“Maybe,” he said in a low voice.

Yeah, okay. Maybe. But the phone-

He had come in, propped his guitar in the corner, and punched 911. There had been an uncommonly long pause, so long he had been about to break the connection (What connection, ha-ha?) and try again when what might have been a child’s voice came on the line. The sound of that voice, both lilting and empty, had surprised Johnny and frightened him badly-he hadn’t even tried to kid himself that his fright was only a startled reflex.

“Little bitty baby Smitty,” the voice had lilted. “I seen you bite your mommy’s titty. Don’t you fret and don’t you pout, don’t you spit that titty out.”

There had been a click followed by the hum of an open line. Frowning, Johnny had redialled. Again the long pause, then a click, then a sound Johnny thought he recognized: a mouth-breather. The sound of a kid with a cold, maybe. Not that it mattered. Wha t mattered was that the phone-lines had gotten crossed somewhere in the neighborhood, and now instead of getting through to the cops-

“Who’s there?” he had asked sharply.

No answer. Just the mouth-breathing. And was that sound familiar? That was pretty ridiculous, wasn’t it? How in God’s name could the sound of breathing on the telephone be familiar? It couldn’t, of course, but all the same-

“Whoever you are, get the hell off the line,” Johnny said. “I have to call the police.”

The breath caught, stopped. Johnny was reaching to break the connection again when the voice returned. Mocking this time. He was sure it was. “Little bitty baby Smitty, stuck his prick in Mommy’s slitty. Don’t you fret and don’t you pout, she won’t make you take it out.” Then, in a voice that was flat and somehow terrible: “Don’t you call here no more, you old fool. Tak!”

Another click as the line went dead, but this time there was no open-line hum. This time there was just stillness.

Johnny hit the phone’s cutoff switch, stuttering lightly with the tip of a finger. Nothing happened. The line remained blank. Thunder boomed, still to the west but closing in, making him jump.

He dropped the phone into the cradle and went into the kitchen, noting how rapidly the light was fading out of the sky and reminding himself to close the upstairs windows if it started to rain… when it started to rain, judging from the way things looked now.

Out here the phone was on the wall by the kitchen table, where all he had to do was rock back in his chair and snag it if he happened to be eating a meal when it rang. Not that there were many calls; his ex-wife sometimes, that was all. His people in New York knew enough to leave their money-machine alone.

He unracked the phone, listened, and got a second helping of silence. No dial-tone, no staticky crackle when lightning flashed blue in the kitchen window, no wah-wah-wah signalling that the line was out of service. Just nothing. He tried 911 anyway, and there weren’t even any tone-beeps in his ear as he pushed the keypads. He hung the telephone up and looked at it in the darkening kitchen. “Little bitty baby Smitty,” he murmured, and suddenly shivered in a way that would have been taken for theatrical if he hadn’t been alone: a big backward-and-forward snapping of the shoulders. An ugly little jingle, and one he’d never heard before.

Never mind the jingle, he thought. What about the voice? You’ve heard that before… haven’t you?

“No,” he said out loud. “At least… I don’t know.”

Right. But the breathing…

“Fuck a duck, you don’t recognize a person’s breathing,” he told the empty kitchen. “Not unless your granddad’s got emphysema.”

He left the kitchen, heading for the front door. All at once he wanted to see what was going on out there in the street.

“What happened down there?” Peter Jackson asked David when the Carver family reached the east sidewalk. He bent his head toward David and lowered his voice so the kids wouldn’t hear. “Is that a body down there?”

“Yes,” David said in a similarly low voice. “Gary Ripton’s his name, I think.” He glanced at his wife for confirmation and Kirsten nodded. “The boy who delivers the Shopper on Monday afternoons. Guy in a van. A drive-by.”

“Someone shot Cary? That was impossible. Impossible that someone he had just been talking to should have been shot. But Carver was nodding his head. “Holy shit!”

David nodded. “Holy shit about covers it, I guess.”

“Hurry up, Daddy-doo,” Ralphie commanded from his place in the wagon.

David glanced back at him, gave the boy a smile, then looked at Peter again. This time he spoke in a voice so low it was really a whisper. “The kids were down at the store, buying sodas. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got an idea the guy almost took a shot at them, too. Then the Reeds” dog came by and the man with the gun shot it, instead.”

“Jesus!” Peter said. The idea that someone had shot Hannibal-genial, Frisbee-chasing Hannibal with his jaunty neck-scarf-made it impossible not to accept. He didn’t know why that should be, but it was. “I mean Jesus Christ!”

David nodded. “Although if there was a little more Jesus in the world, there might be a lot less stuff like this. You know?”

Peter thought of the millions up through history who had been slaughtered in the name of Jesus, then pushed the thought away and nodded. He didn’t think this was quite the time for a theological argument with his neighbor.

“I want to get them inside, Dave,” Kirsten murmured. “Off the street, “kay?”

David nodded, started up the hill again past Peter, then stopped and looked back. “Where’s Mary?”

“Work,” Peter said. “She left a note to say she was probably going to swing by the Crossroads Mall on her way home. She should be here anytime, though-Mondays are her short days, she’s off at two. Why?”

“I’d make sure she comes right inside, that’s all. The guy’s probably long gone and hard to find, but you never know, do you? And a guy who’d shoot a paperboy-

Peter was nodding. Overhead, thunder boomed loudly. Ellie cringed against her mother’s leg, but in the wagon, Ralphie laughed.

Kirsten tugged David’s arm. “Come on. And don’t stop to talk to Doc.” She lifted her chin toward Billingsley, who was standing in the dry gutter with his hands in his pockets and peering down the street. Squinting as he was, his eyes were reduced to a pair of bright blue gleams, like exotic fish caught in nets of flesh.

David started pulling the wagon again. “How you doin”, Ralphie?” Peter asked as the wagon rolled past him. He noted the word BUSTER was written on the wagon’s side in fading white paint. Ralphie stuck his tongue out and made the wasp-in-the-jar sound again, blowing so hard that his cheeks bulged out like Dizzy Gillespie’s.

“Hey, that’s charming,” Peter said. “That’ll get you girls later in life. Trust me.”

“Bugger-doody!” the little scamp in the wagon cried, and made a rather mature jacking-off gesture at Peter with one hand.

“That’ll be enough of that, big guy,” David said indulgently, without turning around. His buttocks worked back and forth in the too-small bathing suit. To Peter they looked like biscuits on pistons.

“What happened?” Tom asked in his gruff voice as the wagon passed by.

Peter tuned out Carver’s reply (David, mindful of his wife’s concern, kept moving as he filled in the Doc) and looked up toward the corner for any sign of his wife’s Lumina. He saw no moving vehicles at all, only a parked van just this side of the Abelsons” house on Bear Street. It was painted a yellow so bright it all but screamed. He supposed that part of its brightness derived from the way the light was fading as the clouds advanced, but still, looking at it made his eyes ache. Must be kids, he thought. No one else would want something that color. It hardly looked like a real vehicle at all, more like something out of a Star Trek movie, or-