The Regulators - Stephen King [27]
'Jim,' Johnny says to the other Reed twin, walking to the back of Mary's car so he can be heard without having to shout. The boy looks up from the dead man and the wailing woman. His face is dazed.
'Take Ralphie inside, Jim. He shouldn't be here.'
Jim nods, picks the boy up, and trots up the walk with him. Johnny expects shrieks of protest — even at six, Ralphie Carver knows it is his destiny to run the world someday — but the boy only hangs in the big teenager's arms like a doll, his eyes huge and unblinking. Johnny believes the influence of childhood trauma on the lives of adults has been wildly overrated by a generation that listened to too many Moody Blues records in its formative years, but something like this must be different; it will be a long time, Johnny thinks, before the chief behavioral factor in Ralph Carver's life ceases to be the sight of his father lying dead on the lawn and his mother kneeling beside him in the rain, hands locked beneath his neck, screaming his daddy's name over and over, as if she could wake him up.
He thinks of trying to separate Kirsten from the corpse — it'll have to be done sooner or later — but Collie Entragian arrives at the Billingsley house before he can make his move, with the counter-girl from the E-Z Stop right behind him. The girl has pulled ahead of the longhair, who is puffing badly. The guy isn't as young as his rock and roll hair made him look from a distance. Johnny is perhaps most struck by the Josephsons. They are standing at the foot of the Carver driveway, holding hands, looking somehow like a Spike Lee version of Hansel and Gretel in the pouring rain. Marielle Soderson passes behind Johnny and joins her husband on the Billingsley lawn. Johnny decides that if Brad and Belinda Josephson can be Hansel and Gretel in Spike's new G-rated joint, Marielle can play the witch.
It's like the last chapter of an Agatha Christie, he thinks, when Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot explains everything, even how the murderer got out of the locked sleeping-car berth after doing the deed. We're all here except for Frank Geller and Charlie Reed, who are still at work. It's a regular block-party.
Except, he realizes, that's not quite true. Audrey Wyler isn't here, and neither is her nephew. The edge of something glimmers in his mind at that. He has a flash memory — the sound of a kid with a cold, he had thought — but before he can do more than start to reach for it, wanting to see if it's connected to anything (it feels connected, God knows why), Collie Entragian comes over to Mary's car and grabs his shoulder, hard enough to hurt, with one dripping hand. He's looking past Johnny, at the Carver place.
'What — two? — how — Christ!'
'Mr Entragian . . . Collie . . .' He tries to sound reasonable, tries not to grimace. 'You're breaking my shoulder.'
'Oh. Sorry, man. But — ' His eyes go back and forth from the shotgunned woman to the shotgunned man, David Carver with tendrils of blood washing down his white, blubbery sides in tendrils. Entragian can't seem to pick one to settle on, and consequently looks like a guy watching a tennis match.
Your shirt,' Johnny says, thinking what a stupendous non-starter of a conversational gambit this is. 'You forgot to put it on.'
'I was shaving,' Collie replies, and runs his hands through his short, dripping hair. The gesture expresses — as probably nothing else could — a mind that has progressed beyond