The Regulators - Stephen King [10]
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