The Regulators - Stephen King [45]
He looked back over his shoulder at the fist-sized hole in the upper panel of the screen door. If a slug had made that, one running the last part of a downward trajectory —
He traced the course such a hypothetical slug might have taken and saw that, yes, it could have sheared off the table-leg, knocking the table itself back into that posture of leaning drunken surprise. And then, its force spent, come to rest?
Johnny reached into the litter of china, hoping he wouldn't cut himself (his hand was shaking badly, and concentration would not still it), and picked up the black object.
'What you got?' Brad asked, crawling toward Johnny.
'Brad, you get back here!' Belinda whispered fiercely.
'Hush, now,' Brad told her. 'What you got there, John?'
'I don't know,' he said, and held it up. He supposed he did know, actually, had known almost as soon as he had determined that it wasn't the remains of some weird summer beetle. But it was like no fired slug he had ever seen in his life. It wasn't the one that had taken the girl's life, that much seemed certain; it would have been flattened and twisted out of shape. This thing didn't seem to have so much as a scratch on it, although it had been fired, had gone through a panel of the screen door, and had sheared off the table-leg.
'Let me see,' Brad said. His wife had crawled up beside him and was looking over his shoulder.
Johnny dropped it into Brad's pale palm, a black cone about seven inches long from its tip, which looked sharp enough to cut skin, to its circular base. He guessed it was about two inches in diameter at its widest point. It was solid black metal, and completely unmarked, so far as Johnny could see. There were no concentric rings stamped into the base, no sign of a firing point (no bright nick left by the firing pin of the gun which had thrown it, for that matter), no manufacturer's name, no caliber stamp.
Brad looked up. 'What in the hell?' he asked, sounding as bewildered as Johnny felt.
'Let me see,' Belinda said in a low voice. 'My father used to take me shooting, and I was his good little helper when he did reloads. Give it over.'
Brad passed it to her. She rolled the metal cone between her fingers, then held it up to her eyes. Thunder banged outside, the sharpest peal in the last few minutes, and they all jumped.
'Where'd you find it?' she asked Johnny.
He pointed at the litter of china under the leaning table.
'Yeah?' She looked skeptical. 'How come it didn't go into the wall?'
Now that she posed the question, he realized what a good one it was. It had only gone through a screen and a flimsy table-leg; why hadn't it gone into the wall, leaving just a hole behind?
'I've never seen anything like this puppy in my life,' Belinda said. 'Of course, I haven't seen everything, far from it, but I can tell you that this didn't come from a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun.'
'Shotguns are what they were firing, though,' Johnny said. 'Double-barrelled shotguns. You're sure this couldn't — '
'I don't even know how it was launched,' she said. 'There's no firing nipple on the bottom, that's for sure. And it's so clunky. Like a kid's idea of what a bullet looks like.'
The swing-door between the hall and the kitchen opened, banging against the wall and startling them even more badly than the thunder had done. It was Susi Geller. Her face was horribly white, and to Johnny she looked all of eleven years old. 'There's someone screaming next door, at Billingsley's,' she said. 'It sounds like a woman, but it's hard to tell. It's scaring the kids.'
'All right, honey,' Belinda said. She sounded perfectly calm, and Johnny admired her for that. 'You go on back in the kitchen, now. We'll be along in a second.'
'Where's Debbie?' Susi asked. Her view down the hall to the stoop was mercifully blocked by the wide-bodied Josephsons. 'Did she go next door? I thought she was right behind me.' She paused. 'You don't think that's her screaming, do you?'
'No, I'm sure it's not,' Johnny said, and was appalled to find himself