The Regulators Read online

  Steve turned off the Ryder truck’s ignition without thinking about what he was doing. He no longer heard the steady hissing sound from the radiator, no longer saw the kids standing by the red wagon, no longer thought about what he was going to say when he called the 800 number the Ryder people gave you in case of engine trouble. Once or twice in his life he’d had little precognitive flashes—hunches, psychic nudges—but he was now gripped not by a flash but a kind of cramp: a certainty that something was going to happen. Not the kind of thing that made you raise a cheer, either.

  He didn’t see the double barrel poking out of the van’s side window, he was placed wrong for that, but he heard the kabam! of the shotgun and knew it immediately for what it was. He had grown up in Texas, and had never mistaken gunfire for thunder.

  The kid flew off the seat of his bike, shoulders twisted, legs bent, hat flying off his head. The back of his tee-shirt was shredded, and Steve could see more than he wanted to—red blood and black, torn flesh. The kid’s throwing-hand had been cocked to his ear, and the folded paper tumbled behind him, into the dry gutter, as the kid hit the lawn of the small house on the corner in a boneless, graceless forward roll.

  The van stopped in the middle of the street just short of the Poplar-Hyacinth intersection, engine idling.

  Steve Ames sat behind the wheel of his rented truck, mouth open, as a small window set into the van’s right rear side slid down, like the power window of a Cadillac or a Lincoln.

  I didn’t know they could do that, he thought, and then: What kind of van is that, anyway?

  He became aware that someone had come out of the store—a girl in the sort of blue smock top that checkout people usually wore. She had one hand up to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun. He could see the young woman, but the paperboy’s body was temporarily gone, blocked by the van. He became aware that a double-barrelled shotgun was now poking out of the window which had just slid down.

  And, last but not least, he became aware of the two children standing by their red wagon—out in the open, totally exposed—and looking in the direction from which the first shots had come.

  2

  Hannibal the German shepherd saw one thing and one thing only: the rolled-up newspaper which fell from Cary Ripton’s hand as the shotgun blast pushed him off his bicycle seat and out of his life. Hannibal charged, barking happily.

  “Hannibal, no!” Jim Reed shouted. He had no idea what was going on (he hadn’t grown up in Texas, and he had mistaken the first twin shotgun blast for thunder, not because it sounded like thunder but because he was unable to recognize it for what it really was, not in the context of a summer afternoon on Poplar Street), but he didn’t like it. Without thinking about what he was doing—or why—he scaled the Frisbee down the sidewalk toward the store, hoping to catch Hannibal’s eye and divert him from his current course. The ploy didn’t work. Hannibal ignored the Frisbee and kept on going, arrowing for the fallen copy of the Shopper, which he could just see in front of the idling red van.

  3

  Cynthia Smith also knew the sound of a shotgun when she heard one—her minister father had shot skeet every Saturday when she was a little girl, and had frequently taken her along on these expeditions.

  This time, however, no one had yelled Pull.

  She put down the paperback she had been reading, came around the counter, and hurried out onto the top step of the store. The glare hit her and she raised a hand to shade her eyes against it.

  She saw the van idling in the middle of the street, saw the shotgun slide out of the back, saw it center on the Carver children. They looked puzzled but not, as yet, frightened.

  My God, she thought. My God, he means to shoot the kids.

  For a moment she was frozen in place. Her brain told her legs to move but nothing happened.

  Go! Go! GO! she screamed at herself, and that broke the ice sheathing her nerves. She lurched forward on legs that felt like stilts, almost falling down the three cement steps, and grabbed at the kids. The twin bores of the shotgun looked huge, gaping, and she saw she was too late. That first frozen moment had been fatal. All she had managed to do was to make sure that when the guy in the back of the van pulled the shotgun’s triggers, he would kill one twenty-year-old roadbunny as well as two innocent little kids.

  4

  David Carver dropped his sponge into the bucket of soapy water beside the right front tire of his Caprice and strolled down his driveway toward the street to see what was happening. Next door, one house up the hill on his right, Johnny Marinville was doing the same thing. He had hold of his guitar by the neck. On the other side, Brad Josephson was also walking down his lawn to the street, his hose spouting into the grass behind him. He was still holding his copy of the Shopper in one hand.

  “Was that a backfire?” Johnny asked. He didn’t think it had been. Back in his pre-Kitty-Cat days, when he had still considered himself “a serious writer” (a phrase with all the pungency of “a really good whore,” to his way of thinking), Johnny had done a hellish research tour in Vietnam, and he thought the sound he had just heard was more like the kind of backfires he had heard during the Tet offensive. Jungle backfires. The kind that killed people.

  David shook his head, then turned his hands up to indicate he didn’t really know. Behind him, the screen door of the cream-and-green ranch-house banged shut and there were running bare feet on the walk. It was Pie, wearing jeans and a blouse that had been buttoned wrong. Her hair clung to her head in a damp helmet. She still smelled of the shower.

  “Was that a backfire? God, Dave, it sounded like a—”

  “Like a gunshot,” Johnny said, then added reluctantly: “I’m pretty sure it was.”

  Kirsten Carver—Kirstie to her friends and Pie to her husband, for reasons probably only a husband could know—looked down the hill. An expression of horror was slipping into her face, seeming somehow to widen not just her eyes but all of her features. David followed her gaze. He saw the idling van, and he saw the shotgun barrel sticking out of the right rear window.

  “Ellie! Ralph!” Pie screamed. It was a piercing cry, penetrating, and behind the Soderson house, Gary paused, listening, his martini glass halfway to his lips. “Oh God, Ellie and Ralph!”

  Pie began to sprint down the hill toward the van.

  “Kirsten, no, don’t do that!” Brad Josephson yelled. He began to run after her, cutting into the street even as she did the same, angling to meet her in the middle, perhaps head her off between the Jacksons’ and the Gellers’. He ran with surprising fleetness for such a big man, but saw after only a dozen running steps that he wasn’t going to catch her.

  David Carver also began to run after his wife, his gut bouncing up and down above his ridiculously tiny bathing suit, his flipflops smacking the sidewalk and making a noise like cap-pistols. His shadow ran after him in the street, long and thinner than Postal Service employee David Carver had ever been in his adult life.

  5

  I’m dead, Cynthia thought, dropping to one knee behind and between the kids, reaching to encircle their shoulders with her arms, meaning to pull them back against her. For all the good that would do. I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m totally dead. And still she couldn’t take her eyes off the twin bores of the shotgun, holes so black, so like pitiless eyes.

  The passenger door of the yellow truck popped open and she saw a lanky man in bluejeans and some sort of rock tee-shirt, a guy with graying shoulder-length hair and a craggy face.

  “Get em in here, lady!” he yelled. “Now, now!”

  She pushed the children toward the truck, knowing it was too late. And then, while she was still trying to ready herself for the rip of the shot or the pellets (as if you could get ready for such a gross invasion), the gun poking from the rear of the van swivelled away from them, swivelled forward, along the red flank of the van. It went off, the report rolling across the hot day like a bowling ball speeding down a stone gutter. Cynthia saw fire lick from the end of the barrel. The
Reeds’ dog, which had been starting his final approach on the dropped newspaper, was thrown violently to the right, the grace slapped out of him as it had been slapped out of Cary Ripton.

  “Hannibal!” Jim and Dave shrieked in unison. The sound made Cynthia think of the Doublemint Twins.

  She shoved the Carver kids toward the open door of the truck so hard that Brother Boogersnot fell down. He started to bellow at once. The girl—always an Ellie, never a Margaret, Cynthia remembered—looked back with an expression of heartbreaking bewilderment. Then the man with the long hair had her by the arm and was hauling her up into the cab. “On the floor, kid, on the floor!” he shouted at her, then leaned out to grab the yowling boy. The Ryder truck’s horn let out a brief blat; the driver had hooked one sneakered foot through the wheel to keep from sliding out headfirst. Cynthia batted the red wagon aside, grabbed the boogersnot by the back of his shorts, and lifted him into the truck-driver’s arms. Down the street, approaching, she could hear a man and a woman yelling the kids’ names. Dad and Mom, she assumed, and apt to be shot down in the street like the dog and the paperboy if they didn’t look out.

  “Get up here!” the driver bawled at her. Cynthia needed no second invitation; she scrambled into the overcrowded cab of the truck.

  6

  Gary Soderson came striding purposefully (although not quite steadily) around the side of his house with his martini glass in one hand. There had been a second loud bang, and he found himself wondering if maybe the Gellers’ gas grill had exploded. He saw Marinville, who had gotten rich in the eighties writing children’s books about an unlikely character named Pat the Kitty-Cat, standing in the middle of the street, shading his eyes and looking down the hill.

  “What be happenin, my brother?” Gary asked, joining him.

  “I think someone in that van down there just killed Cary Ripton and then shot the Reeds’ dog,” Johnny Marinville said in a strange, flat voice.

  “What? Why would anyone do that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Gary saw a couple—the Carvers, he was almost positive—running down the street toward the store, closely pursued by a galumphing African-American gent that had to be the one the only Brad Josephson.

  Marinville turned to face him. “This is bad shit. I’m calling the cops. In the meantime, I advise you to get off the street. Now.”

  Marinville hurried up the walk to his house. Gary ignored his advice and stayed where he was, glass in hand, looking at the van idling in the middle of the street down there by the Entragian place, suddenly wishing (and for him this was an exceedingly odd wish) that he wasn’t quite so drunk.

  7

  The door of the bungalow at 240 Poplar banged open and Collie Entragian came charging out exactly as Cary Ripton had always feared he someday would: with a gun in his hand. Otherwise, however, he looked pretty much all right—no foam on the lips, no bloodshot, buggy eyes. He was a tall man, six-four at least, starting to show a little softness in the belly but as broad and muscular through the shoulders as a football linebacker. He wore khaki pants and no shirt. There was shaving cream on the left side of his face, and a hand-towel over his shoulder. The gun in his hand was a .38, and might very well have been the service pistol Cary had often imagined while delivering the Shopper to the house on the corner.

  Collie looked at the boy lying facedown and dead on his lawn, his clothes already damp from the lawn sprinkler (and the papers that had spilled out of his carrysack turning a soggy gray), and then at the van. He raised the pistol, clamping his left hand over his right wrist. Just as he did, the van began to roll. He almost fired anyway, then didn’t. He had to be careful. There were people in Columbus, some of them very powerful, who would be delighted to hear that Collier Entragian had discharged a weapon on a suburban Wentworth street . . . a weapon he had been required by law to turn in, actually.

  That’s no excuse and you know it, he thought, turning as the van rolled, pivoting with it. Fire your weapon! Fire your goddam weapon!

  But he didn’t, and as the van turned left onto Hyacinth, he saw there was no license plate on the back . . . and what about the silver gadget on the roof? What in God’s name had that been?

  On the other side of the street, Mr. and Mrs. Carver were sprinting into the parking lot of the E-Z Stop. Josephson was behind them. The black man glanced to the left and saw the red van was gone—it had just disappeared behind the trees which screened the part of Hyacinth Street which ran east of Poplar—and then bent over, hands on knees, gasping for breath.

  Collie walked across the street, tucking the barrel of the .38 into the back of his pants, and put his hand on Josephson’s shoulder. “You okay, man?”

  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 sti
ll 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?”