Also by Richard Bachman and published

by Hodder Stoughton

Thinner

The Bachman Books

By Stephen King

Carrie

'Salem's Lot

The Shining

Night Shift

The Stand

Christine

Pet Sematary

It

Misery

The Tommyknockers

The Dark Half

The Stand: the Complete and Uncut Edition

Four Past Midnight

Needful Things

Gerald's Game

Dolores Claiborne

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Insomnia

Rose Madder

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"Leaving on a Jet Plane," Words and Music by John Denver, Copyright

© 1967 (Renewed) 1995, Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc.

(ASCAP), International Copyright Secured. All rights Reserved. Reprinted

by Permission of Cherry Lane Music Company.

Copyright © 1996 by Richard Bachman

First published in Great Britain in 1996

by Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline PLC

The right of Richard Bachman to be identified as the Author

of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

10  9  8  7654321

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means without the prior written

permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious

and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bachman, Richard, 1947-1985 The regulators

1 .American fiction — 20th century

I.Title 813.5'4[F]

ISBN 0340 67176 9

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent

Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline PLC

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

Thinking of Jim Thompson and Sam Peckinpah:

Legendary shadows.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Before his death from cancer in late 1985, Richard Bachman published five novels. In 1994, while preparing to move to a new house, the author's widow found a cardboard carton filled with manuscripts in the cellar. These novels and stories were in varying degrees of completion. The least finished were longhand scribbles in the steno notebooks Bachman used for original composition. The most finished was a typescript of the novel which follows. It was in a manuscript box secured with rubber bands, as if Bachman had been on the verge of sending it to his publisher when his final remission ended.

The former Mrs Bachman brought it to me for evaluation, and I found it at least up to the standard of his earlier work. I have made a few small changes, mostly updating certain references (substituting Ethan Hawke for Rob Lowe in the first chapter, for instance), but have otherwise left it pretty much as I found it. This work is now offered (with the approval of the author's widow) as the capstone to a peculiar but not uninteresting career.

My thanks to Claudia Eschelman (the former Claudia Bachman), Bachman scholar Douglas Winter, Elaine Koster at New American Library, and to Carolyn Stromberg, who edited the earliest Bachman novels and validated this one.

The former Mrs Bachman says that, to the best of her knowledge, Bachman never travelled to Ohio, 'although he might have flown over it once or twice'. She also has no idea when this novel was written, although she suspects it must have been late at night. Richard Bachman suffered from chronic insomnia.

Charles Verrill

New York City

'Mister, we deal in lead'

— Steve McQueen

The Magnificant Seven

Postcard from William Garin to his sister, Audrey Wyler:

CHAPTER ONE

Poplar Street/3:45 p.m./July 15, 1996

Summer's here.

Not just summer, either, not this year, but the apotheosis of summer, the avatar of summer, high green perfect central Ohio summer dead-smash in the middle of July, white sun glaring out of that fabled faded Levi's sky, the sound of kids hollering back and forth through the Bear Street Woods at the top of the hill, the tink! of Little League bats from the ballfield on the other side of the woods, the sound of power mowers, the sound of muscle-cars out on Highway 19, the sound of rollerblades on the cement sidewalks and smooth macadam of Poplar Street, the sound of radios — Cleveland Indians baseball (the rare day game) competing with Tina Turner belting out 'Nutbush City Limits', the one that goes Twenty-five is the speed limit, motorcycles not allowed in it' — and surrounding everything like an auditory edging of lace, the soothing, silky hiss of lawn sprinklers.

Summer in Wentworth, Ohio, oh boy, can you dig it. Summer here on Poplar Street, which runs straight through the middle of that fabled faded American dream with the smell of hotdogs in the air and a few burst paper remains of Fourth of July firecrackers still lying here and there in the gutters. It's been a hot July, a perfect good old by God blue-ribbon jeezer of a July, no doubt about it, but if you want to know the truth, it's also been a dry July, with no water but the occasional flipped spray of a hose to stir those last shreds of Chinese paper from where they lie. That may change today; there's an occasional rumble of thunder from the west, and those watching The Weather Channel (there's plenty of cable TV on Poplar Street, you bet) know that thunderstorms are expected later on. Maybe even a tornado, although that's unlikely.

Meantime, though, it's all watermelon and Kool-Aid and foul tips off the end of the bat; it's all the summer you ever wanted and more here in the center of the United States of America, life as good as you ever dreamed it could be, with Chevrolets parked in driveways and steaks in refrigerator meat-drawers waiting to be slapped on the barbecue in the backyard come evening. (And will there be apple pie to follow? What do you think?) This is the land of green lawns and carefully tended flowerbeds; this is the Kingdom of Ohio where the kids wear their hats turned around backward and their strappy tank-tops hang down over their baggy shorts and their great big galooty sneakers all seem to bear the Nike swoosh.

On the block of Poplar which runs between Bear Street at the top of the hill and Hyacinth at the bottom, there are eleven houses and one store. The store, which stands on the corner of Poplar and Hyacinth, is the ever-popular, all-American convenience mart, where you can get your cigarettes, your Blatz or Rolling Rock, your penny candy (although these days most of it costs a dime), your BBQ supplies (paper plates plastic forks taco chips ice cream ketchup mustard relish), your Popsicles, and your wide variety of Snapple, made from the best stuff on earth. You can even get a copy of Penthouse at the E-Z Stop 24 if you want one, but you have to ask the clerk; in the Kingdom of Ohio, they mostly keep the skin magazines under the counter. And hey, that's perfectly all right. The important thing is that you should know where to get one if you need one.

The clerk today is new, less than a week on the job, and right now, at 3.45 in the afternoon, she's waiting on a little boy and girl. The girl looks to be about eleven and is already on her way to being a beauty. The boy, clearly her little brother, is maybe six and is (in the new clerk's opinion, at least) already on his way to being a first-class boogersnot.

'I want two candybars!' Brother Boogersnot exclaims.

'There's only money enough for one, if we each have a soda,' Pretty Sis tells him with what the clerk thinks is admirable patience. If this were her little brother, she would be very tempted to kick his ass so high up he could get a job playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame in the school play.

'Mom gave you five bucks this morning, I saw it,' the boogersnot says. 'Where's the rest of it, Marrrrr-grit?'

'Don't call me that, I hate that,' the girl says. She has long honey-blond hair which the clerk thinks is absolutely gorgeous. The new clerk's own hair is short and kinky, dyed orange on the right and green on the left. She has a pretty good idea she wouldn't have gotten this job without washing the dye out of it if the manager hadn't been absolutely strapped for someone to work eleven-to-seven — her good luck, his bad. He had extracted a promise from her that she'd wear a kerchief or a baseball cap over the dye-job, but promises were made to be broken. Now, she sees, Pretty Sister is looking at her hair with some fascination.

'Margrit-Margrit-Margrit!' the little brother crows with the cheerfully energetic viciousness which only little brothers can muster.

'My name's really Ellen,' the girl says, speaking with the air of one imparting a great confidence. 'Margaret's my middle name. He calls me that because he knows I hate it.'

'Nice to meet you, Ellen,' the clerk says, and begins totting up the girl's purchases.

'Nice to meet you, Marrrrr-grit!' the boogersnot brother mimics, screwing his face into an expression so strenuously awful that it is funny. His nose is wrinkled, his eyes crossed. 'Nice to meet you, Margrit the Maggot!'

Ignoring him, Ellen says: 'I love your hair.'

'Thanks,' the new clerk says, smiling. 'It's not as nice as yours, but it'll do. That's a dollar forty-six.'

The girl takes a little plastic change-purse from the pocket of her jeans. It's the kind you squeeze open. Inside are two crumpled dollar bills and a few pennies.

'Ask Margrit the Maggot where the other three bucks went!' the boogersnot trumpets. He's a regular little public address system. 'She used it to buy a magazine with Eeeeeeethan Hawwwwke on the cover!'

Ellen goes on ignoring him, although her cheeks are starting to get a little red. As she hands over the two dollars she says, 'I haven't seen you before, have I?'

'Probably not — I just started in here last Wednesday. They wanted somebody who'd work eleven-to-seven and stay over a few hours if the night guy turns up late.'

'Well, it's very nice to meet you. I'm Ellie Carver. And this is my little brother, Ralph.'

Ralph Carver sticks out his tongue and makes a sound like a wasp caught in a mayonnaise jar. What a polite little animal it is, the young woman with the tu-tone hair thinks.

'I'm Cynthia Smith,' she says, extending her hand over the counter to the girl. 'Always a Cynthia and never a Cindy. Can you remember that?'

The girl nods, smiling. 'And I'm always an Ellie, never a Margaret.'

'Margrit the Maggot!' Ralph cries in crazed six-year-old triumph. He raises his hands in the air and bumps his hips from side to side in the pure poison joy of living. 'Margrit the Maggot loves Eeeeethan Hawwwwwke!'

Ellen gives Cynthia a look much older than her years, an expression of world-weary resignation that says You see what I have to put up with. Cynthia, who had a little brother herself and knows exactly what pretty Ellie has to put up with, wants to crack up but manages to keep a straight face. And that's good. This girl's a prisoner of her time and her age, the same as anyone else, which means that all of this is perfectly serious to her. Ellie hands her brother a can of Pepsi. 'We'll split the candybar outside,' she says.

'You're gonna pull me in Buster,' Ralph says as they start toward the door, walking into the brilliant oblong of sun that falls through the window like fire. 'Gonna pull me in Buster all the way back home.'

'Like hell I am,' Ellie says, but as she opens the door, Brother Boogersnot turns and gives Cynthia a smug look which says Wait and see who wins this one. You just wait and see. Then they go out.

Summer yes, but not just summer; we are talking July 15th, the very rooftree of summer, in an Ohio town where most kids go to Vacation Bible School and participate in the Summer Reading Program at the Public Library, and where one kid has just got to have a little red wagon which he has named (for reasons only he will ever know) Buster. Eleven houses and one convenience store simmering in that bright bald midwestern July glare, ninety degrees in the shade, ninety-six in the sun, hot enough that the air shimmers above the pavement as if over an open incinerator.

The block runs north-south, odd-numbered houses on the Los Angeles side of the street, even-numbered ones on the New York side. At the top, on the western corner of Poplar and Bear Street, is 251 Poplar. Brad Josephson is out front, using the hose to water the flowerbeds beside the front path. He is forty-six, with gorgeous chocolate skin and a long, sloping gut. Ellie Carver thinks he looks like Bill Cosby . . . a little bit, anyway. Brad and Belinda Josephson are the only black people on the block, and the block is damned proud to have them. They look just the way people in suburban Ohio like their black people to look, and it makes things just right to see them out and about. They're nice folks. Everyone likes the Josephsons.

Gary Ripton, who delivers the Wentworth Shopper on Monday afternoons, comes pedaling around the corner and tosses Brad a rolled-up paper. Brad catches it deftly with the hand that isn't holding the hose. Never even moves. Just up with the hand and whoomp, there it is.

'Good one, Mr Josephson!' Gary calls, and pedals on down the hill with his canvas sack of papers bouncing on his hip. He is wearing an oversized Orlando Magic jersey with Shaq's number, 32, on it.

'Yep, I ain't lost it yet,' Brad says, and tucks the nozzle of the hose under his arm so he can open the weekly handout and see what's on the front page. It'll be the same old crap, of course — yard sales and community puffery — but he wants to get a look, anyway. Just human nature, he supposes. Across the street, at 250, Johnny Marinville is sitting on his front step, playing his guitar and singing along. One of the world's dumber folk-songs, but Marinville plays well, and although no one will ever mistake him for Marvin Gaye (or Perry Como, for that matter), he can carry a tune and stay in key. Brad has always found this slightly offensive; a man who's good at one thing should be content with that and let the rest of it go, Brad feels.

Gary Ripton, fourteen, crewcut, plays backup shortstop for the Wentworth American Legion team (the Hawks, currently 14-4 with two games left to play), tosses the next Shopper on to the porch of 249, the Soderson place. The Josephsons are the Poplar Street Black Couple; the Sodersons, Gary and Marielle, are the Poplar Street Bohemians. On the scales of public opinion, the Sodersons pretty much balance each other. Gary is, by and large, a help-out kind of guy, and liked by his neighbours in spite of the fact that he's at least half-lit nearly all of the time. Marielle, however . . . well, as Pie Carver has been known to say, 'There's a word for women like Marielle; it rhymes with the one for how you kick a football.'

Gary's throw is a perfect bank shot, bouncing the Shopper off the Soderson front door and landing it spang on the Soderson welcome mat, but no one comes out to get it; Marielle is inside taking a shower (her second of the day; she hates it when the weather gets sticky like this), and Gary is out back, absent-mindedly fueling the backyard barbecue, eventually loading it with enough briquets to flash-fry a water buffalo. He is wearing an apron with the words YOU MAY KISS THE COOK on the front. It's too early to start the steaks, but it's never too early to get ready. There is an umbrella-shaded picnic table in the middle of the Soderson backyard, and standing on it is Gary's portable bar: a bottle of olives, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of vermouth. The bottle of vermouth has not been opened. A double martini stands in front of it. Gary finishes overloading the barbecue, goes to the table, and swallows what's left in the glass. He is very partial to martinis, and tends to be in the bag by four o'clock or so on most days when he doesn't have to teach. Today is no exception.

'All right,' Gary says, 'next case.' He then proceeds to make another Soderson Martini. He does this by a) filling his martini glass to the three-quarters point with Bombay gin; b) popping in an Amati olive; c) tipping the rim of the glass against the unopened bottle of vermouth for good luck.

He tastes; closes his eyes; tastes again. His eyes, already quite red, open. He smiles. 'Yes, ladies and gentlemen!' he tells his simmering backyard. 'We have a winner!'

Faintly, over all the other sounds of summer — kids, mowers, muscle-cars, sprinklers, singing bugs in the baked grass of his back yard — Gary can hear the writer's guitar, a sweet and easy sound. He picks out the tune almost at once and dances around the circle of shade thrown by the umbrella with his glass in his hand, singing along: 'So kiss me and smile for me . . . Tell me that you'll wait for me . . . Hold me like you'll never let me go . . .'

A good tune, one he remembers from before the Reed twins two houses down were even thought of, let alone born. For just a moment he is struck by the reality of time's passage, how stark it is, and unappealable. It passes the ear with a sound like iron. He takes another big sip of his martini and wonders what to do now that the barbecue is ready for liftoff. Along with the other sounds he can hear the shower upstairs, and he thinks of Marielle naked in there — the bitch of the western world, but she's kept her body in good shape. He thinks of her soaping her breasts, maybe caressing her nipples with the tips of her fingers in a circular motion, making them hard. Of course she's doing nothing of the damned kind, but it's the sort of image that just won't go away unless you do something to pop it. He decides to be a twentieth-century version of St George; he will fuck the dragon instead of slaying it. He puts his martini glass down on the picnic table and starts for the house.

Oh gosh, it's summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime, and on Poplar Street the living is easy.

Gary Ripton checks his rearview mirror for traffic, sees none, and swerves easterly across the street to the Carver house. He hasn't bothered with Mr Marinville because, at the start of the summer, Mr Marinville gave him five dollars not to deliver the Shopper. 'Please, Gary,' he said, his eyes solemn and earnest. 'I can't read about another supermarket opening or drugstore jamboree. It'll kill me if I do.' Gary doesn't understand Mr Marinville in the slightest, but he is a nice enough man, and five bucks is five bucks.

Mrs Carver opens the front door of 248 Poplar and waves as Gary easy-tosses her the Shopper. She grabs for it, misses completely, and laughs. Gary laughs with her. She doesn't have Brad Josephson's hands, or reflexes, but she's pretty and a hell of a good sport. Her husband is beside the house, wearing his bathing suit and flipflops, washing the car. He catches a glimpse of Gary out of the corner of his eye, turns, points a finger. Gary points one right back, and they pretend to shoot each other. This is Mr Carver's crippled but game effort to be cool, and Gary respects that. David Carver works for the post office, and Gary figures he must be on vacation this week. The boy makes a vow to himself: if he has to settle for a regular nine-to-five job when he grows up (he knows that, like diabetes and kidney failure, this does happen to some people), he will never spend his vacation at home, washing his car in the driveway.

I'm not going to have a car, anyway, he thinks. Going to have a motorcycle. No Japanese bike, either. Big damn old Harley-Davidson like the one Mr Marinville keeps in his garage. American steel.

He checks the rearview again and catches sight of something bright red up on Bear Street beyond the Josephson place — a van, it looks like, parked just beyond the southwestern corner of the intersection — and then swoops his Schwinn back across the street again, this time to 247, the Wyler place.

Of the occupied houses on the street (242, the old Hobart place, is vacant), the Wyler place is the only one which even approaches seedy — it's a small ranch-style home that could use a fresh coat of paint, and a fresh coat of seal on the driveway. There's a sprinkler twirling on the lawn, but the grass is still showing the effects of the hot, dry weather in a way the other lawns on the street (including the lawn of the vacant Hobart house, actually) are not. There are yellow patches, small right now but spreading.

She doesn't know that water isn't enough, Gary thinks, reaching into his canvas bag for another rolled-up Shopper. Her husband might've, but —

He suddenly realizes that Mrs Wyler (he guesses that widows are still called Mrs) is standing inside the screen door, and something about seeing her there, hardly more than a silhouette, startles him badly. He wobbles on his bike for a moment, and when he throws the rolled-up paper his usually accurate aim is way off. The Shopper lands atop one of the shrubs flanking the front steps. He hates doing that, hates it, it's like some stupid comedy show where the paperboy is always throwing the Daily Bugle on to the roof or into the rosebushes — har-har, paperboys with bad aim, wotta scream — and on a different day (or at a different house) he might have gone back to rectify the error . . . maybe even put the paper in the lady's hand himself with a smile and a nod and a have a nice day. Not today, though. There's something here he doesn't like. Something about the way she's standing inside the screen door, shoulders slumped and hands dangling, like a kid's toy with the batteries pulled. And that's maybe not all that's out of kilter, either. He can't see her well enough to be sure, but he thinks maybe Mrs Wyler is naked from the waist up, that she's standing there in her front hall wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. Standing there and staring at him.

If so, it's not sexy. It's creepy.

The kid that stays with her, her nephew, that little weasel's creepy, too. Seth Garland or Garin or something like that. He never talks, not even if you talk to him — hey, how you doin, you like it around here, you think the Indians'll make it to the Series again — just looks at you with his mud-colored eyes. Looks at you the way Gary feels Mrs Wyler, who is usually nice, is looking at him now. Like step into my parlor said the spider to the fly, like that. Her husband died last year (right around the time the Hobarts had that trouble and moved away, now that he thinks of it), and people say it wasn't an accident. People say that Herb Wyler, who collected stamps and had once given Gary an old air rifle, committed suicide.

Gooseflesh — somehow twice as scary on a day as hot as this one — ripples up his back and he banks back across the street after another cursory look into the rearview mirror. The red van is still up there near the corner of Bear and Poplar (some spiffy rig, the boy thinks), and this time there is a vehicle coming down the street, as well, a blue Acura Gary recognizes at once. It's Mr Jackson, the block's other teacher. Not high school in his case, however; Mr Jackson is actually Professor Jackson, or maybe it's just Assistant Professor Jackson. He teaches at Ohio State, go you Buckeyes. The Jacksons live at 244, one up from the old Hobart place. It's the nicest house on the block, a roomy Cape Cod with a high hedge on the downhill side and a high cedar stake fence on the uphill side, between them and the old veterinarian's place.

'Yo, Gary!' Peter Jackson says, pulling up beside him. He's wearing faded jeans and a tee-shirt with a big yellow smile-face on it. HAVE A NICE DAY! Mr Smiley-Smile is saying. 'How's it going, bad boy?'

'Great, Mr Jackson,' Gary says, smiling. He thinks of adding Except that I think Mrs Wyler's standing in her door back there with her shirt off and then doesn't. 'Everything's super-cool.'

'Are you starting any games yet?'

'Only two so far, but that's okay. I got a couple of innings last night, and I'll probably get a couple more tonight. It's really all I hoped for. But it's Frankie Albertini's last year in Legion, you know.' He holds out a rolled copy of the Shopper.

'That's right,' Peter says, taking it. 'And next year it's Monsieur Gary Rip ton's turn to howl at shortstop.'

The boy laughs, tickled at the idea of standing out there at short in his Legion uniform and howling like a werewolf. 'You teaching summer school again this year?'

'Yep. Two classes. Historical Plays of Shakespeare, plus James Dickey and the New Southern Gothic. Either sound interesting to you?'

1 think I'll pass.'

Peter nods seriously. 'Pass and you'll never have to go to summer school, bad boy.' He taps the smile-face on his shirt. 'They loosen up on the teacher dress-code a little come June, but summer school's still a drag. Same as it ever was.' He drops the rolled-up Shopper on to the seat and pulls the Acura's transmission lever down into drive. 'Don't give yourself a heatstroke pedaling around the neighbourhood with those papers.'

'Nah. I think it's gonna rain later, anyway. I keep hearing thunder off and on.'

'That's what they say on the — watch out!'

A large furry shape bullets by, chasing a red disc. Gary leans his bike over toward Mr Jackson's car and is just feathered by Hannibal's tail as the German Shepherd chases after the Frisbee.

'He's the one you ought to warn about heatstroke,' Gary says.

'Maybe you're right,' Peter says, and drives slowly on.

Gary watches Hannibal snatch the Frisbee off the sidewalk on the far side of the street and turn with it in his mouth. He has a jaunty bandanna tied around his neck and appears to be wearing a big old doggy grin.

'Bring it back, Hannibal!' Jim Reed calls, and his twin brother, Dave, joins in: 'Come on, Hannibal! Don't be a dork! Fetch! Bring!'

Hannibal stands in front of 246, across from the Wyler house, with the Frisbee in his mouth and his tail waving back and forth slowly. His grin appears to widen.

The Reed twins live at 245, a house down from Mrs Wyler. They are standing at the edge of their lawn (one dark, one light, both tall and handsome in cut-off tee-shirts and identical Eddie Bauer shorts), staring across the street at Hannibal. Behind them are a couple of girls. One is Susi Geller from next door. Pretty but not, you know, kabam. The other, a redhead with long cheerleader legs, is a different story. Her picture could be next to kabam in the dictionary. Gary doesn't know her, but he would like to know her, her hopes and dreams and plans and fantasies. Especially the fantasies. Not in this life, he thinks. That's mature pussy. She's seventeen if she's a day.

'Aw, sugar!' Jim Reed says, then turns to his dark-haired sib. 'You go get it this time.'

'No way, it'll be all spitty,' Dave Reed says. 'Hannibal, be a good dog and bring that back here!'

Hannibal stands on the sidewalk in front of Doc's house, still grinning. Nyah-nyah, he says without having to say anything; it's all in the grin and the regally serene sweep of the tail. Nyah-nyah, you've got girls and Eddie Bauer shorts, but I got your Frisbee and I'm leaking canine spit all over it, and in my opinion that makes me the Grand Wazoo.

Gary reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bag of sunflower seeds — if you have to ride the bench, he has discovered, sunflower seeds help to pass the time. He has become quite adept at cracking them with his teeth and chewing the tasty centers even as he spits the hulls on to the cracked cement of the dugout floor with the machine-gun speed of a major leaguer.

'I gotcha covered,' he calls back to the Reed twins, hoping the sweet little redhead will be impressed by his animal-taming prowess, knowing this is a dream so foolish only a kid between his freshman and sophomore years in high school could possibly entertain it, but she looks so wonderful in those cuffed white shorts she's wearing, oh great gosh a'mighty, and when did a little fantasy ever hurt a kid?

He drops the bag of sunflower seeds down to dog level and crackles the cellophane. Hannibal comes at once, still with the red Frisbee caught in the center of his grin. Gary pours a few seeds into his palm. 'Good, Hannibal,' he says. These're good. Sunflower seeds, loved by dogs all over the world. Try em. You'll buy em.'

Hannibal studies the seeds a moment longer, nostrils quivering delicately, then drops the Frisbee on to Poplar Street and vacuums them out of Gary's palm. Quick as a flash, the boy bends, grabs the Frisbee (it is sorta spitty around the edges), and scales it back at Jim Reed. It's a perfect, floating toss, one Jim is able to grab without moving a single step. And, oh God, oh Jesus, the redhead is applauding him, bouncing up and down next to Susi Geller, her boobs (small but delectable) kind of jiggling inside the halter she's wearing. Oh thank you Lord, thank you so much, we now have enough jackoff material in our memory banks to last at least a week.

Grinning, unaware that he will die both a virgin and a backup shortstop, Gary throws a Shopper on to the stoop of Tom Billingsley's house (he can hear Doc's mower yowling out back), and swoops across the street again towards the Reed house. Dave tosses the Frisbee to Susi Geller and then takes the Shopper when Gary flips it to him.

'Thanks for getting the Frisbee back,' Dave says.

'No problem.' He nods toward the redhead. 'Who's she?'

Dave laughs, not unkindly. 'Never mind, little man. Don't even bother to ask.'

Gary thinks of chasing it a little, then decides it would probably be better to quit while he's ahead — he got the Frisbee, after all, and she applauded him, and the sight of her bouncing around in that little halter would have gotten an overcooked noodle hard. Surely that is enough for a summer afternoon as hot as this one.

Above and behind them, at the top of the hill, the red van begins to move, creeping slowly up on the corner.

'You coming to the game tonight?' Gary asks Dave Reed. 'We got the Columbus Rebels. Should be good.'

'You gonna play?'

'I should get a couple of innings in the field and at least one ay-bee.'

'Probably not, then,' Dave says, and yodels a laugh which makes Gary wince. The Reed twins look like young gods in their cut-off tees, he thinks, but when they open their mouths they bear a suspicious resemblance to the Hager Twins of Hee Haw.

Gary glances down toward the house on the corner of Poplar and Hyacinth, across from the store. The last house on the left, as in the horror movie of the same name. There is no car in the driveway, but that means nothing; it could be in the garage.

'He home?' he asks Dave, lifting his chin at 240.

'Dunno,' Jim says, coming over. 'But you hardly ever do, do you? That's what makes him so weird. Half the time he leaves his damn car in the garage and cuts through the woods to Hyacinth. Probably takes the bus to wherever it is he goes.'

'You scared of him?' Dave asks Gary. He's not exactly taunting, but it's close.

'Shit, no,' Gary says, cool, looking at the redhead, wondering about how it would feel to have a package like her in his arms, all sleek and springy, maybe slipping him a little tongue as she snuggled up to his boner. Not in this life, Bub, he thinks again.

He tosses the redhead a wave, is outwardly non-committal and inwardly overjoyed when she returns it, then sails diagonally down the street toward 240 Poplar. He'll deliver the Shopper on to the porch with his usual hard flip, and then — if the crazy ex-cop doesn't come charging out the front door, foaming at the mouth and glaring at him with stoned PCP eyes, maybe waving his service pistol or a machete or something — Gary will go across to the E-Z Stop for a soda to celebrate another successful negotiation of his route: Anderson Avenue to Columbus Broad, Columbus Broad to Bear Street, Bear Street to Poplar Street. Then home to change into his uniform and off to the baseball wars.

First, however, there is 240 Poplar to get behind him, home of the ex-cop who reputedly lost his job for beating a couple of innocent North Side kids to death because he thought they raped a little girl. Gary has no idea if there's any truth to the story — he has never seen anything about it in the papers, certainly — but he has seen the ex-cop's eyes, and there is something in them that he's never seen in another pair of eyes, a vacancy that makes you want to look away just as soon as you can without appearing uncool.

At the top of the hill, the red van — if that's what it is, it's so gaudy and customized it's hard to tell — turns on to Poplar. It begins to pick up speed. The sound of its engine is a cadenced, silky whisper. And what, pray tell, is that chrome gadget on the roof?

Johnny Marinville stops playing his guitar to watch the van slide past. He can't see inside because the windows are polarized, but the thing on the roof looks like a chrome-plated radar dish, goddamned if it doesn't. Has the CIA landed on Poplar Street? Across from him, Johnny sees Brad Josephson standing on his lawn, still holding his hose in one hand and his Shopper in the other. Brad is also gaping after the slow-moving van (Is it a van, though? Is it?), his expression a mixture of wonder and perplexity.

Arrows of sun glint off the bright red paint and the chrome below the dark windows, arrows so bright they make Johnny wince.

Next door to Johnny, David Carver is still washing his car. He's enthusiastic, you have to give him that; he's got that Chevy of his buried in soapsuds all the way to the wiper-blades.

The red van rolls past him, humming and glinting.

On the other side of the street, the Reed twins and their gal pals stop their front-lawn Frisbee game to look at the slow-rolling van. The kids make a rectangle; in the center of it sits Hannibal, panting happily and awaiting his next chance to snatch the Frisbee.

Things are happening fast now, although no one on Poplar Street realizes it yet.

In the distance, thunder rumbles.

Gary Ripton barely notices the van in his rearview mirror, or the bright yellow Ryder truck which turns left from Hyacinth on to Poplar, pulling on to the tarmac of the E-Z Stop, where the Carver kids are still standing by Buster the red wagon and squabbling over whether Ralph will be pulled up the hill by his sister or not. Ralph has agreed to walk and keep silent about the magazine with Ethan Hawke on the cover, but only if his dear sister Margrit the Maggot gives him all of the candybar instead of just half.

The kids break off their argument, noticing the white steam hissing out of the Ryder truck's grille like dragon's breath, but Gary Ripton pays zero attention to the Ryder truck's problems. His attention is focused on one thing and one thing only: delivering the crazy ex-copper's Shopper and then getting away unscathed. The ex-copper's name is Collier Entragian, and he is the only person on the block with a NO TRESPASSING sign on his lawn. It's small, it's discreet, but it's there.

If he killed a couple of kids, how come he's not in jail? Gary wonders, and not for the first time. He decides he doesn't care. The ex-cop's continued freedom isn't his business on this sultry afternoon; survival is his business.

With all this on his mind, it's no wonder Gary doesn't notice the Ryder truck with the steam pouring out of the grille, or the two kids who have momentarily ceased their complicated negotiations concerning the magazine, the 3 Musketeers bar, and the red wagon, or the van coming down the hill. He is concentrating on not becoming a psycho cop's next victim, and this is ironic, since his fate is actually approaching from behind him.

One of the van's side windows begins to slide down.

A shotgun barrel pokes out. It is an odd colour, not quite silver, not quite gray. The twin muzzles look like the symbol for infinity colored black.

Somewhere beyond the blazing sky, afternoon thunder rumbles again.

From the Columbus Dispatch, July 31st, 1994:

MEMBERS OF

TOLEDO FAMILY

SLAIN IN SAN JOSE

Four Killed in Suspected Gang

Drive-by; Six-Year-Old Survives

SAN JOSE (AP) A family vacation to northern California ended in tragedy yesterday when four members of a Toledo family were slain in a hail of gunfire, victims of what San Jose police speculate may have been misdirected gang violence. Killed in the drive-by shooting were William Garin, 42, June Garin, 40, and two of their three children: John Garin, 12, and Mary Lou Garin, 10. The Garins were visiting Joseph and Roxanne Calabrese, friends from college. The Calabreses were in the back yard at the time of the shooting and were not injured. Also uninjured was six-year-old Seth Garin, who was playing in the back-yard sandbox. According to Joseph Calabrese, the Garins and their older children were playing croquet on the front lawn when they were gunned down.

'I can't believe the society we're living in, that such things can happen,' a shaken Calabrese said. 'This is a good neighborhood. We've never had anything like this happen here before.'

Witnesses reported seeing a red van in the vicinity shortly before the shooting. One man claimed it may have been equipped with high-tech monitoring equipment. 'It had what looked like a radar dish on the roof,' he said. 'If the punks don't ditch it, it should be easy to find.'

Police have not found the mystery van yet, however, and no arrests have been made. When asked about the weapons used in the attack, Lieutenant Robert Alvarez would only say that ballistics had not yet been able to make a definite determination, and that the issue is still under investigation.

CHAPTER TWO

1

Steve Ames saw the shooting because of the two kids arguing beside the red wagon in front of the store. The girl looked seriously pissed at the little boy, and for one second Steve was sure she was going to give him a shove . . . which might send him sprawling across the wagon and in front of the truck. Running over a brat in a Bart Simpson shirt in central Ohio would certainly be the perfect end to this totally fucked-up day.

As he stopped well short of them — better safe than sorry — he saw their attention had been diverted from whatever they were fighting about to the steam pouring out of his radiator. Beyond them, in the street, was a red van, maybe the brightest red van Steve had ever seen in his life. The paintjob wasn't what attracted his eye, however. What did was the shiny chrome doodad on the van's roof. It looked like some sort of futuristic radar dish. It was swinging back and forth in a short, repeating arc, too, the way that radar dishes did.

There was a kid riding a bike on the far side of the street. The van slid over toward him, as if the driver (or someone inside) wanted to talk to him. The kid had no idea it was there; he had just taken a rolled-up newspaper from the sack hanging down on one hip and was cocking his arm back to throw it.

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 on to 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 on to 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 on to 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-coloured 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 Gary'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 becausehe 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. Til 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 two 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.

From Movies on TV, edited by Steven H. Scheuer, Bantam Books:

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.

3

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. What 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.

4

'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.'

'Bugger-doody!' the little scamp in the wagon cried, and made a rather mature jacking-off gesture at Peter with one hand.

'That'll be enough of that, big guy,' David said indulgently, without turning around. His buttocks worked back and forth in the too-small bathing suit. To Peter they looked like biscuits on pistons.

'What happened?' Tom asked in his gruff voice as the wagon passed by.

Peter tuned out Carver's reply (David, mindful of his wife's concern, kept moving as he filled in the Doc) and looked up toward the corner for any sign of his wife's Lumina. He saw no moving vehicles at all, only a parked van just this side of the Abelsons' house on Bear Street. It was painted a yellow so bright it all but screamed. He supposed that part of its brightness derived from the way the light was fading as the clouds advanced, but still, looking at it made his eyes ache. Must be kids, he thought. No one else would want something that color. It hardly looked like a real vehicle at all, more like something out of a Star Trek movie, or —

An idea suddenly hit him. Not a very good one.

'Dave?'

Carver looked back, his sunburned belly hanging over the front of his bathing suit, scales of soap from his car-washing operation drying on it.

What was he driving, the guy who shot Gary?'

'A red van.'

'That's right,' Ralphie chipped in. 'Red like Tracker Arrow.'

Peter hardly heard this. He was stuck on the word van, feeling his own stomach tighten up like something attached to a crank.

'The reddest red van you ever saw,' Kirsten added. 'I saw it, too. I was looking out the window and I saw it go by. David, will you come on?

'Sure,' he said, and began pulling the wagon again. When David turned away, Peter (his momentary disquiet passing) suddenly stuck his tongue out at Ralphie, who just happened to be looking at him. Ralphie looked comically surprised.

Old Doc strolled down to Peter, hands still in his pockets. Thunder rolled. They looked up and saw dark shelves of clouds overspreading Poplar Street's portion of the sky. Lightning stabbed forks at downtown Columbus.

'Going to rain a bitch,' the veterinarian said. His hair was thin, white, baby-fine. 'I hope they'll get the boy's body decently covered before it comes.' He paused, took one hand out of his pocket, and passed it slowly over his brow, as if to soothe away the beginnings of a headache. 'Terrible thing. He was a fine lad. Played ball.'

'I know.' Peter thought of the way Gary had laughed when he, Peter, had told him that next year it would be his turn to howl at shortstop, and felt a sudden pain in his stomach, the organ (not the heart, as the poets had always claimed) most attuned to humankind's tender emotions. Suddenly it was all perfectly real to him. Gary Ripton wasn't going to be the Wentworth Hawks' starting shortstop next summer; Gary Ripton wasn't going to swing in through the back door tonight, asking what was for supper. Gary Ripton had flown off to Never-Never Land, leaving his shadow behind. He was one of the Lost Boys now.

Thunder bammed again, the sound so close and splintery this time that Peter jumped. 'Look,' he said to Tom. 'I've got a big sheet of plastic in my garage. The size of a car-cover, almost. If I got it, would you come down the street and help me cover him with it?'

'Officer Entragian might not like that,' the old man said.

'Screw Officer Entragian, he's no more a cop than I am,' Peter said. 'They fired his ass last year for graft.'

'The other police, though, when they come — '

'I don't care about them, either,' Peter said. He wasn't crying, exactly, but his voice had thickened and was no longer quite steady. 'He was a nice kid, a really lovely kid, and some drugrunner shot him off his bike like an Indian off his pony in a John Ford movie. It's going to rain and he'll get soaked. I'd like to tell his mother I did what I could. So do you want to help me or not?'

'Well, since you put it like that,' Tom said. He clapped Peter on the shoulder. 'Come on, Teach, let's do it.'

'Good man.'

5

Kim Geller slept through the whole thing. She was still sleeping on the coverlet of her bed when Susi and Debbie Ross — the redhead with whom Gary Ripton had been so taken — came rushing into her bedroom and shook her awake. She sat up, muzzy and feeling almost hungover (sleeping on dog-hot days like this one was almost always a mistake, but sometimes you just couldn't help it), trying to follow what the girls were saying and losing the thread of it almost at once. They seemed to be telling her that someone had been shot, shot on Poplar Street, and that was of course fantastic.

Still, when they got her over to the window, it seemed undeniable that something had happened. The Reed twins and Cammie, their mother, were standing at the end of their driveway. The Lush and the Bitch, known as the Sodersons in politer circles, were standing right in the middle of the street up by the end of the block . . . although now Marielle was tugging Gary in the direction of their house, and he seemed to be going. Beyond them, standing together on the sidewalk, were the Josephsons. And, across the way, she saw Peter Jackson and old man Billingsley coming out of the Jackson garage, carrying a great big piece of blue plastic between them. The wind was starting to rise, and the sheet of plastic was rippling.

Everyone on the street, just about. Everyone that was home, anyhow. It was no good trying to get a look at what they were gawking at from here, either. The side of the house cut off any view down the block to the corner.

Kimberly Geller turned back to the girls, trying hard to clear the cobwebs out of her mind. The girls were dancing from foot to foot as if they had to go to the bathroom; Debbie, she saw, was snapping her hands open and closed. They were both pale and excited, a combination Kim didn't care for very much. But the idea that someone had been killed . . . they had to be wrong about that . . . didn't they?

'Now tell me what happened,' she said. 'No faking.'

'Someone killed Gary Ripton, we told you!' Susi cried impatiently, as if her mother were the dumbest thing in the world . . . which, at this particular moment, Kim felt herself to be. 'Come on, Mom! We can watch the police come!'

'I want to see him again before someone covers him up!' Debbie yelled suddenly. She turned and raced off down the stairs. Susi paused for a moment, looking dubious — looking almost sick, in fact — then turned and followed her friend.

'Come on, Mom!' she called back over her shoulder, and then was thundering down the stairs, this spring's Rose Queen at the high school prom and every bit as graceful as a water buffalo, making the windows rattle and the overhead light-fixture tingle.

Kim walked slowly across to the bed and slipped her bare feet into her sandals, feeling slow and late and confused.

6

'And you ran all the way down there?' Belinda Josephson asked for the third time. This seemed to be the part of the story she couldn't quite get straight. 'Fat as you are?'

'Shit, woman, I'm not fat,' Brad said. 'Large is what I am.'

'Honey, that's what they'll put on your death certificate, if you do many more of those hundred-yard dashes,' Belinda said. '"The victim died of terminal largeness."' The words were nagging, the tone was not. She rubbed the back of his neck as she spoke, feeling the chilled sweat there.

He pointed down the street. 'Look. Pete Jackson and Old Doc.'

'What are they doing?'

'Going to cover up the boy, I think,' he said, and started in that direction.

She yanked him back at once. 'No you don't, my friend. No sir, no way. You've had your trip downstreet for the day.'

He gave her what Belinda thought of as his Don't Diss Me Woman look — a pretty good one for a Boston-raised black man whose chief knowledge of ghetto life came from TV — but made no argument. Perhaps he would have if Johnny Marinville hadn't come down his walk just then. More thunder boomed. A steady breeze was blowing now. It felt cold to Belinda — showery-cold. There were purplish thunderheads rolling in overhead, ugly but not scary. What was scary — a little, anyway — was the yellow sky off to the southwest. She ho