Doctor Sleep

Dan looked at Abra’s old stuffed toy.
    “Ready, Hoppy? I hope so. I hope we both are.”
    11
    BillyFreeman was slouched behind the wheel of his truck, but sat up in a hurry when Abra came out of the Deane house. Her friend—Emma—stood in the doorway. The two girls said goodbye, slapping palms first in an overhead high five, then down low. Abra started for her own house, across the street and four doors down. That wasn’t in the plan, and when she glanced at him, he raised both hands in a what gives gesture.
    She smiled and shot him another quick thumbs-up. She thought everything was okay, he got that loud and clear, but seeing her outside and on her own made Billy uneasy, even if the freaks were twenty miles south of here. She was a powerhouse, and maybe she knew what she was doing, but she was also only thirteen.
    As he watched her go up the walk to her house, pack on her back andrummaging in her pocket for her key, Billy leaned over and thumbed the button on his glove compartment. His own Glock .22was inside. The pistols were rented firepower from a guy who was an emeritus member of the Road Saints, New Hampshire chapter. In his younger years, Billy had sometimes ridden with them but had never joined. On the whole he was glad, but he understood the pull. The camaraderie.He supposed it was the way Dan and John felt about the drinking.
    Abra slipped into her house and closed the door. Billy didn’t take either the Glock or his cell phone out of the glove compartment—not yet—but he didn’t close the compartment, either. He didn’t know if it was what Dan called the shining, but he had a bad feeling about this. Abra should have stayed with her friend.
    She should havestuck to the plan.
    12
    They ride in campers and Winnebagos, Abra had said, and it was a Winnebago that pulled into the parking lot where the Cloud Gap access road dead-ended. Dan sat watching with his hand in the picnic basket. Now that the time had come, he felt calm enough. He turned the basket so one end faced the newly arrived RV and flicked off the Glock’s safety with his thumb. The ’Bago’sdoor opened and Abra’s would-be kidnappers spilled out, one after the other.
    She had also said they had funny names—pirate names—but these looked like ordinary people to Dan. The men were the going-on-elderly kind you always saw pooting around in campers and RVs; the woman was young and good-looking in an all-American way that made him think of cheerleaders who still had their figures ten yearsafter high school, and maybe after a kid or two. She could have been the daughter of one of the men. He felt a moment’s doubt. This was, after all, a tourist spot, and it was the beginning of leaf-peeping season in New England. He hoped John and David would hold their fire; it would be horrible if they were just innocent by—
    Then he saw the rattlesnake baring its fangs on the woman’s leftarm,and the syringe in her right hand. The man crowding in close beside her had another syringe. And the man in the lead had what looked very much like a pistol in his belt. They stopped just inside the birch poles marking the entrance to the picnic area. The one in the lead disabused Dan of any lingering doubts he might have had by drawing the pistol. It didn’t look like a regular gun. It was too thinto be a regular gun.
    “Where’s the girl?”
    With the hand not in the picnic basket, Dan pointed to Hoppy the stuffed rabbit. “That’s as close to her as you’re ever going to get.”
    The man with the funny gun was short, with a widow’s peak above a mild-mannered accountant’s face. A soft pod of well-fed stomach hung over his belt. He was wearing chinos and a t-shirt reading GOD DOES NOT DEDUCT FROMMAN’S ALLOTED SPAN THE HOURS SPENT FISHING.
    “I have a question for you, honeybunch,” the woman said.
    Dan raised his eyebrows. “Go ahead.”
    “Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to go to sleep?”
    He did. All at once his eyelids were as heavy as sashweights. The hand holding the gun began to relax. Two more seconds and he would have been crashed out and snoring with his head on the initial-carvedsurface of the picnic table. But that was when Abra screamed.
    ( WHERE’S THE CROW? I DON’T SEE THE CROW! )
    13
    Dan jerked as a man will when he is badly startled on the edge of sleep. The hand in the picnic basket spasmed, the Glock went off, and a cloud of wickerwork fragments flew. The bullet went wild but the people from the Winnebago