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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 infrom 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.
2
    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.”
    â€œYou didn’t hear it?”
    â€œHear 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.
    â€œHey, 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 onto his tatty old Converse sneakers. Maybe just as well. He might even do his liver a favor and take the night off.
    â€œAre you deaf, Gary, or just stupid?” the light of his life inquired.
    â€œLikely 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?”
    â€œIasked you why in God’s name anyone would shoot the paper boy?”
    â€œMaybe 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.
3
    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-Cat, 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