The Regulators

The swing-door between the hall and the kitchen opened, banging against the wall and startling them even more badly than the thunder had done. It was Susi Geller. Her face was horribly white, and to Joh

“All right, honey,” Belinda said. She sounded perfectly calm, and Joh

“Where’s Debbie?” Susi asked. Her view down the hall to the stoop was mercifully blocked by the wide-bodied Josephsons. “Did she go next door? I thought she was right behind me.” She paused. “You don’t think that’s her screaming, do you?”

“No, I’m sure it’s not,” Joh

She went back into the kitchen, letting the door close behind her. The three of them looked at one another for a moment with sick conspirators” eyes. None of them said anything. Then Belinda handed the gawky-looking black cone back to Joh

Little bitty baby Smitty, a voice said way back in his mind, but when he tried to chase after that voice, wanting to ask if it really knew something or was just blowing off its bazoo, it was gone.

Joh

Steven Jay Ames, pretty much of a scratched entry in the great American steeplechase, had a motto, and this motto was:

He had gotten D’s in his first semester at MIT-this in spite of SAT scores somewhere in the ionosphere-but, hey,

He had transferred from electrical engineering to general engineering, and when his grades still hadn’t risen past that magical 2.0 point, he had packed his bags and gone down the road to Boston University, having decided to give up the sterile halls of science for the green fields of English Lit. Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, a little T. S. Eliot. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of the universe, here we go round the prickly pear; twentieth-century angst, man. He had done okay at BU for a while, then had flunked out in his junior year, as much a victim of obsessive bridge-playing as of booze and Panama Red. But

He had drifted around Cambridge, hanging out, playing guitar and getting laid. He wasn’t much of a guitar-player and did better at getting laid, but

really. When Cambridge began to get a tad elderly, he had simply cased his guitar and ridden his thumb down to New York City.

In the years since, he had scuttled his ragged claws through salesman’s jobs, gone around the prickly pear as a disc jockey at a short-lived heavy metal station in Fishkill, New York, gone around again as a radio-station engineer, a rock-show promoter (six good shows followed by a nightmaris h exit from Providence in the middle of the night-he’d left owing some pretty hard guys about $60,000, but

as a palmistry guru on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, and then as a guitar tech. That felt like home, somehow, and he became a gun for hire in upstate New York and eastern Pe

kind of guy. His wife was also a good sort, easygoing and equipped with mild, sleepy eyes, a good sense of humor, beautiful breasts and not, so far as Steve could tell, an unfaithful bone in her body. Best of all, Sandy was also a recovering bridge addict. Steve had had many deep conversations with her about the almost uncontrollable urge to overbid, especially in a money game.

In May of this year, Deke had purchased a very large club-a House of Blues kind of deal-in San Francisco. He and Sandy had left the east coast three weeks ago. He had promised Steve a good job if Steve would pack up all their shit (albums, mostly, over two thousand of them, anachronisms like Hot Tuna and Quicksilver Messenger Service and Ca

Hey, he hadn’t been out to the West Coast in almost seven years, and he reckoned the change would do him good. Recharge those old Duracells.

It had taken him a little longer than he had expected to settle his Albany shit, get the truck, load the truck, and get rolling. There had been several phone calls from Deke, the last one sort of testy, and when Steve had mentioned this, Deke had said, well, that was what three weeks of sleeping bags and making do with the same half a dozen tee-shirts did to a person-was he coming or not? I’m coming, I’m coming, Steve had replied. Cool it, big guy. And he had. Left three days ago, in fact. Everything groovy at first. Then, this afternoon, he had blown a hose or something, he had taken the Wentworth exit in search of the Great American Service Station, and then-whoa, dude-there had come a big bang from under the hood and all the dials on the dashboard started showing bad news. He hoped it was just a blown seal, but it had actually sounded more like a piston. In any case, the Ryder truck, which had been a beauty ever since he had left New York, had suddenly turned into a beast. Still,