Desperation by Stephen King

in the slightest.
    Ellie came to stand beside him and slipped an arm around his waist. Ralph risked letting go of the bars with one of his hands so he could take one of hers.
    Now there were thuds on the stairs, coming closer, and scuffling sounds. Someone was being brought up to join them, but she wasn’t coming easily.
    â€œWe have to help him!” she was screaming. “We have to help Peter! We—”
    Her words broke off as she was thrown into the room. She crossed it with weird, balletic grace, stuttering on her toes, white sneakers like ballet slippers, hands held out, hair streaming behind her, jeans, a faded blue shirt. She collided with the desk, upper thighs smacking the edge hard enough to move it backward toward the chair, and then, from the other side of the room, David was shrieking at her like a bird, standing at the bars, jumping up and down on the balls of his feet, shrieking in a savage, panicky voice Ralph had never heard before, never even suspected.
    â€œThe shotgun, lady!” David screamed. “Get the shotgun, shoot him, shoot him, lady, shoot him!”
    The white-haired man finally looked up. His face was old and dark with desert tan; the deep bags beneath his watery ginhead eyes gave him a bloodhound look.
    â€œGet it!” the old man rasped. “For Christ’s sake, woman!”
    The woman in the jeans and the workshirt looked toward the sound of the boy’s voice, then back over her shoulder toward the stairs and the clump of heavy approaching footfalls.
    â€œDo it!” Ellie chimed in from beside Ralph. “ He killed our daughter, he’ll kill all of us, do it!”
    The woman in the jeans and workshirt grabbed for the gun.

2
    Until Nevada, things had been fine.
    They had started out as four happy wanderers from Ohio, destination Lake Tahoe. There Ellie Carver and the kids would swim and hike and sightsee for ten days and Ralph Carver would gamble—slowly, pleasurably, and with tremendous concentration. This would be their fourth visit to Nevada, their second to Tahoe, and Ralph would continue to follow his ironclad gambling rule: he would quit when he had either (a) lost a thousand dollars, or (b) won ten thousand. In their three previous trips, he had reached neither of these markers. Once he had gone back to Columbus with five hundred dollars of his stake intact, once with two hundred, and last year he had driven them back with over three thousand dollars in the inner lefthand pocket of his lucky safari jacket. On that trip they had stayed at Hiltons and Sheratons instead of in the RV at camping areas, and the elder Carvers had gotten themselves laid every damned night. Ralph considered that pretty phenomenal for people pushing forty.
    â€œYou’re probably tired of casinos,” he’d said in February, when they started talking about this vacation. “Maybe California this time? Mexico?”
    â€œSure, we can all get dysentery,” Ellie had replied. “Look at the Pacific between sprints to the casa de poo-poo, or whatever they call it down there.”
    â€œWhat about Texas? We could take the kids to see the Alamo.”
    â€œToo hot, too historic. Tahoe will be cool, even in July. The kids love it. I do, too. And as long as you don’t come asking for any of my money when yours is gone—”
    â€œYou know I’d never do that,” he had said, sounding shocked. Feeling a little shocked, actually. The two of them sitting in the kitchen of their suburban home in Wentworth, not far from Columbus, sitting next to the bronze Frigidaire with the magnetic stick-on daisies scattered across it, travel-folders on the counter in front of them, neither aware that the gambling had already started and the first loss would be their daughter. “You know what I told you—”
    â€œ ‘Once the addict-behavior starts, the gambling stops,’ ” she had repeated. “I know, I remember, I believe.