The Regulators - Stephen King [92]
He told me to go, she thought. I better trust him. But first —
First there was the thing he had told her to do before she left. Such a simple thing . . . but it might solve a lot. Everything, if they were very lucky. Audrey hurried into the kitchen, ignoring the cries and babble of voices from across the street. Now that her mind was made up, she was all but overwhelmed by a need to hurry, to get this last chore done before Tak turned its attention back to her.
Or before it sent Colonel Henry and his friends again.
4
When things went wrong, they went wrong with spectacular suddenness. Johnny asked himself later how much of the blame was his — again and again he asked it — and never got any clear answer. Certainly his attention had lapsed, although that had been before the shit actually hit the fan.
He had followed along behind the Reed twins as they headed through the woods toward the path, and had allowed his mind to drift off because the boys were moving with agonized slowness, trying not to rustle a single bush or snap a single twig. None of them had the slightest idea that they were not alone in the greenbelt; by the time Johnny and the twins entered it, Collie and Steve were on the path and well ahead of them, moving quietly south.
Johnny's mind had gone back to Bill Harris's horrified survey of Poplar Street on the day of his visit back in 1990, Bill at first saying Johnny couldn't be serious, then, seeing he was, asking him what the deal was. And Johnny Marinville, who now chronicled the adventures of a cat who toted a fingerprint kit, had replied: The deal is I don't want to die yet, and that means doing some personal editorial work. A second-draft Johnny Marinville, if you like. And I can do it. Because I have the desire, which is important, and because I have the tools, which is vital. You could say it's just another version of what I do. I'm rewriting my life. Re-sculpting my life.
It was Terry, his first wife, who had provided him with what might really have been his last chance, although he hadn't said so to Bill. Bill didn't even know that, after almost fifteen years when their only communication had been through lawyers, Johnny and the former Theresa Marinville had commenced a cautious dialogue, sometimes by letter, mostly on the phone. That contact had increased since 1988, when Johnny had finally put the booze and drugs behind him — for good, he hoped. Yet there was still something wrong, and at some point in the spring of 1989 he had found himself telling his first ex-wife, whom he had once tried to stab with a butter-knife, that his sober life felt pointless and goalless. He could not, he said, imagine ever writing another novel. That fire seemed to be out, and he didn't miss waking up in the morning with it burning his brains . . . along with the inevitable hangover. That part seemed to be done. And he could accept that. The part he didn't think he could accept was how the old life of which his novels had been a part was still everywhere around him, whispering from the corners and murmuring from his old IBM every time he turned it on. I am what you were, the typewriter's hum said to him, and what you'll always be. It was never about self-image, or even ego, but only about what was printed in your genes from the very start. Run to the end of the earth and take a room in the last hotel and go to the end of the final corridor and when you open the door that's there, I'll be sitting on a table inside, humming my same old hum, the one you heard on so many shaky hungover mornings, and there'll be a can of Coors beside your book-notes and a gram of coke in the top drawer left, because in the end that's what you are and all you are. As some wise man or other once said, there is no gravity; the earth just sucks.
'You ought to dig out the kids' book,' she had said, startling him out of this reverie.
'What kids' book? I never — '
'Don't you remember Pat the Detective Kitty-Cat?'
It took him a minute,