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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. “I’ll pull you in the wagon,” he told the boy. “All the way up to the house. How’s that?”
    â€œMargrit the Maggot loves Ethan Hawke,” his son confided.
    â€œDoes 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 thelook 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 to step inside until the police come?” he asked.
    â€œHey,” 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.
    â€œUsed 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 thestore. 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.”
    â€œThat’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 Stephen H. Scheuer, Bantam Books:

CHAPTER 3
1
    Poplar Street/3:58 P.M ./July 15, 1996
    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