The Regulators - Stephen King [46]
She went back into the kitchen, letting the door close behind her. The three of them looked at one another for a moment with sick conspirators' eyes. None of them said anything. Then Belinda handed the gawky-looking black cone back to Johnny, duck-walked past him to the kitchen door, and pushed it open. Brad followed on his hands and knees. Johnny looked at the slug a moment longer, thinking of what the woman had said, that it was like a kid's idea of a bullet. She was right. He had visited his share of lower elementary school classrooms since beginning to chronicle the adventures of Pat the Kitty-Cat, and he had seen a lot of drawings, big grinning mommies and daddies standing under yellow Crayola suns, weird green landscapes festooned with bold brown trees, and this looked like something that had fallen out of one of those pictures, whole and intact, somehow made real.
Little bitty baby Smitty, a voice said way back in his mind, but when he tried to chase after that voice, wanting to ask if it really knew something or was just blowing off its bazoo, it was gone.
Johnny put the slug in his right front pants pocket with his car keys and then followed the Josephsons into the kitchen.
4
Steven Jay Ames, pretty much of a scratched entry in the great American steeplechase, had a motto, and this motto was:
NO PROBLEM, MAN.
He had gotten D's in his first semester at MIT — this in spite of SAT scores somewhere in the ionosphere — but, hey,
NO PROBLEM, MAN.
He had transferred from electrical engineering to general engineering, and when his grades still hadn't risen past that magical 2.0 point, he had packed his bags and gone down the road to Boston University, having decided to give up the sterile halls of science for the green fields of English Lit. Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, a little T. S. Eliot. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of the universe, here we go round the prickly pear; twentieth-century angst, man. He had done okay at BU for a while, then had flunked out in his junior year, as much a victim of obsessive bridge-playing as of booze and Panama Red. But
NO PROBLEM, MAN.
He had drifted around Cambridge, hanging out, playing guitar and getting laid. He wasn't much of a guitar-player and did better at getting laid, but
NO PROBLEM, MAN,
really. When Cambridge began to get a tad elderly, he had simply cased his guitar and ridden his thumb down to New York City.
In the years since, he had scuttled his ragged claws through salesman's jobs, gone around the prickly pear as a disc jockey at a short-lived heavy metal station in Fishkill, New York, gone around again as a radio-station engineer, a rock-show promoter (six good shows followed by a nightmarish exit from Providence in the middle of the night — he'd left owing some pretty hard guys about $60,000, but
NO REAL PROBLEM, MAN),
as a palmistry guru on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, and then as a guitar tech. That felt like home, somehow, and he became a gun for hire in upstate New York and eastern Pennsylvania. He liked tuning and repairing guitars — it was peaceful. Also, he was a lot better at repairing them than he was at playing them. During this period he had also quit smoking dope and playing bridge, which simplified things even further. Two years before, living in Albany, he had become friends with Deke Ableson, who owned Club Smile, a good roadhouse where you could get a bellyful of blues almost any night you wanted. Steve had first shown up at Smile in his capacity as a freelance guitar tech, then had stepped up when the guy running the board had a minor heart attack. At first that had been a problem, maybe the first real one of Steve's adult life, but for some reason he had stuck with it in spite of his fear of fucking up and being lynched by drunk cycle-wolves. Part of it was Deke, who was unlike every club owner Steve had known up until then: he was not a thief, a lecher, or a fellow who could validate his own existence only