The Regulators - Stephen King [128]
'JIM!' Susi screamed. 'OHHHH GAWWWD, JIM! OH GAWWWD NO! OH — '
There was a slap. The screams were cut off almost at once. Then:
'You can't hit my daughter! You can't hit my daughter, you bitch, I don't care what ideas you've gotten from . . . from affirmative action! You fat black bitch!'
'Oh, fuck me til I cry,' Cynthia said. She clutched her own double-dyed hair and squeezed her eyes shut like a kid who doesn't want to watch the final few minutes of a scary movie.
Brad kept his open and held his breath, waiting for Bee to go nuclear. Instead, Bee ignored the woman, calling softly through the fence: 'Are you sending his body over, Bradley?' She sounded completely composed, for which Brad was completely thankful.
'Yeah. You and his mother and his brother catch hold of him when we do.'
'We will.' Still cool as a cucumber fresh out of the crock.
'Kim?' Brad called through the stakes of the fence. 'Mrs Geller? Why don't you go on in the house, ma'am?'
'Yes!' Kim said pleasantly. 'I think that's a good idea. We'll just go in the house, won't we, Susi? Some cold water on our faces will make us feel better.'
There were footfalls. The snuffling began to diminish, which was good. Then the coyotes began to howl again, which was bad. Brad looked over his shoulder and saw chips of moving silver light in the tangled darkness of the greenbelt. Eyes.
'We've got to hurry,' Cynthia said.
'You don't know the half of it,' Audrey said.
Brad thought: That's what I'm afraid of. He turned and took hold of Jim Reed's shoulders. He could smell, very faintly, the shampoo and aftershave the kid had used that morning. Probably he'd been thinking about the girls as he applied them. Johnny took a nervous look behind them — at those moving chips of light, Brad assumed — then moved down Jim's body until he had one arm around the dead boy's waist and the other supporting his butt. Audrey and Cynthia took his legs.
'Ready?' Johnny asked.
They nodded.
'On three, then. One . . . two . . . three.'
They raised the body like a quartet doing a team bench-lift. For one horrible moment Brad thought his back, having supported a shamefully large gut for the last ten years or so, was going to lock up on him. Then they had Jim's body up to the top of the fence. The dead boy's arms hung out to either side, the posture of a circus acrobat inviting applause at the climax of a fabulous stunt. His open palms were full of moonlight.
Beside Brad, Johnny sounded on the verge of cardiac arrest. Jim's head lolled limply backward on his neck. A drop of half-congealed blood fell and struck Brad's cheek. It made him think of mint jelly, for some mad reason, and his stomach clenched like a hand in a slick glove.
'Help us!' Cynthia gasped. 'For Christ's sake, someone —
Hands appeared, hovered above the blunt fence-stakes for a moment, then broke apart into fingers which grasped Jim's shirt and the waistband of his shorts. Just as Brad knew he couldn't hold the body another second (never until now had he really understood the concept of dead weight), it was pulled away from him. There was a meaty thud, and from a little distance away (the Carvers' back porch was Brad's guess), Susi Geller voiced another brief scream.
Johnny looked at him, and Brad was almost convinced the man was smiling. 'Sounds like they dropped him,' Johnny said in a low voice. He wiped an arm across his sweaty face, then lowered it. The smile — if it had been there in the first place — was gone.
'Whoops,' Brad said.
'Yeah. Whoops-a-fuckin-daisy.'
'Hey, Doc!' Cynthia cried in a low voice. 'Catch! Don't worry, safety's on!' She lifted the .30-.06, stock first, standing on her toes in order to tip it over the fence.
'Got it,' Billingsley said. Then, in a lower voice: 'That woman and her idiot daughter finally went in the house.'
Cynthia climbed the fence and swung easily over the top. Audrey needed a push and a hand on her hip for balance, and then she was over, as well. Steve went next, using Brad's and Johnny's interlaced hands as a stirrup and then sitting up top a moment, waiting for