The Regulators - Stephen King [18]
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