No. The silver thing on the roof of the van. That’s what’s buggin me, booby.

Oh? Really?

Well, maybe not really… but it would do for a start. Or an excuse. In the end a hunch was a hunch, and either you believed in your hunches and played them or you didn’t. He himself had always believed, and apparently a minor matter like getting fired hadn’t changed the power they held over him.

David Carver set his daughter down on her feet and took his blatting son from his wife. Til pull you in the wagon,” he told the boy. “All the way up to the house. How’s that?”

“Margrit the Maggot loves Ethan Hawke,” his son confided.

“Does she? Well, maybe so, but you shouldn’t call her that,” David said. He spoke in the absent tones of a man who will forgive his child-one of his children, anyway-just about anything. And his wife was looking at the kid with the eyes of one who regards a saint, or a boy prophet. Only Collie Entragian saw the look of dull hurt in the girl’s eyes as her revered brother was plumped down into the wagon. Collie had other things to think of, lots of them, but that look was just too big and too sad to miss. Yow.

He looked from Ellie Carver to the girl with the crazed hair and the aging hippie-type from the rental truck. “Do you suppose I could at least get you two to step inside until the police come?” he asked.

“Hey,” the girl said, “sure.” She was looking at him warily. “You’re a cop, right?”

The Carvers were drawing away, Ralph sitting cross-legged in his wagon, but they might still be close enough to overhear anything he said… and besides, what was he going to do? Lie? You start down that road, he told himself, and maybe you can wind up on Freak Street, an ex-cop with a collection of badges in your basement, like Elvis, and a couple of extras pinned inside your wallet for good measure. Call yourself a private detective, although you never quite get around to applying for the license. Ten or fifteen years from now you’ll still be talking the talk and at least trying to walk the walk, like a woman in her thirties who wears miniskirts and goes braless in an effort to convince people (most of whom don’t give a shit anyway) that her cheerleading days aren’t behind her.

“Used to be,” he said. The clerk nodded. The guy with the long hair was looking at him curiously but not disrespectfully. “You did a good job with the kids,” he added, looking at her but speaking to both of them.

Cynthia considered this, then shook her head. “It was the dog,” she said, and began walking toward the store. Collie and the aging hippie followed her. “The guy in the van-the one with the shotgun-he meant to throw some fire at the kids.” She turned to the longhair. “Did you see that? Do you agree?”

He nodded. “There wasn’t a thing either of us could do to stop him, either.” He spoke in an accent too twangy to be deep Southern. Texas, Collie thought. Texas or Oklahoma. “Then the dog distracted him-isn’t that what happened?-and he shot it, instead.”

“That’s it,” Cynthia said. “If it hadn’t distracted the guy… well… I think we’d be as dead as him now.” She lifted her chin in the direction of Cary Ripton, still dead and dampening on Collie’s lawn. Then she led them into the E-Z Stop.

From Movies on TV, edited by Steven H. Scheuer, Bantam Books:

Moments after Collie, Cynthia, and the longhair from the Ryder truck go inside the store, a van pulls up on the southwestern corner of Poplar and Hyacinth, across from the E-Z Stop. It’s a flaked metallic blue with dark polarized windows. There’s no chrome gadget on its roof, but its sides are flared and scooped in a futuristic way that makes it look more like a scout-vehicle in a science-fiction movie than a van. The tires are entirely treadless, as smooth and blank as the surface of a freshly washed blackboard. Deep within the darkness behind the tinted windows, dim colored lights flash rhythmically, like telltales on a control panel.

Thunder rumbles, closer and sharper now. The summer brightness begins to fade from the sky; clouds, purple-black and threatening, are piling in from the west. They reach for the July sun and put it out. The temperature begins to sink at once.

The blue van hums quietly. Up the block, at the top of the hill, another van-this one the bright yellow of a fake banana-pulls up at the southeast corner of Bear Street and Poplar. It stops there, also humming quietly.

The first really sharp crack of thunder comes, and a bright shutter-flash of lightning follows. It shines in Hannibal’s glazing right eye for a moment, making it glow like a spirit-lamp.

Gary Soderson was still standing in the street when his wife joined him. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked. “You look like you’re in a trance, or something.”

“You didn’t hear it?”

“Hear what?” she asked irritably. “I was in the shower, what'm I gonna hear in there?” Gary had been married to the lady for nine years and knew that, in Marielle, irritation was a dominant trait. “The Reed kids with their Frisbee, I heard them. Their damn dog barking. Thunder. What else'm I gonna hear? The Norman Dickersnackle Choir?”

He pointed down the street, first toward the dog (she wouldn’t have Hannibal to complain about anymore, at least), then toward the twisted shape on the lawn of 240. “I don’t know for sure, but I think someone just shot the kid who delivers the Shopper.”

She peered in the direction of his finger, squinting, shading her eyes even though the sun had now disappeared (to Gary it felt as if the temperature had already dropped at least ten degrees). Brad Josephson was trudging up the sidewalk toward them. Peter Jackson was out in front of his house, looking curiously down the hill. So was Tom Billingsley, the vet most people called Old Doc. The Carver family was crossing the street from the store side to the side their house was on, the girl walking next to her mother and holding her hand. Dave Carver (looking to Gary like a boiled lobster in the bathing suit he was wearing-a soap-crusted boiled lobster, at that) was pulling his son in a little red wagon. The boy, who was sitting cross-legged and staring around with the imperious disdain of a pasha, had always struck Gary as about a 9.5 on the old Shithead-Meter.

“Hey, Dave!” Peter Jackson called. “What’s going on?”

Before Carver could reply, Marielle struck Gary’s shoulder with the heel of her hand, hard enough to slop the last of his martini out of his glass and on to his tatty old Converse sneakers. Maybe just as well. He might even do his liver a favor and take the night off.

“Are you deaf, Gary, or just stupid?” the light of his life enquired.

“Likely both,” he responded, thinking that if he ever decided to sober up for good, he would probably have to divorce Marielle first. Or at least slit her vocal cords. What did you say?”

“I asked you why in God’s name anyone would shoot the paperboy?

“Maybe it was someone didn’t get his double coupons last week,” Gary said. Thunder cracked-still west of them, but nearing. It seemed to run through the gathering clouds like a harpoon.

Johnny Marinville, who had once won the National Book Award for a novel of sexual obsession called Delight and who now wrote children’s books about a feline private detective named Pat the Kitty-Kat, stood looking down at his living-room telephone and feeling afraid. Something was going on here. He was trying not to be paranoid about it, but yeah, something was going on here.