The Regulators

Chapter Three

POPLAR STREET/3:58 P.M./JULY 15, 1996

1

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.

2

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.

“Hey, Dave!” Peter Jackson called. “What’s going on?”

Before Carver could reply, Marielle struck Gary’s shoulder with the heel of her hand, hard enough to slop the last of his martini out of his glass and on to his tatty old Converse sneakers. Maybe just as well. He might even do his liver a favor and take the night off.

“Are you deaf, Gary, or just stupid?” the light of his life enquired.

“Likely both,” he responded, thinking that if he ever decided to sober up for good, he would probably have to divorce Marielle first. Or at least slit her vocal cords. What did you say?”

“I asked you why in God’s name anyone would shoot the paperboy?

“Maybe it was someone didn’t get his double coupons last week,” Gary said. Thunder cracked-still west of them, but nearing. It seemed to run through the gathering clouds like a harpoon.

Johnny Marinville, who had once won the National Book Award for a novel of sexual obsession called Delight and who now wrote children’s books about a feline private detective named Pat the Kitty-Kat, stood looking down at his living-room telephone and feeling afraid. Something was going on here. He was trying not to be paranoid about it, but yeah, something was going on here.

“Maybe,” he said in a low voice.

Yeah, okay. Maybe. But the phone-

He had come in, propped his guitar in the corner, and punched 911. There had been an uncommonly long pause, so long he had been about to break the connection (What connection, ha-ha?) and try again when what might have been a child’s voice came on the line. The sound of that voice, both lilting and empty, had surprised Johnny and frightened him badly-he hadn’t even tried to kid himself that his fright was only a startled reflex.

“Little bitty baby Smitty,” the voice had lilted. “I seen you bite your mommy’s titty. Don’t you fret and don’t you pout, don’t you spit that titty out.”

There had been a click followed by the hum of an open line. Frowning, Johnny had redialled. Again the long pause, then a click, then a sound Johnny thought he recognized: a mouth-breather. The sound of a kid with a cold, maybe. Not that it mattered. Wha t mattered was that the phone-lines had gotten crossed somewhere in the neighborhood, and now instead of getting through to the cops-

“Who’s there?” he had asked sharply.

No answer. Just the mouth-breathing. And was that sound familiar? That was pretty ridiculous, wasn’t it? How in God’s name could the sound of breathing on the telephone be familiar? It couldn’t, of course, but all the same-

“Whoever you are, get the hell off the line,” Johnny said. “I have to call the police.”

The breath caught, stopped. Johnny was reaching to break the connection again when the voice returned. Mocking this time. He was sure it was. “Little bitty baby Smitty, stuck his prick in Mommy’s slitty. Don’t you fret and don’t you pout, she won’t make you take it out.” Then, in a voice that was flat and somehow terrible: “Don’t you call here no more, you old fool. Tak!”

Another click as the line went dead, but this time there was no open-line hum. This time there was just stillness.

Johnny hit the phone’s cutoff switch, stuttering lightly with the tip of a finger. Nothing happened. The line remained blank. Thunder boomed, still to the west but closing in, making him jump.

He dropped the phone into the cradle and went into the kitchen, noting how rapidly the light was fading out of the sky and reminding himself to close the upstairs windows if it started to rain… when it started to rain, judging from the way things looked now.

Out here the phone was on the wall by the kitchen table, where all he had to do was rock back in his chair and snag it if he happened to be eating a meal when it rang. Not that there were many calls; his ex-wife sometimes, that was all. His people in New York knew enough to leave their money-machine alone.

He unracked the phone, listened, and got a second helping of silence. No dial-tone, no staticky crackle when lightning flashed blue in the kitchen window, no wah-wah-wah signalling that the line was out of service. Just nothing. He tried 911 anyway, and there weren’t even any tone-beeps in his ear as he pushed the keypads. He hung the telephone up and looked at it in the darkening kitchen. “Little bitty baby Smitty,” he murmured, and suddenly shivered in a way that would have been taken for theatrical if he hadn’t been alone: a big backward-and-forward snapping of the shoulders. An ugly little jingle, and one he’d never heard before.

Never mind the jingle, he thought. What about the voice? You’ve heard that before… haven’t you?

“No,” he said out loud. “At least… I don’t know.”

Right. But the breathing…

“Fuck a duck, you don’t recognize a person’s breathing,” he told the empty kitchen. “Not unless your granddad’s got emphysema.”

He left the kitchen, heading for the front door. All at once he wanted to see what was going on out there in the street.

“What happened down there?” Peter Jackson asked David when the Carver family reached the east sidewalk. He bent his head toward David and lowered his voice so the kids wouldn’t hear. “Is that a body down there?”

“Yes,” David said in a similarly low voice. “Gary Ripton’s his name, I think.” He glanced at his wife for confirmation and Kirsten nodded. “The boy who delivers the Shopper on Monday afternoons. Guy in a van. A drive-by.”

“Someone shot Cary? That was impossible. Impossible that someone he had just been talking to should have been shot. But Carver was nodding his head. “Holy shit!”

David nodded. “Holy shit about covers it, I guess.”

“Hurry up, Daddy-doo,” Ralphie commanded from his place in the wagon.

David glanced back at him, gave the boy a smile, then looked at Peter again. This time he spoke in a voice so low it was really a whisper. “The kids were down at the store, buying sodas. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got an idea the guy almost took a shot at them, too. Then the Reeds” dog came by and the man with the gun shot it, instead.”

“Jesus!” Peter said. The idea that someone had shot Hannibal-genial, Frisbee-chasing Hannibal with his jaunty neck-scarf-made it impossible not to accept. He didn’t know why that should be, but it was. “I mean Jesus Christ!”

David nodded. “Although if there was a little more Jesus in the world, there might be a lot less stuff like this. You know?”

Peter thought of the millions up through history who had been slaughtered in the name of Jesus, then pushed the thought away and nodded. He didn’t think this was quite the time for a theological argument with his neighbor.

“I want to get them inside, Dave,” Kirsten murmured. “Off the street, “kay?”

David nodded, started up the hill again past Peter, then stopped and looked back. “Where’s Mary?”

“Work,” Peter said. “She left a note to say she was probably going to swing by the Crossroads Mall on her way home. She should be here anytime, though-Mondays are her short days, she’s off at two. Why?”

“I’d make sure she comes right inside, that’s all. The guy’s probably long gone and hard to find, but you never know, do you? And a guy who’d shoot a paperboy-

Peter was nodding. Overhead, thunder boomed loudly. Ellie cringed against her mother’s leg, but in the wagon, Ralphie laughed.

Kirsten tugged David’s arm. “Come on. And don’t stop to talk to Doc.” She lifted her chin toward Billingsley, who was standing in the dry gutter with his hands in his pockets and peering down the street. Squinting as he was, his eyes were reduced to a pair of bright blue gleams, like exotic fish caught in nets of flesh.

David started pulling the wagon again. “How you doin”, Ralphie?” Peter asked as the wagon rolled past him. He noted the word BUSTER was written on the wagon’s side in fading white paint. Ralphie stuck his tongue out and made the wasp-in-the-jar sound again, blowing so hard that his cheeks bulged out like Dizzy Gillespie’s.

“Hey, that’s charming,” Peter said. “That’ll get you girls later in life. Trust me.”