She saw the van idling in the middle of the street, saw the shotgun slide out of the back, saw it center on the Carver children. They looked puzzled but not, as yet, frightened.

My God, she thought. My God, he means to shoot the kids.

For a moment she was frozen in place. Her brain told her legs to move but nothing happened.

Go! Go! GO! she screamed at herself, and that broke the ice sheathing her nerves. She lurched forward on legs that felt like stilts, almost falling down the three cement steps, and grabbed at the kids. The twin bores of the shotgun looked huge, gaping, and she saw she was too late. That first frozen moment had been fatal. All she had managed to do was to make sure that when the guy in the back of the van pulled the shotgun’s triggers, he would kill one twenty-year-old roadbunny as well as two innocent little kids.

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.

Was that 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.

Was that a backfire? God, Dave, it sounded like a-”

“Like 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.

“Ellie! 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.

“Kirsten, 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.

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.

“Get em in here, lady!” he yelled. “Now, now!”

She pushed the children toward the truck, knowing it 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. The Reeds” dog, which had been starting his final approach on the dropped newspaper, was thrown violently to the right, the grace slapped out of him as it had been slapped out of Cary Ripton.

“Hannibal!” Jim and Dave shrieked in unison. The sound made Cynthia think of the Doublemint Twins.

She shoved the Carver kids toward the open door of the truck so hard that Brother Boogersnot fell down. He started to bellow at once. The girl-always an Ellie, never a Margaret, Cynthia remembered-looked back with an expression of heartbreaking bewilderment. Then the man with the long hair had her by the arm and was hauling her up into the cab. “On the floor, kid, on the floor!” he shouted at her, then leaned out to grab the yowling boy. The Ryder truck’s horn let out a brief blat; the driver had hooked one sneakered foot through the wheel to keep from sliding out headfirst. Cynthia batted the red wagon aside, grabbed the boogersnot by the back of his shorts, and lifted him into the truck-driver’s arms. Down the street, approaching, she could hear a man and a woman yelling the kids” names. Dad and Mom, she assumed, and apt to be shot down in the street like the dog and the paperboy if they didn’t look out.

“Get up here!” the driver bawled at her. Cynthia needed no second invitation; she scrambled into the overcrowded cab of the truck.

Gary Soderson came striding purposefully (although not quite steadily) around the side of his house with his martini glass in one hand. There had been a second loud bang, and he found himself wondering if maybe the Gellers” gas grill had exploded. He saw Marinville, who had gotten rich in the eighties writing children’s books about an unlikely character named Pat the Kitty-Cat, standing in the middle of the street, shading his eyes and looking down the hill.

What be happenin, my brother?” Gary asked, joining him.

“I think someone in that van down there just killed Cary Ripton and then shot the Reeds” dog,” Johnny Marinville said in a strange, flat voice.

“What? Why would anyone do that?”

“I have no idea.”

Gary saw a couple-the Carvers, he was almost positive-running down the street toward the store, closely pursued by a galumphing African-American gent that had to be the one, the only Brad Josephson.

Marinville turned to face him. “This is bad shit. I’m calling the cops. In the meantime, I advise you to get off the street. Now.”

Marinville hurried up the walk to his house. Gary ignored his advice and stayed where he was, glass in hand, looking at the van idling in the middle of the street down there by the Entragian place, suddenly wishing (and for him this was an exceedingly odd wish) that he wasn’t quite so drunk.

The door of the bungalow at 240 Poplar banged open and Collie Entragian came charging out exactly as Cary Ripton had always feared he someday would: with a gun in his hand. Otherwise, however, he looked pretty much all right-no foam on the lips, no bloodshot, buggy eyes. He was a tall man, six-four at least, starting to show a little softness in the belly but as broad and muscular through the shoulders as a football linebacker. He wore khaki pants and no shirt. There was shaving cream on the left side of his face, and a hand-towel over his shoulder. The gun in his hand was a.38, and might very well have been the service pistol Cary had often imagined while delivering the Shopper to the house on the corner.