The Regulators - Stephen King [9]
'I can't believe the society we're living in, that such things can happen,' a shaken Calabrese said. 'This is a good neighborhood. We've never had anything like this happen here before.'
Witnesses reported seeing a red van in the vicinity shortly before the shooting. One man claimed it may have been equipped with high-tech monitoring equipment. 'It had what looked like a radar dish on the roof,' he said. 'If the punks don't ditch it, it should be easy to find.'
Police have not found the mystery van yet, however, and no arrests have been made. When asked about the weapons used in the attack, Lieutenant Robert Alvarez would only say that ballistics had not yet been able to make a definite determination, and that the issue is still under investigation.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Steve Ames saw the shooting because of the two kids arguing beside the red wagon in front of the store. The girl looked seriously pissed at the little boy, and for one second Steve was sure she was going to give him a shove . . . which might send him sprawling across the wagon and in front of the truck. Running over a brat in a Bart Simpson shirt in central Ohio would certainly be the perfect end to this totally fucked-up day.
As he stopped well short of them — better safe than sorry — he saw their attention had been diverted from whatever they were fighting about to the steam pouring out of his radiator. Beyond them, in the street, was a red van, maybe the brightest red van Steve had ever seen in his life. The paintjob wasn't what attracted his eye, however. What did was the shiny chrome doodad on the van's roof. It looked like some sort of futuristic radar dish. It was swinging back and forth in a short, repeating arc, too, the way that radar dishes did.
There was a kid riding a bike on the far side of the street. The van slid over toward him, as if the driver (or someone inside) wanted to talk to him. The kid had no idea it was there; he had just taken a rolled-up newspaper from the sack hanging down on one hip and was cocking his arm back to throw it.
Steve turned off the Ryder truck's ignition without thinking about what he was doing. He no longer heard the steady hissing sound from the radiator, no longer saw the kids standing by the red wagon, no longer thought about what he was going to say when he called the 800 number the Ryder people gave you in case of engine trouble. Once or twice in his life he'd had little precognitive flashes — hunches, psychic nudges — but he was now gripped not by a flash but a kind of cramp: a certainty that something was going to happen. Not the kind of thing that made you raise a cheer, either.
He didn't see the double barrel poking out of the van's side window, he was placed wrong for that, but he heard the kabam! of the shotgun and knew it immediately for what it was. He had grown up in Texas, and had never mistaken gunfire for thunder.
The kid flew off the seat of his bike, shoulders twisted, legs bent, hat flying off his head. The back of his tee-shirt was shredded, and Steve could see more than he wanted to — red blood and black, torn flesh. The kid's throwing-hand had been cocked to his ear, and the folded paper tumbled behind him, into the dry gutter, as the kid hit the lawn of the small house on the corner in a boneless, graceless forward roll.
The van stopped in the middle of the street just short of the Poplar-Hyacinth intersection, engine idling.
Steve Ames sat behind the wheel of his rented truck, mouth open, as a small window set into the van's right rear side slid down, like the power window of a Cadillac or a Lincoln.
I didn't know they could do that, he thought, and then: What kind of van is that, anyway?
He became aware that someone had come out of the store — a girl in the sort of blue smock top that checkout people usually wore. She had one hand up to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun. He could see the young woman, but the paperboy's body was temporarily