The Regulators - Stephen King [60]
'Don't you go out there!' she screamed. 'They'll come back and kill you! They'll come back and kill us all!'
No answer from the other house for several moments, and then Collie Entragian spoke up in a voice that sounded both apologetic and bemused: 'No good, ma'am! He's gone!'
'You should have stopped him!' Kirsten screamed. Belinda put an arm around the woman's shoulders and was frightened by the steady high vibration she felt. As if Kirsten was on the verge of exploding. What kind of policeman are you!'
'He's not,' Kim said. She spoke in a just-what-the-hell-did-you-expect tone. 'He got kicked off the force. He was running a hot-car ring.'
Susi raised her head. 'I don't believe it.'
'What do you know about it, a girl your age?' her mother asked.
Belinda was about to slide off the edge of the sink when she saw something on the back lawn that made her freeze. It was caught against one leg of the kids' swing set, and like the spider's web, jeweled with hanging drops of rain.
'Cammie?'
'What?'
'Come here.'
If anyone would know, Cammie would; she had a garden in her backyard, a jungle of potted plants inside her house, and a library's worth of books on growing things.
Cammie got up from her place by the pantry door, and came over. Susi and her mother joined her; so did Dave Reed.
'What?' Pie Carver asked, turning a wild gaze on Belinda. Pie's daughter had her arms wrapped around her mother's leg as if it were a treetrunk, and was still trying to hide her face against the hip of Pie's denim shorts. 'What is it?'
Belinda ignored her and spoke to Cammie. 'Look over there. By the swings. Do you see?'
Cammie started to say she didn't, then Belinda pointed and she did. Thunder mumbled to the east of them, and the breeze kicked up a brief gust. The spider's web outside the window shivered and shed tiny droplets of rain. The thing Belinda had seen got free of the swing set and rolled partway across the Carvers' backyard, in the direction of the stake fence.
'That's impossible,' Cammie said flatly. 'Russian thistle doesn't grow in Ohio. Even if it did . . . this is summer. They root in summer.'
'What's Russian thistle, Mom?' Dave asked. His arm was around Susi's waist. 'I never heard of it.'
Tumbleweed,' Cammie said in that same flat voice. 'Russian thistle is tumbleweed.'
3
Brad poked his head through Carver's office door just in time to see Johnny pull a green-and-white box of cartridges out of a desk drawer. In his other hand, the writer had David Carver's pistol. He had rolled the cylinder out to make sure the chambers were empty; they were, but he was still holding the gun awkwardly, with all of his fingers outside the trigger-guard. To Brad he looked like one of those guys who sold dubious items on high-channel cable TV: Folks, this little beauty will ventilate any night-time intruder unwise enough to pick your house, yes, of course it will, but wait, there's more! It slices! It dices! And do you love scalloped potatoes but just never have time to make them at home?
'Johnny.'
He looked up, and for the first time Brad saw clearly how frightened the man was. It made him like Johnny better. He couldn't think of a reason why that should be, but it was.
'There's a fool out on Old Doc's lawn. Jackson, I guess.'
'Shit. That's not very bright, is it?'
'No. Don't shoot yourself with that thing.' Brad started out of the room, then turned back. 'Are we crazy? Because it feels that way.'
Johnny raised his hands in front of him, palms up, to indicate he didn't know.
4
Johnny looked into the chambers of the pistol one more time — as if a bullet might have grown in one of them while he wasn't looking — then snapped the cylinder back into place. He stuck the pistol in his belt and tucked the box of cartridges into his shirt pocket.
The front hall was a minefield of Ralphie Carver's boy-toys; the kid had apparently not yet been introduced by his doting