The Regulators - Stephen King [68]
'Is she going to die?' Collie asks.
'I don't know,' Billingsley says. He pauses, takes his own look at Gary, sighs, runs his hands through his Albert Einstein tangle of white hair. 'Probably. Certainly, if she doesn't get to a hospital soon. She needs a lot of help. Most of all, a transfusion. And there's someone hurt next door, by the sound. Kirsten, I think. And maybe she's not the only one.'
Collie nods.
'Mr Entragian, what do you think is going on here?'
'I don't have the slightest idea.'
Cynthia grabs a newspaper (it's the Columbus Dispatch, not the Wentworth Shopper) that has fallen to the living-room floor during the rumpus, rolls it up, and crawls slowly to the front door. She uses the newspaper to sweep broken glass — there is a surprising amount of it — out of her way as she goes.
Steve thinks of objecting, asking her if she maybe has a deathwish, then stows it. Sometimes he gets ideas about things. Pretty strong ones, as a matter of fact. Once, while peaceably reading palms on the boardwalk in Wildwood, he had an idea so strong that he quit the job that very night. It was an idea about a laughing seventeen-year-old girl with ovarian cancer. Malignant, advanced, maybe a month beyond any possible human remedy. Not the sort of idea you wanted to have about a pretty green-eyed high-school kid if your life's motto was
NO PROBLEM.
The idea he's having now is every bit as strong as that one but quite a bit more optimistic: the shooters are gone, at least for the time being. There's no way he can know that, but he feels certain of it, just the same.
Instead of calling Cynthia back, he joins her. The inside door has been blown open by several gunshots (it has also been so severely warped that Steve doubts it will ever close again), and the breeze coming through the shattered screen is heaven — sweet and cool on his sweaty face. The kids are still crying next door, but the screaming has stopped, at least for the time being, and that's a relief.
'Where is he?' Cynthia asks, sounding stunned. 'Look, there's his wife — ' she points to Mary's body, which is now lying in the street, close enough to the far side so that tendrils of her hair are wavering in the water rushing down the west gutter — 'but where's he? Mr Jackson?'
Steve points through the torn lower half of the screen. 'In that house. Must be. See his glasses on the path?'
Cynthia squints, then nods.
'Who lives there?' Steve asks her.
'I don't know. I haven't been here anywhere near long enough to — '
'Mrs Wyler and her nephew,' Collie says from behind them. They turn and see him squatting on his hunkers, looking out between them. 'The boy's autistic or dyslexic or catatonic . . . one of those damned icks, I can never keep them straight. Her husband died last year, so it's just the two of them. Jackson . . . must . . . must have . . . ' He doesn't break off but runs down, the words getting smaller and smaller, finally diminishing into silence. When he speaks again, his voice is still low . . . and very thoughtful. 'What the hell?'
'What?' Cynthia asks uneasily. 'What?'
'Are you kidding me? You don't see?'
'See what? I see the woman, and I see her husband's gla — ' Now it's her turn to run down.
Steve starts to ask what the deal is, then understands — sort of. He supposes he would have seen it earlier, even though he's a stranger to the street, if his attention hadn't been diverted by the body, the dropped spectacles, and his concern for Mrs Soderson. He knows what he must do about that, and more than anything else he has been nerving himself up to do it.
Now, though, he simply looks across the street, letting his eyes move slowly from the E-Z Stop to the next building up, from that one to the one where the kids were playing Frisbee when he turned on to the street, and then on to the one directly opposite them, the one