Characters in The Regulators

They aren’t spooky ones at all, so don’t get your hopes up on that score, but they are well-documented, at least. Adrian Givens, the concierge, told me they have been seen by perhaps three dozen guests since the sightings began, always in that same rough locale.

But Bill had lied. She knew because of a letter she’d gotten from a man named Allen Symes. Symes, a geologist-engineer for something called the Deep Earth Mining Corporation, had seen the Garin family on July 24th of 1994, the same day Audrey’s brother had sent her the exuberant postcard.

Once, that was, his motor was running again. “Peter? I say, Peter, can you hear me, old boy?” Tak now spoke in the clipped British tones of Andrew Case, Peter’s department head. Like all of Tak’s imitations, it was quite good.

… From Audrey Wyler’s journal: June 12, 1995 It happened again—the daydream thing. If that’s what it is. 3rd or 4th time, but the first (I think) since I’ve been keeping this journal, & by far the …

They stepped carefully over the dead girl on the stoop and walked down to the sidewalk. Behind them came Brad and Belinda Josephson, shepherding the Carver children and shielding them from the sight of their father, still lying in his driveway and still as dead as ever.

Anyone who’s reading this and maybe judging me for a fool (a reckless fool, at that), I only wish you could have seen the way Bill Garin’s face lit up.

… death, Johnny was thinking of his literary agent, Bill Harris, and Bill’s reaction to Poplar Street: pure, unadulterated horror. Good agent that he was, he had managed to maintain a neutral, if slightly glazed, smile on the ride from the airport, but the smile began to slip when they entered …

CRISIS CENTER, MOTOKOPS’ HQ The room is dominated, is always, by the huge Situscreen. Standing before it on a floatpad is COLONEL HENRY, looking grave. Sitting at the horse-shoe-shaped Crisis Desk are the rest of the MotoKops squad: SNAKE HUNTER, BOUNTY, MAJOR PIKE, ROOTY, AND CASSIE.

At the top, on the western corner of Poplar and Bear Street, is 251 Poplar. Brad Josephson is out front, using the hose to water the flowerbeds beside the front path. He is forty-six, with gorgeous chocolate skin and a long, sloping gut.

We could never have children ourselves. He was a loving boy, a sweetheart of a boy—” “Somebody probably loved Typhoid Mary, too,” Cammie Reed said in a dry, rasping voice. Audrey looked at her, still biting at her lips, then looked back at Johnny, appealing with her eyes for understanding.

MAIN STREET DAY SHERIFF STREETER watches DEPUTY LAINE yank CANDY to his feet. Behind them, in the adobe which houses Lushan’s Chinese Laundry, a number of Chinese workers watch from the doorway, where they are huddled. CANDY What’re you chinkies lookin’ at?! They don’t recoil this time. CHINESE LAUNDRYMAN You!

STREETER That so? Well, we’ll see. I’m guessing there won’t be any ghosts riding tonight without Captain Candell to hand out the sheets. Still smiling, STREETER turns toward the jail again. SCENE CONTINUES MURDOCK Suppose I told you the regulators were a lot closer than Desatoya Mountain or Skate Rock?

He stepped forward, read the little plaque pinned to the pocket of the man’s crisp uniform blouse, and said: “Outlaws, Captain Richardson.” “I beg your pardon?” “Outlaws. Regulators. Renegades from the wastes.” “My friend, if you see anything funny about this—” “I don’t, sir. No indeed.

Everyone likes the Josephsons. Cary Ripton, who delivers the Wentworth Shopper on Monday afternoons, comes pedaling around the corner and tosses Brad a rolled-up paper. Brad catches it deftly with the hand that isn’t holding the hose. Never even moves. Just up with the hand and whoomp, there it is.

We’re all here except for Frank Geller and Charlie Reed, who are still at work. It’s a regular block-party. Except, he realizes, that’s not quite true. Audrey Wyler isn’t here, and neither is her nephew.

The printed legend beneath this one read: CHARLOTTE, BORDER COLLIE, AGE 6. COULD SORT PHOTOS AND CULL OUT THOSE OF HUMANS KNOWN TO HER. To the left of Charlotte was a photograph of a parrot which appeared to be smoking a Camel.

He had to be careful. There were people in Columbus, some of them very powerful, who would be delighted to hear that Collier Entragian had discharged a weapon on a suburban Wentworth street... a weapon he had been required by law to turn in, actually.

CASSIE I don’t know, but... INT. THE POWER WAGON CORRAL, FEATURING THE MOTOKOPS CASSIE gasps with shock, eyes widening! COLONEL HENRY, looking grim, puts his arm around her. The other squad-members gather round. ROOTY Root-root-root-root! SNAKE HUNTER Yeah, Rooty, I couldn’t agree more!

… and the tough-but-all-girl Cassandra Styles are going to be the hot action figures this summer, along with arch-enemies No Face and Countess Lili Marsh. Chief delight for Palz marketers and manufacturers is the immediate success of the pricey MotoKop vehicles, the so-called Power Wagons, futuristic vans which come with fold-up …

… From The Regulators, screenplay by Craig Goodis and Quentin Woolrich: EXT. MAIN STREET DAY SHERIFF STREETER watches DEPUTY LAINE yank CANDY to his feet. Behind them, in the adobe which houses Lushan’s Chinese Laundry, a number …

Ralph Carver sticks out his tongue and makes a sound like a wasp caught in a mayonnaise jar. What a polite little animal it is, the young woman with the tu-tone hair thinks. “I’m Cynthia Smith,” she says, extending her hand over the counter to the girl.

On the wall to his left was a framed photograph of a small brown dog with eerily intelligent eyes. On the matting beneath the photo, carefully printed in block letters, was DAISY, PEMBROKE CORGI, AGE 9. COULD COUNT. SHOWED APPARENT ABILITY TO ADD SMALL NUMBERS.

“Aw, sugar!” Jim Reed says, then turns to his dark-haired sib. “You go get it this time.” “No way, it’ll be all spitty,” Dave Reed says. “Hannibal, be a good dog and bring that back here!” Hannibal stands on the sidewalk in front of Doc’s house, still grinning.

Cary points one right back, and they pretend to shoot each other. This is Mr. Carver’s crippled but game effort to be cool, and Cary respects that. David Carver works for the post office, and Cary figures he must be on vacation this week.

“Come on, Teach, let’s do it.” “Good man.” 5 Kim Geller slept through the whole thing. She was still sleeping on the coverlet of her bed when Susi and Debbie Ross—the redhead with whom Cary Ripton had been so taken—came rushing into her bedroom and shook her awake.

During this period he had also quit smoking dope and playing bridge, which simplified things even further. Two years before, living in Albany, he had become friends with Deke Ableson, who owned Club Smile, a good roadhouse where you could get a bellyful of blues almost any night you wanted.

I took him in my arms & he wept like a baby. Kept saying he was tired, so tired all the time. I said something about taking him to see Dr. Evers first thing in the morning. He just laughed, said I knew what was wrong with him.

He no longer felt much like laughing, either, and that was probably good. “My daddy!” Ellen Carver was howling from behind him. Johnny tried to remember if he had ever—in Vietnam, for instance—heard such piercing, keening grief coming out of such a young throat and couldn’t. “My DADDY!” “Hush, honey.”

STREETER Don’t shoot, he’s gone! RESUME ROOFTOPS The men lower their guns. FLIP MORAN looks confused and ashamed of himself. EXT. STREETER AID LAURA, CLOSE The SHERIFF’S hard shell is temporarily gone—smashed.

It’s like the last chapter of an Agatha Christie, he thinks, when Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot explains everything, even how the murderer got out of the locked sleeping-car berth after doing the deed. We’re all here except for Frank Geller and Charlie Reed, who are still at work.

“Only two so far, but that’s okay. I got a couple of innings last night, and I’ll probably get a couple more tonight. It’s really all I hoped for. But it’s Frankie Albertini’s last year in Legion, you know.” He holds out a rolled copy of the Shopper.

The gila stretched its saurian head forward and began chomping at the bottom panel of the door with its teeth. Three bites was all it took, and then it was in Old Doc’s kitchen. Gary Soderson became distantly aware of a rotten breeze blowing into his face.

She hadn’t gone to the Crossroads Mall, though. She had gone to the Columbus Hotel. There she had met a man named Gene Martin, and for the next three hours she had done everything for him a woman could possibly do for a man except cut his toenails.

A large furry shape bullets by, chasing a red disc. Cary leans his bike over toward Mr. Jackson’s car and is just feathered by Hannibal’s tail as the German shepherd chases after the Frisbee. “He’s the one you ought to warn about heatstroke,” Cary says.

He has always been rather terrified of Henry Kaepner, of Henry Kaepner’s somehow daunting integrity; in his heart Peter has always known that Henry Kaepner considers him unworthy of his daughter (and in his heart this is an opinion with which Peter Jackson has always concurred).

He didn’t have mind enough left to understand them, for one thing. He was shortly going to be dead, for another. As dead as Herb Wyler. As dead as the man with the shopping cart, the one Peter would shortly be meeting in the woods.

He has found a bottle of something—Steve can’t see what—and is standing by the photo of Hester, a pigeon who liked to finger-paint. Not, Steve thinks, that pigeons exactly have fingers. Gary isn’t steady on his feet and his words sound slurry. “Somebody help Mar’elle!

From the firing pit of Dream Floater, Laura DeMott trains her shotgun on the smashed picture window; from the firing pit of Tracker Arrow, Hoss Cartwright and a very young Clint Eastwood—he is Rowdy Yates of Rawhide in this incarnation, as a matter of fact—have also got the house covered.

Hiding behind Seth’s eyes and laughing at me. I think the most terrible thing of all is how the SLB knows to leave Hugh Hobart alone. To let him just watch. June 29, 1995 Woke up this morning around 3 a.m. and the other half of the bed was empty.

About five minutes later, the EMTs helped Irene Hobart out the door. Hugh, the son, was holding her hand & crying. I hated that kid, absolutely did, but I don’t anymore. Now I only pity him & fear for him. There was blood all down the front of her dress.

We had ourselves quite an afternoon even before our “little scare.” Garin did let his older boy, John, drive us out to the pit-wall, and was he excited? I almost think young Jack Garin would have voted me for God, if I’d been running for the job.

Nothing gold can stay... which poet had said that? Frost? It didn’t matter. Janice Goodlin Conroy had found out it was true as well as poetic. So, in time, had Audrey Garin.

Johnny never took his eyes off Ralphie. “Dream Floater?” “Cassie’s Power Wagon,” Ralphie said. “Cassie Styles. I think she’s Colonel Henry’s girlfriend. My friend Jason says she isn’t because MotoKops don’t have girlfriends, but I think she is. Why are the Power Wagons on Poplar Street, Mr. Marinville?”

(How could any vessel capable of containing Tak not be?) Since the wino came yesterday, Tak and the boy have been playing a nervy game of stud poker, just like Laura and Jeb Murdock in The Regulators.

Jim Reed calls, and his twin brother, Dave, joins in: “Come on, Hannibal! Don’t be a dork! Fetch! Bring!” Hannibal stands in front of 246, across from the Wyler house, with the Frisbee in his mouth and his tail waving back and forth slowly. His grin appears to widen.

Things started being that way when Bill’s friend, Joe Calabrese, called and said my brother and his wife and the two older kids had been killed, shotgunned in a drive-by.

SCENE CONTINUES LAURA (coughing) Gun misfired... you always said... never trust... a hideout gun... She breaks down coughing. STREETER Don’t talk. I’ll send Joe Prudum for the doc— LAURA (coughing) Too... too late. Just hold me! STREETER does. She looks up at him CURIOUSLY. LAURA Why, Sheriff!... are you crying?

NBC’s Saturday-morning cartoon epic began manufacturing in all major product categories about three weeks too late to catch the major Christmas wave of buying. John Kleist, senior V.P.

Peter falls on his knees beside his wife just as Pie Carver fell on her knees beside her husband, and oh gosh, does John Edward Marinville have a case of Dem Ole Kozmic Vietnam Blues again or what?

STREETER (to LAINE) Make sure he gets his hat, Josh. Wouldn’t want him to have to go to jail without his hat. Grinning, LAINE picks up CANDY’S pinned-back Johnny Reb cavalry hat, which fell off candy‘s head when STREETER knocked him over the hitching-rail.

Jack Garin wanted to know what was inside. I said we didn’t know, no one had been in there on account of the MSHA regulations. Mrs. Garin (June) wanted to know if the company would be exploring it later, and I said maybe, if we could get the right permits.

… Letter from Mrs. Patricia Allen to Katherine Anne Goodlowe, of Montpelier, Vermont: June 19, 1986 Dear Kathi, This is the most beautiful place in the whole world, I’m convinced of it. The honeymoon has been the sweetest nine days of my …

Collie had a brief, unwelcome memory of going after Kellie Eberhart in exactly the same place one night at the West Columbus Drive-In, her saying that if he gave her a hickey, her dad would probably shoot them both.

It was no good trying to get a look at what they were gawking at from here, either. The side of the house cut off any view down the block to the corner. Kimberly Geller turned back to the girls, trying hard to clear the cobwebs out of her mind.

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.

Then the house is gone and it’s the Two Sisters (where in The Regulators we first see Laura DeMott, saloon lass with a heart of gold, surreptitiously buying cloth for a church dress) again, with half its roof gone and all its windows blown in.

Among them we see PREACHER YEOMAN and LAWYER BRADLEY. YEOMAN, no longer concerned that the regulators are a supernatural visitation meant to punish the town for its sins raises one hand to the SHERIFF in a salute.

“Ain’t nothin beats chow around the campfire, Paw!” it cried in its best Little Joe Cartwright voice. Then it drifted back toward the kitchen door, a dirty boy-balloon with the remains of a sandwich in one hand. Moonlight streamed through the living-room windows.

What he replied was the last real talking he did, and I remember it well. “Colonel Henry and Major Pike told me to,” he said. “They told me I could see the Ponderosa. In there.” He pointed at the crack running down the middle of the slide. “But I couldn’t.

Johnny is perhaps most struck by the Josephsons. They are standing at the foot of the Carver driveway, holding hands, looking somehow like a Spike Lee version of Hansel and Gretel in the pouring rain. Marielle Soderson passes behind Johnny and joins her husband on the Billingsley lawn.

Roof trapdoors bang open. Cowboys and aliens fill the remaining shooting-points. “Gosh, Paw, looks like a damn turkey-shoot!” Mark McCain cries, and then utters a shrill laugh. “Root-root-root!” “SHUT UP, ROOTY!” they all chorus, and the laugh becomes general.

If he saw the two men with the rippling tarp between them and understood what they were up to, he didn’t say. He seemed lost in his own musings. Movement caught Belinda’s eye. She looked up Bear Street and saw an olive-green Lumina approaching the intersection. Mary Jackson’s car.

Audrey had had one exactly like it at the age of five, using it to hold long and deliriously nonsensical chats with an invisible playmate named Melissa Sweetheart. On some visits to the folly in the meadow, the word PLAYSKOOL was stamped on the phone’s handset.

“Get a move-on, pard!” Peter walks across the rain-washed remains of a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk (Ellen Carver and her friend Mindy from a block over made it that very morning), then steps into the gutter. Rushing water fills one shoe, but he doesn’t even feel it.

One of the cops was now pointing a bullhorn at him. Steve wasn’t crazy about that, but better a bullhorn than a gun, he supposed. “ARE YOU A HOSTAGE?” Mr. Bullhorn boomed. “ARE YOU A HOSTAGE-TAKER?” Steve grinned, cupped his hands around his mouth and called back, “I’m a Libra!

Serve it medium-rare with a little mint jelly on the side, Mrs. Ames, and your family will never ask for roast chicken again. I guarantee it. “Gary!” The skinny guy with the gin on his breath took a step toward her, then looked back at Steve and Cynthia.

INT. RESUME MEATWAGON The Doom Turret SLIDES BACK, revealing NO FACE, sinister as always in his black uniform. Sitting behind him at the controls, with her customary look of sexy hauteur, is COUNTESS LILI. The Hypno-Jewel around her neck FLICKERS WILDLY through the color spectrum. NO FACE Floatpad, Countess. Now!

“You ought to dig out the kid’s book,” she had said, startling him out of this reverie. “What kid’s book? I never—” “Don’t you remember Pat the Detective Kitty-Cat?” It took him a minute, but then he did.

… Letter from Mrs. Patricia Allen to Katherine Anne Goodlowe, of Montpelier, Vermont: June 19, 1986 Dear Kathi, This is the most beautiful place in the whole world, I’m convinced of it. The honeymoon has been the …

It’s the nicest house on the block, a roomy Cape Cod with a high hedge on the downhill side and a high cedar stake fence on the uphill side, between them and the old veterinarian’s place. “Yo, Cary!” Peter Jackson says, pulling up beside him.

Among them we see PREACHER YEOMAN and LAWYER BRADLEY. YEOMAN, no longer concerned that the regulators are a supernatural visitation meant to punish the town for its sins raises one hand to the SHERIFF in a salute.

… From The Regulators, screenplay by Craig Goodis and Quentin Woolrich: EXT. MAIN STREET DAY SHERIFF STREETER watches DEPUTY LAINE yank CANDY to his feet. Behind them, in the adobe which houses Lushan’s Chinese Laundry, a number of Chinese workers …

“Well, it’s very nice to meet you. I’m Ellie Carver. And this is my little brother, Ralph.” Ralph Carver sticks out his tongue and makes a sound like a wasp caught in a mayonnaise jar. What a polite little animal it is, the young woman with the tu-tone hair thinks.

This place was the lie. But I need to be here, she thought. I really, really do. Maybe, but Janice’s love-hate relationship with Ray Soames suddenly bored her to tears. She felt like whirling on her heels and saying, Well, why don’t you quit whining and drop him?

Whatever the reason, it seems clear that MotoKops Colonel Henry, Snake Hunter, Bounty, Major Pike, Rooty the Robot, and the tough-but-all-girl Cassandra Styles are going to be the hot action figures this summer, along with arch-enemies No Face and Countess Lili Marsh.

From the firing pit of Dream Floater, Laura DeMott trains her shotgun on the smashed picture window; from the firing pit of Tracker Arrow, Hoss Cartwright and a very young Clint Eastwood—he is Rowdy Yates of Rawhide in this incarnation, as a matter of fact—have also got the house covered.

Right over to the wall he went, to the same bulletin board where Sally put up Mrs. Wyler’s letter when it came in, marking it CAN ANYONE HELP THIS LADY in big red-ink letters.

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.

Sitting beside him in the nav-pit is the grizzled trapper type Johnny spotted earlier: Sergeant Mathis, Jeb Murdock’s chief aide after the beating and capture of Captain Candell.

Nuts for cowboys and posses and cuttin’ ’em off at the pass is young Seth Garin. Bill said Seth probably knew he wasn’t in the real Old West because of all the cars and campers, but “the scenery still turned him on.” That’s how Bill put it.

Like how the characters from The Regulators, both good and bad, have always gotten along with the MotoKops in Seth’s sandbox play-fantasies. In his fantasies, even Sheriff Streeter and Jeb Murdock get along, although they’re deadly enemies in the movie.” “Is what’s happening now still a play-fantasy to Seth?”

… “Shut up, Rooty,” said Snake Hunter’s voice. It was as if some invisible ensemble of talented lunatics were putting on a show for her. When the thing in front of her spoke again, Snake Hunter was gone and Ben Cartwright was back, that stern Moses of the Sierra Nevada. “We …

… CHAPTER 2 1 Steve Ames saw the shooting because of the two kids arguing beside the red wagon in front of the store. The girl looked seriously pissed at the little boy, and for one second Steve was sure she was going to give him a shove... which might send …

Behind them are a couple of girls. One is Susi Geller from next door. Pretty but not, you know, kabam. The other, a redhead with long cheerleader legs, is a different story. Her picture could be next to kabam in the dictionary.

There was hamburger, but it didn’t know how to cook and there was certainly no information on the subject stored in Seth’s memory-banks. Tak had no objection to raw meat—liked it, in fact—but on two or three occasions, eating hamburger that way had made Seth’s body ill.

“You need to double back,” the woman who was now Terry Alvey had said. “Huh?” he had asked when he’d caught his breath. He hadn’t wanted her to understand how her words had rocked him.

Colonel Henry is driving; poked out of the firing trap and doing the shooting is Chuck Connors, also known as the Rifleman. His son is right next to him, grinning from ear to ear. “Good shootin, Paw!”

What a concept, huh? Okay, girl, that’s my creepy story for the night. I’m gonna stick the whole works in a little padded mailer from the gift-shop, then see if I can persuade Tom it’s time to stop shooting bumper pool in the game room and come to bed.

Grinning, unaware that he will die both a virgin and a backup shortstop, Cary throws a Shopper onto the stoop of Tom Billingsley’s house (he can hear Doc’s mower yowling out back), and swoops across the street again toward the Reed house.

Johnny sees the lightning strike the abandoned Hobart place, which stands between the cop’s house and the Jacksons’ place. It demolishes the decorative chimney William Hobart added last year before his problems started and he decided to put the house up for sale. The lightning also ignites the shake roof.

As Yvonne Bateman, an engineer pal of mine, said just after the round of blast-field shots uncovered the hole, “It would be just like the tree-huggers to try and get the whole pit designated a …