The Regulators - Stephen King [106]
The cop reached up and hooked his fingers into Dave's shirt.
'Hurt,' he whispered hoarsely. 'Hurt.'
'Don't — ' Dave swallowed, cleared his throat ' — try to talk.'
Behind him, incredibly, he could hear Johnny Marinville and the hippie guy talking about whether or not they should go on. They were insane, had to be. And Marinville . . . where had Marinville been? How could he have let this happen? He was a fucking adultl
With a shudder of effort, Collie Entragian got up on one elbow. His remaining eye stared at the boy with ferocious concentration. 'Never,' he whispered. 'Never — '
'Sir . . . Mr Entragian . . . you'd better just . . . '
Wh-wh-WHOOOOOOOO!
Close enough this time to make Dave Reed's skin feel as if it were freezing. He felt like ripping Johnny Marinville's face off for not stopping this before it had become irrevocable. Yet the cop's eye held him like a bug on a pin, and one of the cop's blood-streaked hands had knotted a handful of Dave's shirt into a loose fist. He could tear away from him, maybe, but . . .
But that was a lie. He felt like a bug on a pin.
'Never took drugs . . . sold them . . . any of it,' Collie whispered. 'Never took a dime. Framed. IA shooflies on the take . . . I found out.'
'You — ' Dave began.
'I found out! You understand . . . what I'm saying?' He held up the hand that wasn't knotted in Dave's shirt, opened it, appeared to examine it. 'Hands . . . clean.'
'Yeah, okay,' Dave said. 'But you better not try to talk. You got . . . well, a little crease, and — '
'Jim, no!' Marinville screamed from behind him. 'Don't!'
Dave suddenly discovered he could pull away from the dying man quite easily.
3
'What do we do?' Johnny asked the longhair as, on the other side of the path, the dark-haired twin knelt by the man his brother had shot. Johnny could hear the faint sound of Entragian murmuring, as if he wanted to make a good confession before he died. Johnny had relearned a gruesome fact this afternoon: people died hard, by and large, and when they went out, they left without much dignity . . . and probably without realizing they were leaving at all.
'Do?' Steve asked. He stared at Johnny, almost comically amazed, and ran a hand through his hair, smearing red in with the gray. More blood was spreading on the shoulders of his shirt where the cat's claws had sunk in. 'What do you mean, do?'
'Do we go on or do we go back?' Johnny asked. His voice was rough, urgent. 'What's up ahead? What did you see?'
'Nothing,' Steve said. 'No, I take that back. It's worse than nothing. It — ' His eyes shifted past Johnny and widened.
Johnny turned, thinking the hippie must have seen the coyotes, they had finally arrived, but it wasn't coyotes. 'Jim, no!' he screamed. 'Don't!' Knowing it was already too late, seeing it on young Jim Reed's pale face, where everything had been cancelled.
4
The boy stood there with the pistol pressed against the side of his head just long enough for Steve Ames to hope that maybe he wasn't going to do it, that he'd had a change of heart at the penultimate moment, that last little vestibule of maybe not before the endless hallway of too late, and then Jim pulled the trigger. His face contorted as if he had been struck with a gas-pain of moderate intensity. His skin seemed to pop sideways on his skull, the left cheek puffing out. Then his head blew apart, his ambitions to write great essays (not to mention those of getting into Susi Geller's pants) so much vapor in the strange sunset air, red goo that splattered across one of the insane cacti like spit. He staggered forward a step on buckling knees, the gun tumbling from his hand, then went down. Steve turned his thunderstruck face to Johnny's, thinking: I didn't see what I just saw. Rewind the tape, play it again, and you'll see, too. I didn't see what I just saw. Neither of us did. No, man. No.
Except he had. The kid, overcome with remorse and horror at what he had done