The Regulators

“Yeah, probably.”

Brad looked at the mass of red hair on the Carvers” stoop. “She’s dead, too, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know. I think so, but… I’m going to ease the screen door open, try to make sure. Any objections?”

He rather hoped Brad would say hell yes, he had objections, a whole damn book of them, but Brad only shook his head.

“You better stay low while I do it,” Joh

“I’ll be lower than a garter-snake in a stamping press.”

“I hope you’re never in a writing seminar I teach,” Joh

“Go on,” Brad said. “If you’re going to do it, do it.”

Joh

“I think she’s alive!” he whispered to Brad. His voice was harsh with excitement. “I think I feel a pulse!”

Forgetting that there might still be people with guns lurking out there in the rain, Joh

The girl’s face came up, except it didn’t, not really, because there was no face there. All he could see was a shattered mass of red and a black hole that had been her mouth. Below it was a litter of white that he at first thought was rice. Then he realized it was her teeth, what was left of them. The two men screamed together in perfect soprano harmony, Brad’s shooting directly into Joh

“What’s wrong?” Cammie Reed cried from behind the swinging door that led into the kitchen. “Oh God, what’s wrong now?”

“Nothing,” the two men said, also together, and then looked at each other. Brad Josephson’s face had gone a queer ashy color.

“Just stay back,” Joh

He realized he was still holding the dead girl’s hair. It was kinky, like an unravelled Brillo pad-

No, he thought coldly. Not like that. Like what holding a scalp would be like, a human scalp.

He grimaced at that and opened his fingers. The girl’s face dropped back on to the concrete stoop with a wet smack that he could have lived without. Beside him, Brad moaned and then pressed the i

Joh

All he did hear was thunder, the crackle of the fire at the Hobarts”, and the hiss of falling rain.

“Leave-” Brad began, then stopped and made a sound caught somewhere between a retch and a swallow. The spasm passed and he tried again. “Leave her.”

Yes. What else, at least for now, was there?

They began to retreat down the hall on their hands and knees. Joh

Something caught his eye and he stopped. There was a small decorative table by the entrance to the dining room where David Carver would never preside over another Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas goose. This table had been loaded down with, gee, what a surprise, a dozen or so Hummel figures. The table wasn’t standing flat but leaning back against the wall to the right of the door, like a drunk dozing against a lamppost. One of its legs had been sheared off. The Hummel shepherdesses and milkmaids and farmboys were now mostly on their backs or faces, and there were more china fragments under the table where one or more had fallen off and shattered. Among the painted pieces there was something else, something black. In the gloom, Joh

He looked back over his shoulder at the fist-sized hole in the upper panel of the screen door. If a slug had made that, one ru

He traced the course such a hypothetical slug might have taken and saw that, yes, it could have sheared off the table-leg, knocking the table itself back into that posture of leaning drunken surprise. And then, its force spent, come to rest?

Joh

“What you got?” Brad asked, crawling toward Joh

“Brad, you get back here!” Belinda whispered fiercely.

“Hush, now,” Brad told her. “What you got there, John?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and held it up. He supposed he did know, actually, had known almost as soon as he had determined that it wasn’t the remains of some weird summer beetle. But it was like no fired slug he had ever seen in his life. It wasn’t the one that had taken the girl’s life, that much seemed certain; it would have been flattened and twisted out of shape. This thing didn’t seem to have so much as a scratch on it, although it had been fired, had gone through a panel of the screen door, and had sheared off the table-leg.

“Let me see,” Brad said. His wife had crawled up beside him and was looking over his shoulder.

Joh

Brad looked up. “What in the hell?” he asked, sounding as bewildered as Joh

“Let me see,” Belinda said in a low voice. “My father used to take me shooting, and I was his good little helper when he did reloads. Give it over.”

Brad passed it to her. She rolled the metal cone between her fingers, then held it up to her eyes. Thunder banged outside, the sharpest peal in the last few minutes, and they all jumped.

“Where’d you find it?” she asked Joh

He pointed at the litter of china under the leaning table.

“Yeah?” She looked skeptical. “How come it didn’t go into the wall?”

Now that she posed the question, he realized what a good one it was. It had only gone through a screen and a flimsy table-leg; why hadn’t it gone into the wall, leaving just a hole behind?

“I’ve never seen anything like this puppy in my life,” Belinda said. “Of course, I haven’t seen everything, far from it, but I can tell you that this didn’t come from a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun.”

“Shotguns are what they were firing, though,” Joh

“I don’t even know how it was launched,” she said. “There’s no firing nipple on the bottom, that’s for sure. And it’s so clunky. Like a kid’s idea of what a bullet looks like.”