The Regulators - Stephen King [19]
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 hoped to God they weren't going to see a tornado funnel between now and dark; that would add the final touch to a day that had gone about as wrong as any day in recent memory.
She supposed that the rain would drive people indoors once it started, but for now just about everybody on the street was out, gawking down the hill at Entragian's house. As she watched, Kim Geller came out of 243, looked around, then walked one house up to join Cammie Reed on the Reeds' front porch. The Reed twins (the stuff of which harmless housewife-fantasies were made, in Belinda Josephson's humble opinion), along with Susi Geller and a dishy redhead Belinda didn't know, were standing on the lawn. Davey Reed was kneeling and appeared to be wiping his feet with his shirt, God knew why —
Of course you know why, she told herself.