The Regulators - Stephen King [58]
She turned and boosted herself, sitting sidesaddle on the edge of the sink. Then she leaned close to the screen, smelling its metal and all the wet summer straining through its mesh. The combined scents called up a momentary nostalgia for her childhood, a feeling that was both fine and fierce. It was strange, she thought, how it was almost always the smells of things that took you back the hardest.
'Halloo!' she called, cupping her hands around her mouth. Brad grabbed her shoulder, apparently wanting her to stop, and she shook him off emphatically. 'Halloo, Billingsley!'
'Don't do that, Bee,' Cammie Reed said. 'It's not wise.'
And what would be wise? Belinda thought. Just sitting on the kitchen floor and waiting for the cavalry to come?
'Hell, go on,' Johnny said. 'What harm can it do? If the people who did the shooting are still around, I imagine that where we are is hardly a big secret to them.' An idea seemed to strike him at that, and he dropped on his hunkers in front of the late postman's wife. 'Kirsten, did David have a gun? A hunting rifle, or maybe — '
'There's a pistol in his desk,' she said. 'Second drawer on the left of the kneehole. That drawer's locked, but the key's in the wide drawer at the top. It's on a piece of green yarn.'
Johnny nodded. 'And the desk? Where's that?'
'Oh. In his little office. Upstairs, the end of the hall.' She said all this while seeming to contemplate her own knees, then raised desperate, distracted eyes to look at him. 'He's out in the rain, Johnny. So is Susi's friend. We shouldn't leave them out in the rain.'
'It's stopping,' Johnny said, and his face suggested he knew how inane that sounded. It seemed to satisfy Pie, though, at least temporarily, and Belinda supposed that was the important thing. Perhaps it was Johnny's tone. The words might be inane, but Belinda had never heard him sound so gentle. 'Just take care of your kids, Kirstie, and don't concern yourself with the rest of it for the time being.'
He got up and started for the swinging door, walking in a battlefield crouch.
'Mr Marinville?' Jim Reed asked. 'Can I come with you?' But when he attempted to set Ralphie aside, a panicked look came into the boy's eyes. His thumb came out of his mouth with an audible pop and he clung to Jim like a barnacle, muttering, 'No, Jim, no, Jim,' under his breath in a way that made Belinda feel like shivering. She thought mad people probably talked that way when they were alone in their cells at night.
'Stay where you are, Jim,' Johnny said. 'Brad? What about you? Little trip to higher altitudes? Clear the old sinuses?'
'Sure.' Brad looked at his wife with that expression of love and exasperation that is the sole property of people who have been married over ten years. 'You really think it's okay for this woman of mine to be shooting off her mouth?'
'I repeat, what harm can it do?'
'Be careful,' Belinda said. She smoothed a hand briefly across Brad's chest. 'Keep your head down. Promise me.'
'I promise to keep my head down.'
She looked at Johnny. 'Now you.'
'Huh? Oh.' He offered a charming grin, and Belinda had a sudden insight: that was the way Mr John Edward Marinville always grinned when he made promises to women. 'I promise.'
They went out, dropping a little self-consciously to their knees as they passed through the swinging door and once more into the Carvers' front hall. Belinda leaned toward the screen again. Besides rain and wet grass, she could smell the old Hobart place burning. She realized she could hear it, too — a crackly, whooshing sound. The downpour would probably keep the fire from spreading, but where were the fire trucks, for Christ's sake? What did they pay their taxes for? 'Halloo, Billingsley's! Who's there?'
After a moment, a man's voice (one she didn't recognize) called back. 'There are seven of us! The couple from up the block — '
That had to be the Sodersons, Belinda thought.
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