The Regulators - Stephen King [26]
Little bitty baby Smitty, he thought, again hearing the voice from the telephone. I seen you bite your mommy's titty. Why should that voice remind him of the man in the bizarre costume and even more bizarre almond-eyed alien mask?
'What in the name of Jesus H. Sodapop Christ happened?' a voice asks from beside him. The others have converged on David Carver, but Gary Soderson has come over here, on to Old Doc's lawn. With his pale face and scrawny body, he looks like a man suffering from mid-stage cholera. 'Holy shit, Johnny! I see Paris, I see France, but I don't see her — '
'Shut up, you drunken asshole,' Johnny says. He looks to his left and sees the Reed twins and their mother, Kim Geller and her daughter, plus a redhead he doesn't know at all. They are gathered around David Carver's body like ballplayers clustered around an injured teammate. Gary's shrew of a wife is also there, but she's spied Gary and is now drifting in the direction of chez Billingsley. Then she stops, fascinated, as the Carvers' door smashes open and Kirstie comes flying out into the pelting rain like the governess in an old gothic novel, shrieking her husband's name as the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls.
Slowly, like a stupid child who has been called upon to recite, Gary says: 'What did you call me?' He isn't looking at Johnny, though, or even at the crowd on the Carvers' lawn; he is looking at what the dead woman's hiked-up skirt has revealed, storing it up for later reference (and, perhaps, conversation). Johnny suddenly feels an almost irresistible urge to punch the man in the nose.
'Never mind, just keep your mouth shut. I mean it.' He looks to his right, down the street, and sees Collie Entragian running this way. He appears to be wearing pink plastic shower-sandals. Behind him is a longhaired guy Johnny has never seen before, and the new girl from the market — Cynthia, her name is.
And behind them, quickly outdistancing old Tom Billingsley and closing in on Cynthia, wild-eyed, comes the street's resident expert on James Dickey and the New Southerns.
'Daddy!' A piercing, desolate little-girl shriek: Ellen Carver.
'Get those kids out of here!' Brad Josephson, hard and commanding, God bless him, but Johnny doesn't even look in that direction. Peter Jackson is coming, and there is something here he probably has even less business seeing than Johnny and Gary Soderson, even though Peter has surely seen it before and they haven't. An English teacher's riddle if ever there was one, he thinks. Another crazy old punchline rockets through his head: Hey, mister, your sign fell down! He can't even remember the fucking joke it came from. He takes one more look around to make sure no one but Gary is paying attention to Mary, and no one is. This is surely a miracle that won't last long. He bends down, turns Mary's hip — how heavy she is now that she's dead, how Christing heavy — and her legs fall together. Water runs down the side of one white thigh like rain on a tombstone. He yanks the hem of her skirt, deliberately turned so his action is blocked to the people coming up the hill. Already he can hear Peter bellowing: 'Mary? Mary?' He will have seen her car, of course, the Lumina with its nose against the stake fence.
'Why — ' Gary begins, then stops when Johnny looks up fiercely.
'Say anything and I'll punch your lights out,' he says. 'I mean it.'
Gary looks vague — almost doltish — for a moment, and then his face fills first with a goaty sort of understanding, followed by fake solemnity. He makes a zipping motion across his lips, though, and that's good. In the long run Gary will almost certainly talk, but Johnny Marinville has never been less concerned with the long run in his whole life.
He turns toward the Carver house and sees David Reed carrying the little Carver girl — she is shrieking and kicking her legs in vast scissoring motions — toward the house. Pie Carver on her