle doesn’t grow in Ohio. Even if it did . . . this is summer. They root in summer.”

  “What’s Russian thistle, Mom?” Dave asked. His arm was around Susi’s waist. “I never heard of it.”

  “Tumbleweed,” Cammie said in that same flat voice. “Russian thistle is tumbleweed.”

  3

  Brad poked his head through Carver’s office door just in time to see Johnny pull a green-and-white box of cartridges out of a desk drawer. In his other hand, the writer had David Carver’s pistol. He had rolled the cylinder out to make sure the chambers were empty; they were, but he was still holding the gun awkwardly, with all of his fingers outside the trigger guard. To Brad he looked like one of those guys who sold dubious items on high-channel cable TV: Folks, this little beauty will ventilate any nighttime intruder unwise enough to pick your house, yes, of course it will, but wait, there’s more! It slices! It dices! And do you love scalloped potatoes but just never have time to make them at home?

  “Johnny.”

  He looked up, and for the first time Brad saw clearly how frightened the man was. It made him like Johnny better. He couldn’t think of a reason why that should be, but it was.

  “There’s a fool out on Old Doc’s lawn. Jackson, I guess.”

  “Shit. That’s not very bright, is it?”

  “No. Don’t shoot yourself with that thing.” Brad started out of the room, then turned back. “Are we crazy? Because it feels that way.”

  Johnny raised his hands in front of him, palms up, to indicate he didn’t know.

  4

  Johnny looked into the chambers of the pistol one more time—as if a bullet might have grown in one of them while he wasn’t looking—then snapped the cylinder back into place. He stuck the pistol in his belt and tucked the box of cartridges into his shirt pocket.

  The front hall was a minefield of Ralphie Carver’s boy-toys; the kid had apparently not yet been introduced by his doting parents to the concept of picking up after himself. Brad went into what had to be the little girl’s bedroom. Johnny followed him. Brad pointed out the window.

  Johnny looked down. It was Peter Jackson, all right. He was on Doc’s lawn, kneeling beside his wife. He had gotten her into a sitting position again. One arm was around her back. He was working the other under her cocked knees. Her skirt was well up on her thighs, and Johnny thought again about her missing pants. Well, so what? So fucking what? Johnny could see the man’s back shaking as sobs racked him.

  Silver light ran across the top of his vision.

  He looked up and saw what looked like an old Airstream trailer—or maybe a lunch-wagon—turning left onto Poplar from Hyacinth. Close behind it was the red van that had taken care of the dog and the paperboy, and behind that was the one with the dark blue metal-flake paint. He looked the other way, up toward Bear Street, and saw the van with the Mary Kay paint-job and the Valentine radar-dish, the yellow one that had first rear-ended Mary and then rode her off the street, and the black one with the turret.

  Six of them. Six in two converging lines of three. He had seen American LAC vehicles in the same formation a long time ago, in Vietnam.

  They were creating a fire-corridor.

  For a moment he couldn’t move. His hands seemed to hang at the ends of his arms like plugs of cement. You can’t, he thought with a kind of sick, unbelieving fury. You can’t come back, you bastards, you can’t keep coming back.

  Brad didn’t see them; he was looking at the man on the lawn of the house next door, absorbed in Peter’s effort to get up with his wife’s dead weight in his arms. And Peter . . .

  Johnny got his right hand moving. He wanted it to streak; it seemed to float instead. He got it around the handle of the gun and pulled it out of the waistband of his pants. Couldn’t shoot it; no loads in the chambers. Couldn’t load it, either, not in his current state. So he brought it down butt-first, shattering the glass of Ellen’s bedroom window.

  “Get inside!” he screamed at Peter, and his voice came out sounding low and strengthless to his own ears. Dear God, what nightmare was this, and how had they stumbled into it? “Get inside! They’re coming again! They’re back! They’re coming again!”

  Drawing found folded into an untitled notebook which apparently served as Audrey Wyler’s journal. Although unsigned, it is almost certainly the work of Seth Garin. If one assumes that its placement in the Journal corresponds to the time it was done, then it was made in the summer of 1995, after the death of Herbert Wyler and the Hobart family’s abrupt departure from Poplar Street.

  CHAPTER 7

  Poplar Street/4:44 P.M. /July 15, 1996

  They seem to come out of the mist rising off the street like materializing metal dinosaurs. Windows slide down; the porthole on the flank of the pink Dream Floater irises open again; the windshield of Bounty’s blue Freedom van retracts into a smooth darkness from which three grayish shotgun barrels bristle.

  Thunder rumbles and somewhere a bird cries harshly. There is a beat of silence, and then the shooting begins.

  It’s like the thunderstorm all over again, only worse, because this time it’s personal. And the guns are louder than before; Collie Entragian, lyi
ng face-down in the doorway between Billingsley’s kitchen and living room, is the first to notice this, but the others are not long in realizing it for themselves. Each shot is almost like a grenade blast, and each is followed by a low moaning sound, something caught between a buzz and a whistle.

  Two shots from the red Tracker Arrow and the top of Collie Entragian’s chimney is nothing but maroon dust in the wind and pebble-sized chunks of brick pattering down on his roof. A shot strikes the plastic spread over Cary Ripton, making it ripple like a parachute, and another tears off the rear wheel of his bike. Ahead of Tracker Arrow is the silver van, the one that looks like an old-fashioned lunch-wagon. Part of its roof rises at an angle, and a silver figure—it appears to be a robot in a Confederate infantryman’s uniform—leans out. It mails three shotgun rounds special express into the burning Hobart house. Each report seems as loud as a dynamite blast.

  Coming downhill from Bear Street, Dream Floater and the Justice Wagon pour fire into 251 and 249—the Josephson house and the Soderson house. The windows blow in. The doors blow open. A round that sounds like something thrown from a small antiaircraft gun hits the back of Gary’s old Saab. The back end crumples in, shards of red taillight glass fly, and there’s a whoomp! as the gas-tank explodes, engulfing the little car in a ball of smoky orange flame. The bumper-stickers—I MAY BE SLOW BUT I’M AHEAD OF YOU on the right, MAFIA STAFF CAR on the left—shimmer in the heat like mirages. The south-moving trio of vans and the trio moving north meet, cross, and stop in front of the stake fences separating the Billingsley place from the Carver house above it and the Jackson house below it.

  Audrey Wyler, who was eating a sandwich and drinking a can of lite beer in the kitchen when the shooting started, stands in the living room, staring out at the street with wide eyes, unaware that she’s still holding half of a salami and lettuce on rye in one hand. The firing has merged into one continuous, ear-splitting World War III roar, but she is in no danger; all of it is currently being directed at the two houses across from her.