The Regulators Read Online Free PDF Page A

innocent little kids.
4
    David Carver dropped his sponge into the bucket of soapy water beside the right front tire of his Caprice and strolled down his driveway toward the street to see what was happening. Next door, one house up the hill on his right, Johnny Marinville was doing the same thing. He had hold of his guitar by the neck. On the other side, Brad Josephson was also walking down his lawn to the street, his hose spouting into the grass behind him. He was still holding his copy of the Shopper in one hand.
    â€œWasthat a backfire?” Johnny asked. He didn’t think it had been. Back in his pre-Kitty-Cat days, when he had still considered himself “a serious writer” (a phrase with all the pungency of “a really good whore,” to his way of thinking), Johnny had done a hellish research tour in Vietnam, and he thought the sound he had just heard was more like the kind of backfires he had heard during the Tet offensive. Jungle backfires. The kind that killed people.
    David shook his head, then turned his hands up to indicate he didn’t really know. Behind him, the screen door of the cream-and-green ranch-house banged shut and there were running bare feet on the walk. It was Pie, wearing jeans and a blouse that had been buttoned wrong. Her hair clung to her head in a damp helmet. She still smelled of the shower.
    â€œWas that a backfire? God, Dave, it sounded like a—”
    â€œLike a gunshot,” Johnny said, then added reluctantly: “I’m pretty sure it was.”
    Kirsten Carver—Kirstie to her friends and Pie to her husband, for reasons probably only a husband could know—looked down the hill. An expression of horror was slipping into her face, seeming somehow to widen not just her eyes but all of her features. David followed her gaze. He saw the idling van, and he saw the shotgun barrel sticking out of the right rear window.
    â€œEllie! Ralph!” Pie screamed. It was a piercing cry, penetrating, and behind the Soderson house, Gary paused, listening, his martini glass halfway to his lips. “Oh God, Ellie and Ralph!”
    Pie began to sprint down the hill toward the van.
    â€œKirsten, no, don’t do that!” Brad Josephson yelled. He began to run after her, cutting into the street even as she did the same, angling to meet her in the middle, perhaps head her off between the Jacksons’ and the Gellers’. He ran with surprising fleetness for such a big man, but saw after only a dozen running steps that he wasn’t going to catch her.
    David Carver also began to run after his wife, his gut bouncing up and down above his ridiculously tiny bathing suit, his flipflops smacking the sidewalk and making a noise like cap-pistols. His shadow ran after him in the street, long and thinner than Postal Service employee David Carver had ever been in his adult life.
5
    I’m dead, Cynthia thought, dropping to one knee behind and between the kids, reaching to encircle their shoulders with her arms, meaning to pull them back against her. For all the good that would do. I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m totally dead. And still she couldn’t take her eyes off the twin bores of the shotgun, holes so black, so like pitiless eyes.
    The passenger door of the yellow truck popped open and she saw a lanky man in bluejeans and some sort of rock tee-shirt, a guy with graying shoulder-length hair and a craggy face.
    â€œGet em in here, lady!” he yelled. “Now, now !”
    She pushed the children toward the truck, knowingit was too late. And then, while she was still trying to ready herself for the rip of the shot or the pellets (as if you could get ready for such a gross invasion), the gun poking from the rear of the van swivelled away from them, swivelled forward, along the red flank of the van. It went off, the report rolling across the hot day like a bowling ball speeding down a stone gutter. Cynthia saw fire lick from the end of the barrel.