From a Buick 8

'No. And the ignition key's not really a key. It's just a slot of metal, about so long.' Curt held his thumb and forefinger a key's length apart.

'A blank, is that what you're talking about? Like a keymaker's blank?'

'No. It's nothing like a key at all. It's just a little steel stick.'

'Did you try it?'

Curt, who had been talking almost compulsively, didn't answer that at once.

'Go on,' Ennis said. 'I'm your partner, for Christ's sake. I'm not going to bite you.'

'All right, yeah, I tried it. I wanted to see if that crazy engine worked.'

'Of course it works. Someone drove it in, right?'

'Roach says so, but when I got a good look under that hood, I had to wonder it he was lying or maybe hypnotized. Anyway, it's still an open question. The key-thing won't turn. It's like the ignition's locked.'

'Where's the key now?'

'I put it back in the ignition.'

Ennis nodded. 'Good. When you opened the door, did the dome light come on? Or isn't there one?'

Curtis paused, thinking back. 'Yeah. There was a dome light, and it came on. I should have noticed that. How could it come on, though? How could it, when the battery's not hooked up?'

'There could be a couple of C-cells powering the dome light, for all we know.' But his lack of belief was clear in his voice.

'What about the circuit from the door to the light? Are C-cells running that, too?'

But Ennis was tired of discussing the dome light. 'What else?'

'I saved the best for last,' Curtis told him. 'I had to do some touching inside, but I used a hanky, and I know where I touched, so don't bust my balls.'

Ennis said nothing out loud, but gave the kid a look that said he'd bust Curt's balls if they needed busting.

'The dashboard controls are all fake, just stuck on there for show. The radio knobs don't turn and neither does the heater control knob. The lever you slide to switch on the defroster doesn't move. Feels like a post set in concrete.'

Ennis followed the tow-truck into the driveway that ran around to the back of Troop D. 'What else? Anything?'

'More like everything. It's fucked to the sky.' This impressed Ennis, because Curtis wasn't ordinarily a profane man. 'You know that great big steering wheel? I think that's probably fake, too. I shimmied it - just with the sides of my hands, don't have a hemorrhage - and it turns a little bit, left and right, but only a little bit. Maybe it's just locked, like the ignition, but

. . .'

'But you don't think so.'

'No. I don't.'

The tow-truck parked in front of Shed B. There was a hydraulic whine and the Buick came out of its snout-up, tail-down posture, settling back on its whitewalls. The tow driver, old Johnny Parker, came around to unhook it, wheezing around the Pall Mall stuck in his gob. Ennis and Curt sat in Cruiser D-19 meanwhile, looking at each other.

'What the hell we got here?' Ennis asked finally. 'A car that can't drive and can't steer cruises into the Jenny station out on Route 32 and right up to the hi-test pump. No tags. No sticker . . .' An idea struck him. 'Registration? You check for that?'

'Not on the steering post,' Curt said, opening his door, impatient to get out. The young are always impatient. 'Not in the glove compartment, either, because there is no glove compartment.

There's a handle for one, and there's a latch-button, but the button doesn't push, the handle doesn't pull, and the little door doesn't open. It's just stage-dressing, like everything else on the dashboard. The dashboard itself is bullshit. Cars didn't come with wooden dashboards in the fifties. Not American ones, at least.'

They got out and stood looking at the orphan Buick's back deck. 'Trunk?' Ennis asked. 'Does that open?'

'Yeah. It's not locked. Push the button and it pops open like the trunk of any other car. But it smells lousy.'

'Lousy how?'

'Swampy.'

'Any dead bodies in there?'

'No bodies, no nothing.'

'No spare tire? Not even a jack?'

Curtis shook his head. Johnny Parker came over, pulling off his work gloves. 'Be anything else, men?'

Ennis and Curt shook their heads.

Johnny started away, then stopped. 'What the hell is that, anyway? Someone's idea of a joke?'

'We don't know yet,' Ennis told him.

Johnny nodded. 'Well, if you find out, let me know. Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought him back. You know?'

'Whole lot of satisfaction,' Curt said automatically. The business about curiosity and the cat was a part of Troop D life, not quite an in-joke, just something that had crept into the day-to-day diction of the job.

Ennis and Curt watched the old man go. 'Anything else you want to pass on before we talk to Sergeant Schoondist?' Ennis asked.

'Yeah,' Curds said. 'It's earthquake country in there.'

'Earthquake country? Just what in the hell does that mean?'

So Curds told Ennis about a show he'd seen on the PBS station out of Pittsburgh just the week before. By then a number of people had drifted over. Among them were Phil Candleton, Arky Arkanian, Sandy Dearborn, and Sergeant Schoondist himself.

The program had been about predicting earthquakes. Scientists were a long way from developing a sure-fire way of doing that, Curds said, but most of them believed it could be done, in time.

Because there were forewarnings. Animals felt them, and quite often people did, too. Dogs got restless and barked to be let outside. Cattle ran around in their stalls or knocked down the fences of their pastures. Caged chickens sometimes flapped so frantically they broke their wings.

Some people claimed to hear a high humming sound from the earth fifteen or twenty minutes before a big temblor (and if some people could hear that sound, it stood to reason that most animals would hear it even more clearly). Also, it got cold. Not everyone felt these odd pre-earthquake cold pockets, but a great many people did. There was even some meteorological data to support the subjective reports.

'Are you shitting me?' Tony Schoondist asked.

No indeed, Curt replied. Two hours before the big quake of 1906, temperatures in San Francisco had dropped a full seven degrees; that was a recorded fact. This although all other weather conditions had remained constant.

'Fascinating,' Ennis said, 'but what's it got to do with the Buick?'

By then there were enough Troopers present to form a little circle of listeners. Curtis looked around at them, knowing he might spend the next six months or so tagged the Earthquake Kid on radio calls, but too jazzed to care. He said that while Ennis was in the gas station office questioning Bradley Roach, he himself had been sitting behind that strange oversized steering wheel, still being careful not to touch anything except with the sides of his hands. And as he sat there, he started to hear a humming sound, very high. He told them he had felt it, as well.

'It came out of nowhere, this high steady hum. I could feel it buzzing in my fillings. I think if it had been much stronger, it would've actually jingled the change in my pocket. There's a word for that, we learned it in physics, I think, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is.'

'A harmonic,' Tony said. 'That's when two things start to vibrate together, like tuning-forks or wine-glasses.'

Curtis was nodding. 'Yeah, that's it. I don't know what could be causing it, but it's very powerful. It seemed to settle right in the middle of my head, the way the sound of the powerlines up on the Bluff does when you're standing right underneath them. This is going to sound crazy, but after a minute or so, that hum almost sounded like talking.'

'I laid a girl up dere on d'Bluffs once,' Arky said sentimentally, sounding more like Lawrence Welk than ever. 'And it was pretty harmonic, all right. Buzz, buzz, buzz.'

'Save it for your memoirs, bub,' Tony said. 'Go on, Curtis.'

'I thought at first it was the radio,' Curt said, 'because it sounded a little bit like that, too: an old vacuum-tube radio that's on and tuned to music coming from a long way off. So I took my hanky and reached over to kill the power. That's when I found out the knobs don't move, either of them. It's no more a real radio than . . . well, than Phil Candleton's a real State Trooper.'

'That's funny, kid,' Phil said. 'At least as funny as a rubber chicken, I guess, or - '

'Shut up, I want to hear this,' Tony said. 'Go on, Curtis. And leave out the comedy.'

'Yes, sir. By the time I tried the radio knobs, I realized it was cold in there. It's a warm day and the car was sitting in the sun, but it was cold inside. Sort of clammy, too. That's when I thought of the show about earthquakes.' Curt shook his head slowly back and forth. 'I got a feeling that I should get out of that car, and fast. By then the hum was quieting down, but it was colder than ever. Like an icebox.'

Tony Schoondist, then Troop D's Sergeant Commanding, walked over to the Buick. He didn't touch it, just leaned in the window. He stayed like that for the best part of a minute, leaning into the dark blue car, back inclined but perfectly straight, hands clasped behind his back. Ennis stood behind him. The rest of the Troopers clustered around Curtis, waiting for Tony to finish with whatever it was he was doing. For most of them, Tony Schoondist was the best SC they'd ever have while wearing the Pennsylvania gray. He was tough; brave; fairminded; crafty when he had to be. By the time a Trooper reached the rank of Sergeant Commanding, the politics kicked in. The monthly meetings. The calls from Scranton. Sergeant Commanding was a long way from the top of the ladder, but it was high enough for the bureaucratic bullshit to kick in. Schoondist played the game well enough to keep his seat, but he knew and his men knew he'd never rise higher. Or want to. Because with Tony, his men always came first . . . and when Shirley replaced Matt Babicki, it was his men and his woman. His Troop, in other words. Troop D. They knew this not because he said anything, but because he walked the walk.

At last he came back to where his men were standing. He took off his hat, ran his hand through the bristles of his crewcut, then put the hat back on. Strap in the back, as per summer regulations. In winter, the strap went under the point of the chin. That was the tradition, and as in any organization that's been around for a long time, there was a lot of tradition in the PSP.

Until 1962, for instance, Troopers needed permission from the Sergeant Commanding to get married (and the SCs used that power to weed out any number of rookies and young Troopers they felt were unqualified for the job).

'No hum,' Tony said. 'Also, I'd say the temperature inside is about what it should be. Maybe a little cooler than the outside air, but . . .' He shrugged.

Curtis flushed a deep pink. 'Sarge, I swear - '

'I'm not doubting you,' Tony said. 'If you say the thing was humming like a tuning fork, I believe you. Where would you say this humming sound was coming from? The engine?'

Curtis shook his head.

'The trunk area?'

Another shake.

'Underneath?'

A third shake of the head, and now instead of pink, Curt's cheeks, neck, and forehead were bright red.

'Where, then?'

'Out of the air,' Curt said reluctantly. 'I know it sounds crazy, but . . . yeah. Right out of the air.' He looked around, as if expecting the others to laugh. None of them did.

Just about then Orville Garrett joined the group. He'd been over by the county line, at a building site where several pieces of heavy equipment had been vandalized the night before.

Ambling along behind him came Mister Dillon, the Troop D mascot. He was a German Shepherd with maybe a little taste of Collie thrown in. Orville and Huddie Royer had found him as a pup, paddling around in the shallow well of an abandoned farm out on Sawmill Road. The dog might have fallen in by accident, but probably not. Some people just know how to have fun, don't they?

Mister D was no K-9 specialty dog, but only because no one had trained him that way. He was plenty smart, and protective, as well. If a bad boy raised his voice and started shaking his finger at a Troop D guy while Mister Dillon •was around, that fellow ran the risk of picking his nose with the tip of a pencil for the rest of his life.

'What's doin, boys?' Orville asked, but before anyone could answer him, Mister Dillon began to howl. Sandy Dearborn, who happened to be standing right beside the dog, had never heard anything quite like that howl in his entire life. Mister D backed up a pace and then hunkered, facing the Buick. His head was up and his hindquarters were down. He looked like a dog does when he's taking a crap, except for his fur. It was bushed out all over his body, every hair standing on end.

Sandy's skin went cold.

'Holy God, what's wrong with him?' Phil asked in a low, awed voice, and then Mister D let loose with another of those long, wavering howls. He took three or four stalk-steps toward the Buick, never coming out of that hunched-over, cramped-up, taking-a-crap stoop, all the time with his muzzle pointing at the sky. It was awful to watch. He made two or three more of those awkward movements, then dropped flat on the macadam, panting and whining.

'What the hell?' Orv said.

'Put a leash on him,' Tony said. 'Get him inside.' Orv did as Tony said, actually running to get Mister Dillon's leash. Phil Candleton, who had always been especially partial to the dog, went with Orv once the leash was on him, walking next to Mister D, occasionally bending down to give him a comforting stroke arid a soothing word. Later, he told the others that the dog had been shivering all over.

Nobody said anything. Nobody had to. They were all thinking the same thing, that Mister Dillon had pretty well proved Curt's point. The ground wasn't shaking and Tony hadn't heard anything when he stuck his head in through the Buick's window, but something was wrong with it, all right. A lot more wrong than the size of its steering wheel or its strange notchless ignition key. Something worse.

In the seventies and eighties, Pennsylvania State Police forensics investigators were rolling stones, travelling around to the various Troops in a given area from District HQ. In the case of Troop D, HQ was Butler. There were no forensics vans; such big-city luxuries were dreamed of, but wouldn't actually arrive in rural Pennsylvania until almost the end of the century. The forensics guys rode in unmarked police cars, carrying their equipment in trunks and back seats, toting it to various crime scenes in big canvas shoulder-bags with the PSP keystone logo on the sides. There were three guys in most forensics crews: the chief and two technicians. Sometimes there was also a trainee. Most of these looked too young to buy a legal drink.

One such team appeared at Troop D that afternoon. They had ridden over from Shippenville, at Tony Schoondist's personal request. It was a funny informal visit, a vehicle exam not quite in the line of duty. The crew chief was Bibi Roth, one of the oldtimers (men joked that Bibi had learned his trade at the knee of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson). He and Tony Schoondist got along well, and Bibi didn't mind doing a solid for the Troop D SC. Not as long as it stayed quiet, that was.

NOW:

Sandy

Ned stopped me at this point to ask why the forensic examination of the Buick was conducted in such an odd (to him, at least) off-the-cuff manner.

'Because,' I told him, 'the only criminal complaint in the matter that any of us could think of was theft of services - eleven dollars' worth of hi-test gasoline. That's a misdemeanor, not worth a forensic crew's time.'

'Dey woulda burned almost dat much gas gettin over here from Shippenville,' Arky pointed out.

'Not to mention the man-hours,' Phil added.

I said, 'Tony didn't want to start a paper trail. Remember that there wasn't one at that point. All he had was a car. A very weird car, granted, one with no license plates, no registration, and - Bibi Roth confirmed this - no VIN number, either.'

'But Roach had reason to believe the owner drowned in the stream behind the gas station!'

'Pooh,' Shirley said. 'The driver's overcoat turned out to be a plastic garbage can. So much for Bradley Roach's ideas.'

'Plus,' Phil put in, 'Ennis arid your dad observed no tracks going down the slope behind the station, and the grass was still wet. If the guy had gone down there, he would have left sign.'

'Mostly, Tony wanted to keep it in-house,' Shirley said. 'Would you say that's a fair way to put it, Sandy?'

'Yes. The Buick itself was strange, but our way of dealing with it wasn't much different from the way we'd deal with anything out of the ordinary: a Trooper down - like your father, last year -

or one who's used his weapon, or an accident, like when George Morgan was in hot pursuit of that crazy asshole who snatched his kids.'

We were all silent for a moment. Cops have nightmares, any Trooper's wife will tell you that, and in the bad dream department, George Morgan was one of the worst. He'd been doing ninety, closing in on the crazy asshole, who had a habit of beating the kids he had snatched and claimed to love, when it happened.

George is almost on top of him and all at once here's this senior citizen crossing the road, seventy years old, slower than creeping bullfrog Jesus, and legally blind. The asshole would have been the one to hit her if she'd started across three seconds earlier, but she didn't. No, the asshole blew right by her, the rearview mirror on the passenger side of his vehicle so close it almost took off her nose. Next comes George, and kapow. He had twelve blameless years on the State Police, two citations for bravery, community service awards without number. He was a good father to his children, a good husband to his wife, and all of that ended when a woman from Lassburg Gut tried to cross the street at the wrong moment and he killed her with PSP cruiser D-27. George was exonerated by the State Board of Review and came back to a desk job on the Troop, rated PLD -

permanent light duty - at his own request. He could have gone back full-time as far as the brass was concerned, but there was a problem: George Morgan could no longer drive. Not even the family car to the market. He got the shakes every time he slid behind the wheel. His eyes teared up until he was suffering from a kind of waterlogged hysterical blindness. That summer he worked nights, on dispatch. In the afternoons he coached the Troop D-sponsored Little League team all the way to the state tournament. When that was over, he gave the kids their trophy and their pins, told them how proud of them he was, then went home (a player's mother drove him), drank two beers, and blew his brains out in the garage. He didn't leave a note; cops rarely do. I wrote a press release in the wake of that. Reading it, you never would have guessed it was written with tears on my face. And it suddenly seemed very important that I communicate some of the reason why to Curtis Wilcox's son.

'We're a family,' I said. 'I know that sounds corny, but it's true. Even Mister Dillon knew that much, and you do, too. Don't you?'

The kid nodded his head. Of course he did. In the year after his father died, we were the family that mattered to him most, the one he sought out and the one that gave him what he needed to get on with his life. His mother and sisters loved him, and he loved them, but they were going on with their lives in a way that Ned could not . . . at least not yet. Some of it was being male instead of female. Some of it was being eighteen. Some of it was all those questions of why that wouldn't go away.

I said, 'What families say and how families act when they're in their houses with the doors shut and how they talk and behave when they're out on their lawns and the doors are open . . .

those can be very different things. Ennis knew the Buick was wrong, your dad did, Tony did, I did.

Mister D most certainly did. The way that dog howled . . .'

I fell silent for a moment. I've heard that howl in my dreams. Then I pushed on.

'But legally, it was just an object - a res, as the lawyers say - with no blame held against it. We couldn't very well hold the Buick for theft of services, could we? And the man who ordered the gas that went into its tank was long gone and hard to find. The best we could do was to think of it as an impoundment.'

Ned wore the frown of someone who doesn't understand what he's hearing. I could understand that. I hadn't been as clear as I wanted to be. Or maybe I was just playing that famous old game, the one called It Wasn't Our Fault.

'Listen,' Shirley said. 'Suppose a woman stopped to use the restroom at that station and left her diamond engagement ring on the washstand and Bradley Roach found it there. Okay?'

'Okay . . .' Ned said. Still frowning.

'And let's say Roach brought it to us instead of just putting it in his pocket and then taking it to a pawnshop in Butler. We'd make a report, maybe put out the make and model of the woman's car to the Troopers in the field, if Roach could give them to us . . . but we wouldn't take the ring. Would we, Sandy?'

'No,' I said. 'We'd advise Roach to put an ad in the paper - Found, a woman's ring, if you think it may be yours, call this number and describe. At which point Roach would get pissing and moaning about the cost of putting an ad in the paper - a whole three bucks.'

'And then we'd remind him that folks who find valuable property often get rewards,' Phil said,

'and he'd decide maybe he could find three bucks, after all.'

'But if the woman never called or came back,' I said, 'that ring would become Roach's property. It's the oldest law in history: finders-keepers.'

'So Ennis and my dad took the Buick.'

'No,' I said. 'The Troop took it.'

'What about theft of services? Did that ever get filed?'

'Oh, well,' I said with an uncomfortable little grin. 'Eleven bucks was hardly worth the paperwork. Was it, Phil?'

'Nah,' Phil said. 'Specially not in those days, when an IBM typewriter with CorrecTape was state-of-the-art. But we squared it up with Hugh Bossey.'

A light was dawning on Ned's face. 'You paid for the gas out of petty cash.'

Phil looked both shocked arid amused. 'Never in your life, boy! Petty cash is the taxpayers'

money, too.'

'We passed the hat,' I said. 'Everybody that was there gave a little. It was easy.'

'If Roach found a ring and nobody claimed it, it would be his,' Ned said. 'So wouldn't the Buick be his?'

'Maybe if he'd kept it,' I said. 'But he turned it over to us, didn't he? And as far as he

'was concerned, that was the end of it.'

Arky tapped his forehead and gave Ned a wise look. 'Nuttin upstairs, dat one,' he said.

For a moment I thought Ned would turn to brooding on the young man who had grown up to kill his father, but he shook that off. 1 could almost see him do it.

'Go on,' he said to me. 'What happened next?'

Oh boy. Who can resist that?

THEN

It took Bibi Roth and his children (that's what he called them) only forty-five minutes to go over the Buick from stem to stern, the young people dusting and brushing and snapping pictures, Bibi with a clipboard, walking around and sometimes pointing wordlessly at something with his ballpoint pen.

About twenty minutes into it, Orv Garrett came out with Mister Dillon. The dog was on his leash, which was a rarity around the barracks. Sandy walked over to them. The dog wasn't howling, had quit trembling, and was sitting with his brush of tail curled neatly over his paws, but his dark brown eyes were fixed on the Buick and never moved. From deep in his chest, almost too low to hear, came a steady growl like the rumble of a powerful motor.

'For Chrissake, Orvie, take him back inside,' Sandy Dearborn said.

'Okay. I just thought he might be over it by now.' He paused, then said: 'I've heard bloodhounds act that way sometimes, when they've found a body. I know there's no body, but do you think someone might have died in there?'

'Not that we know of.' Sandy was watching Tony Schoondist come out of the barracks' side door and amble over to Bibi Roth. Ennis was with him. Curt Wilcox was out on patrol again, much against his wishes. Sandy doubted that even pretty girls would be able to talk him into giving them warnings instead of tickets that afternoon. Curt wanted to be at the barracks, watching Bibi and his crew at work, not out on the road; if he couldn't be, lawbreakers in western Pennsylvania would pay.

Mister Dillon opened his mouth and let loose a long, low whine, as if something in him hurt.

Sandy supposed something did. Orville took him inside. Five minutes later Sandy himself was rolling again, along with Steve Devoe, to the scene of a two-car collision out on Highway 6.

Bibi Roth made his report to Tony and Ennis as the members of his crew (there were three of them today) sat at a picnic table in the shade of Shed B, eating sandwiches and drinking the iced tea Matt Babicki had run out to them.

'I appreciate you taking the time to do this,' Tony said.

'Your appreciation is appreciated,' Bibi said, 'and I hope it ends there. I don't want to submit any paperwork on this one, Tony. No one would ever trust me again.' He looked at his crew and clapped his hands like Miss Frances on Ding-Dong School. 'Do we want paperwork on this job, children?' One of the children who helped that day was appointed Pennsylvania's Chief Medical Examiner in 1993.

They looked at him, two young men and a young woman of extraordinary beauty. Their sandwiches were raised, their brows creased. None of them was sure what response was required.

'No, Bibi!' he prompted them.

'No, Bibi,' they chorused dutifully.

'No what?' Bibi asked.

'No paperwork,' said young man number one.

'No file copies,' said young man number two.

'No duplicate or triplicate,' said the young woman of extraordinary beauty. 'Not even any singlicate.'

'Good!' he said. 'And with whom are we going to discuss this, kinder?'

This time they needed no prompting. 'No one, Bibi!'

'Exactly,' Bibi agreed. 'I'm proud of you.'

'Got to be a joke, anyway,' said one of the young men. 'Someone's trickin on you, Sarge.'

'I'm keeping that possibility in mind,' Tony said, -wondering what any of them would have thought if they had seen Mister Dillon howling and hunching forward like a crippled thing. Mister D hadn't been trickin on anybody.

The children went back to munching and slurping and talking among themselves. Bibi, meanwhile, was looking at Tony and Ennis Rafferty with a slanted little smile.

'They see what they look at with youth's wonderful twenty-twenty vision and don't see it at the same time,' he said. 'Young people are such wonderful idiots. What is that thing, Tony? Do you have any idea? From witnesses, perhaps?'

'No.'

Bibi turned his attention to Ennis, who perhaps thought briefly about telling the man what he knew of the Buick's story and then decided not to. Bibi was a good man . . . but he didn't wear the gray.

'It's not an automobile, that's for sure,' Bibi said. 'But a joke? No, I don't think it's that, either.'

'Is there blood?' Tony asked, not knowing if he wanted there to be or not.

'Only more microscopic examination of the samples we took can determine that for sure, but I think not. Certainly no more than trace amounts, if there is.'

'What did you see?'

'In a word, nothing. We took no samples from the tire treads because there's no dirt or mud or pebbles or glass or grass or anything else in them. I would have said that was impossible. Henry there - ' He pointed to young man number one. ' - kept trying to wedge a pebble between two of them and it kept falling out. Now what is that? And could you patent such a thing? If you could, Tony, you could take early retirement.'

Tony was rubbing his cheek with the tips of his fingers, the gesture of a perplexed man.

'Listen to this,' Bibi said. 'We're talking floormats here. Great little dirtcatchers, as a rule. Every one a geological survey. Usually. Not here, though. A few smudges of dirt, a dandelion stalk. That's all.' He looked at Ennis. 'From your partner's shoes, I expect. You say he got behind the wheel?'

'Yes.'

'Driver's-side footwell. And that's where these few artifacts were found.' Bibi patted his palms together, as if to say QED.

'Are there prints?' Tony asked.

'Three sets. I'll want comparison prints from your two officers and the pump-jockey. The prints we lifted from the gas-hatch will almost certainly belong to the pump-jockey. You agree?'

'Most likely,' Tony said. 'You'd run the prints on your own time?'

'Absolutely, my pleasure. The fiber samples, as well. Don't annoy me by asking for anything involving the gas chromatograph in Pittsburgh, there's a good fellow. I will pursue this as far as the equipment in my basement permits. That will be quite far.'

'You're a good guy, Bibi.'

'Yes, and even the best guy will take a free dinner from time to time, if a friend offers.'

'He'll offer. Meantime, is there anything else?'

'The glass is glass. The wood is wood . . . but a wooden dashboard in a car of this vintage -

this purported vintage - is completely wrong. My older brother had a Buick from the late fifties, a Limited. I learned to drive on it and I remember it well. With fear and affection. The dashboard was padded vinyl. I would say the seatcovers in this one are vinyl, which would be right for this make and model; I will be checking with General Motors to make sure. The odometer . . . very amusing. Did you notice the odometer?'

Ennis shook his head. He looked hypnotized.

'All zeros. Which is fitting, I suppose. That car - that purported car - would never drive.'

His eyes moved from Ennis to Tony and then back to Ennis again. 'Tell me you haven't seen it drive. That you haven't seen it move a single inch under its own power.'

'Actually, I haven't,' Ennis said. Which was true. There was no need to add that Bradley Roach claimed to have seen it moving under its own power, and that Ennis, a veteran of many interrogations, believed him.

'Good.' Bibi looked relieved. He clapped his hands, once more being Miss Frances. 'Time to go, children! Voice your thanks!'

'Thanks, Sergeant,' they chorused. The young woman of extraordinary beauty finished her iced tea, belched, and followed her white-coated colleagues back to the car in which they had come.

Tony was fascinated to note that not one of the three gave the Buick a look. To them it was now a closed case, and new cases lay ahead. To them the Buick was just an old car, getting older in the summer sun. So what if pebbles fell out when placed between the knuckles of the tread, even when placed so far up along the curve of the tire that gravity should have held them in? So what if there were three portholes on one side instead of four?

They see it and don't see it at the same time, Bibi had said. Young people are such wonderful idiots.

Bibi followed his wonderful idiots toward his own car (Bibi liked to ride to crime scenes in solitary splendor, whenever possible), then stopped. 'I said the wood is wood, the vinyl is vinyl, and the glass is glass. You heard me say that?'

Tony and Ennis nodded.

'It appears to me that this purported car's exhaust system is also made of glass. Of course, I was only peering under from one side, but I had a flashlight. Quite a powerful one.' For a few moments he just stood there, staring at the Buick parked in front of Shed B, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. 'I have never heard of a car with a glass exhaust system,' he said finally, and then walked toward his car. A moment later, he and his children were gone.

Tony was uncomfortable with the car out where it was, not just because of possible storms but because anyone who happened to walk out back could see it. Visitors were what he was thinking of, Mr and Mrs John Q. Public. The State Police served John Q. and his family as well as they could, in some cases at the cost of their lives. They did not, however, completely trust them. John Q.'s family was not Troop D's family. The prospect of word getting around - worse, of rumor getting around - made Sergeant Schoondist squirm.

He strolled to Johnny Parker's little office (the County Motor Pool was still next door in those days) around quarter to three and sweet-talked Johnny into moving one of the plows out of Shed B and putting the Buick inside. A pint of whiskey sealed the deal, and the Buick was towed into the oil-smelling darkness that became its home. Shed B had garage doors at either end, and Johnny brought the Buick in through the back one. As a result, it faced the Troop D barracks from out there for all the years of its stay. It's something most of the Troopers became aware of as time passed. Not a forebrain thing, nothing like an organized thought, but something that floated at the back of the mind, never quite formed and never quite gone: the pressure of its chrome grin.

There were eighteen Troopers assigned to Troop D in 1979, rotating through the usual shifts: seven to three, three to eleven, and the graveyard shift, when they rode two to a cruiser. On Fridays and Saturdays, the eleven-to-seven shift was commonly called Puke Patrol.

By four o'clock on the afternoon the Buick arrived, most of the off-duty Troopers had heard about it and dropped by for a look. Sandy Dearborn, back from the accident on Highway 6 and typing up the paperwork, saw them going out there in murmuring threes and fours, almost like tour groups.

Curt Wilcox was off-duty by then and he conducted a good many of the tours himself, pointing out the mismatched portholes and big steering wheel, lifting the hood so they could marvel over the whacked-out mill with BUICK 8 printed on both sides of the engine block.

Orv Garrett conducted other tours, telling the story of Mister D's reaction over and over again. Sergeant Schoondist, already fascinated by the thing (a fascination that would never completely leave him until Alzheimer's disease erased his mind), came out as often as he could.

Sandy remembered him standing just outside the open Shed B door at one point, foot up on the boards behind him, arms crossed. Ennis was beside him, smoking one of those little Tiparillos he liked and talking while Tony nodded. It was after three, and Ennis had changed into jeans and a plain white shirt. After three, and that was the best Sandy could say later on. He wished he could do better, but he couldn't.

The cops came, they looked at the engine (the hood permanently up by that point, gaping like a mouth), they squatted down to look at the exotic glass exhaust system. They looked at everything, they touched nothing. John Q. and his family wouldn't have known to keep their mitts off, but these were cops. They understood that, while the Buick might not be an evidential res as of right then, later on that might change. Especially if the man who had left it at the Jenny station should happen to turn up dead.

'Unless that happens or something else pops, I intend to keep the car here,' Tony told Matt Babicki and Phil Candleton at one point. It was five o'clock or so by then, all three of them had been officially off-duty for a couple of hours, and Tony was finally thinking about going home.

Sandy himself had left around four, wanting to mow the grass before sitting down to dinner.

'Why here?' Matt asked. 'What's the big deal, Sarge?'

Tony asked Matt and Phil if they knew about the Cardiff Giant. They said they didn't, and so Tony told them the story. The Giant had been 'discovered' in upstate New York's Onondaga Valley.

It was supposed to be the fossilized corpse of a gigantic humanoid, maybe something from another world or the missing link between men and apes. It turned out to be nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a Binghamton cigar-maker named George Hull.

'But before Hull fessed-up,' Tony said, just about everyone in the whole round world -

including P. T. Barnum - dropped by for a look. The crops on the surrounding farms were trampled to mush. Houses were broken into. There was a forest fire started by asshole John Q's camping in the woods. Even after Hull confessed to having the "petrified man" carved in Chicago and shipped Railway Express to upstate New York, people kept coming. They refused to believe the thing wasn't real. You've heard the saying "There's a sucker born every minute?" That was coined in 1869, in reference to the Cardiff Giant.'

'What's your point?' Phil asked.

Tony gave him an impatient look. 'The point? The point is that I'm not having any Cardiff fucking Giant on my watch. Not if 1 can help it. Or the goddam Buick of Turin, for that matter.'

As they moved back toward the barracks, Huddie Royer joined them (with Mister Dillon at his side, now heeling as neatly as a pooch in a dog-show). Huddie caught the Buick of Turin line and snickered. Tony gave him a dour look.

'No Cardiff Giant in western PA; you boys mark what I say and pass the word. Because word of mouth's how it's gonna be done - I'm not tacking any memo up on the bulletin board. I know there'll be some gossip, but it'll die down. I will not have a dozen Amish farms overrun by lookie-loos in the middle of the growing season, is that understood?'

It was understood.

By seven o'clock that evening, things had returned to something like normal. Sandy Dearborn knew that for himself, because he'd come back after dinner for his own encore look at the car. He found only three Troopers - two off-duty and one in uniform - strolling around the Buick. Buck Flanders, one of the off-duties, was snapping pictures with his Kodak. That made Sandy a bit uneasy, but what would they show? A Buick, that was all, one not yet old enough to be an official antique.

Sandy got down on his hands and knees and peered under the car, using a flashlight that had been left nearby (and probably for just that purpose). He took a good gander at the exhaust system. To him it looked like Pyrex glass. He leaned in the driver's window for awhile (no hum, no chill), then went back to the barracks to shoot the shit with Brian Cole, who was in the SC chair that shift. The two of them started on the Buick, moved on to their families, and had just gotten to baseball when Orville Garrett stuck his head in the door.

'Either you guys seen Ennis? The Dragon's on the phone, and she's not a happy lady.'

The Dragon was Edith Hyams, Ennis's sister. She was eight or nine years older than Ennis, a longtime widow-lady. There were those in Troop D who opined that she had murdered her husband, simply nagged him into his grave. 'That's not a tongue in her mouth, that's a Ginsu knife,' Dicky-Duck Eliot observed once. Curt, who saw the lady more than the rest of the Troop (Ennis was usually his partner; they got on well despite the difference in their ages), was of the opinion that Edith was the reason Trooper Rafferty had never married. 'I think that deep down he's afraid they're all like her,' he once told Sandy.

Coming back to work after your shift is through is never a good idea, Sandy thought after spending a long ten minutes on the phone with The Dragon. Where is he, he promised he'd be home by six-thirty at the latest, I got the roast he wanted down at Pepper's, eighty-nine cents a pound, now it's cooked like an old boot, gray as wash-water (only of course what the lady said was warsh-warter), if he's down at The Country Way or The Tap you tell me right now, Sandy, so I can call and tell him what's what. She also informed Sandy that she was out of her water-pills, and Ennis was supposed to have brought her a fresh batch. So where the hell was he? Pulling overtime? That would be all right, she reckoned, God knew they could use the money, only he should have called.

Or was he drinking? Although she never came right out and said so, Sandy could tell that the Dragon voted for drinking.

Sandy was sitting at the dispatch desk, one hand cupped over his eyes, trying to get a word in edgeways, when Curtis Wilcox bopped in, dressed in his civvies and looking every inch the sport.

Like Sandy, he'd come back for another peek at the Roadmaster.

'Hold on, Edith, hold on a second,' Sandy said, and put the telephone against his chest. 'Help me out here, rookie. Do you know where Ennis went after he left?'

'He left?'

'Yeah, but he apparently didn't go home.' Sandy pointed to the phone, which was still held against his chest. 'His sister's on the line.'

'If he left, how come his car's still here?' Curt asked.

Sandy looked at him. Curtis looked back. And then, without a word spoken, the two of them jumped like Jack and Jill to the same conclusion.

Sandy got rid of Edith - told her he'd call her back, or have Ennis call her, if he was around.

That taken care of, Sandy went out back with Curt.

There was no mistaking Ennis's car, the American Motors Gremlin they all made fun of. It stood not far from the plow Johnny Parker had moved out of Shed B to make room for the Buick. The shadows of both the car and the plow straggled long in the declining sun of a summer evening, printed on the earth like tattoos.

Sandy arid Curt looked inside the Gremlin and saw nothing but the usual road-litter: hamburger wrappers, soda cans, Tiparillo boxes, a couple of maps, an extra uniform shirt hung from the hook in back, an extra citation book on the dusty dashboard, some bits of fishing gear. All that rickrack looked sort of comforting to them after the sterile emptiness of the Buick. The sight of Ennis sitting behind the wheel and snoozing with his old Pirates cap tilted over his eyes would have been even more comforting, but there was no sign of him.

Curt turned and started back toward the barracks. Sandy had to break into a trot in order to catch up and grab his arm. 'Where do you think you're going?' he asked.

'To call Tony.'

'Not yet,' Sandy said. 'Let him have his dinner. We'll call him later if we have to. I hope to God we don't.'

Before checking anything else, even the upstairs common room, Curt and Sandy checked Shed B. They walked all around the car, looked inside the car, looked under the car. There was no sign of Ennis Rafferty in any of those places - at least, not that they could see. Of course, looking for sign in and around the Buick that evening was like looking for the track of one particular horse after a stampede has gone by. There was no sign of Ennis specifically, but . . .

'Is it cold in here, or is it just me?' Curt asked. They were about ready to return to the barracks. Curt had been down on his knees with his head cocked, taking a final look underneath the car. Now he stood up, brushing his knees. 'I mean, I know it's not freezing or anything, but it's colder than it should be, wouldn't you say?'

Sandy actually felt too hot - sweat was running down his face - but that might have been nerves rather than room-temperature. He thought Curt's sense of cold was likely just a holdover from what he'd felt, or thought he'd felt, out at the Jenny station.

Curt read that on his face easily enough. 'Maybe it is. Maybe it is just me. Fuck, I don't know. Let's check the barracks. Maybe he's downstairs in supply, coopin. Wouldn't be the first time.'

The two men hadn't entered Shed B by either of the big roll-up doors but rather through the doorknob-operated, people-sized door that was set into the east side. Curt paused in it instead of going out, looking back over his shoulder at the Buick.

His gaze as he stood beside the wall of pegged hammers, clippers, rakes, shovels, and one posthole digger (the red AA on the handle stood not for Alcoholics Anonymous but for Arky Arkanian) was angry. Almost baleful. 'It wasn't in my mind,' he said, more to himself than to Sandy. 'It was cold. It's not now, but it was.'

Sandy said nothing.

'Tell you one thing,' Curt said. 'If that goddam car's going to be around long, I'm getting a thermometer for this place. I'll pay for it out of my own pocket, if I have to. And say! Someone left the damn trunk unlocked. I wonder who - '

He stopped. Their eyes met, and a single thought flashed between them: Fine pair of cops we are.

They had looked inside the Buick's cabin, and underneath, but had ignored the place that was -

according to the movies, at least - the temporary body-disposal site of choice for murderers both amateur and professional.

The two of them walked over to the Buick and stood by the back deck, peering at the line of darkness where the trunk was unlatched.

'You do it, Sandy,' Curt said. His voice was low, barely above a whisper.

Sandy didn't want to, but decided he had to - Curt was, after all, still a rookie. He took a deep breath and raised the trunk's lid. It went up much faster than he had expected. There was a clunk when it reached the top of its arc, loud enough to make both men jump. Curt grabbed Sandy with one hand, his fingers so cold that Sandy almost cried out.

The mind is a powerful and often unreliable machine. Sandy was so sure they were going to find Ennis Rafferty in the trunk of the Buick that for a moment he saw the body: a curled fetal shape in chino pants and a plaid shirt, looking like something a Mafia hitman might leave in the trunk of a stolen Lincoln.

But it was only overlapped shadows that the two Troopers saw. The Buick's trunk was empty.

There was nothing there but plain brown carpeting without a single tool or grease-stain on it.

They stood in silence for a moment or two, and then Curt made a sound under his breath, either a snicker or an exasperated snort. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's get out of here. And shut the damn trunk tight this time. 'Bout scared the life out of me.'

'Me too,' Sandy said, and gave the trunk a good hard slam. He followed Curt to the door beside the wall with the pegged tools on it. Curtis was looking back again.

'Isn't that one hell of a thing,' he said softly.

'Yes,' Sandy agreed.

'It's fucked up, wouldn't you say?'

'I would, rook, I would indeed, but your partner isn't in it. Or anywhere in here. That much is for sure.'

Curt didn't bridle at the word rook. Those days were almost over for him, and they both knew it. He was still looking at the car, so smooth and cool and there. His eyes were narrow, showing just two thin lines of blue. 'It's almost like it's talking. I mean, I'm sure that's just my imagination - '

'Damn tooting it is.'

' - but I can almost hear it. Mutter-mutter-mutter.'

'Quit it before you give me the willies.'

'You mean you don't already have them?'

Sandy chose not to reply to that. 'Come on, all right?'

They went out, Curt taking one last look before closing the door.

The two of them checked upstairs in the barracks, where there was a living room and a dorm-style bedroom behind a plain blue curtain that contained four cots. Andy Colucci was watching a sitcom on television and a couple of Troopers who had the graveyard shift were snoozing; Sandy could hear the snores. He pulled back the curtain to check. Two guys, all right, one of them going wheek-wheek through his nose -polite - and the other going ronk-ronk-ronk through his open mouth - big and rude. Neither of them was Ennis. Sandy hadn't really expected to find him there; when Ennis cooped, he most commonly did it in the basement supply room, rocked back in the old swivel chair that went perfectly with the World War II-era metal desk down there, the old cracked radio on the shelf playing danceband music soft. He wasn't in the supply room that night, though. The radio was off and the swivel chair with the pillow on the seat was unoccupied. Nor was he in either of the storage cubicles, which were poorly lit and almost as spooky as cells in a dungeon.

There were a total of four toilets in the building, if you included the stainless steel lidless model in the bad-boy corner. Ennis wasn't hiding out in any of the three with doors. Not in the kitchenette, not in dispatch, not in the SC's office, which stood temporarily empty with the doors open and the lights off.

By then, Huddie Royer had joined Sandy and Curt. Orville Garrett had gone home for the day (probably afraid that Ennis's sister would turn up in person), and had left Mister Dillon in Huddie's care, so the dog was there, too. Curt explained what they were doing and why. Huddie grasped the implications at once. He had a big, open Farmer John face, but Huddie was a long way from stupid. He led Mister D to Ennis's locker and let him smell inside, which the dog did with great interest. Andy Coined joined them at this point, and a couple of other off-duty guys who had dropped by to sneak a peek at the Buick also joined the party. They went outside, split up into two groups, and walked around the building in opposing circles, calling Ennis's name. There was still plenty of good light, but the day had begun to redden.

Curt, Huddie, Mister D, and Sandy were in one group. Mister Dillon walked slowly, smelling at everything, but the only time he really perked and turned, the scent he'd caught took him on a beeline to Ennis's Gremlin. No help there.

At first yelling Ennis's name felt foolish, but by the time they gave up and went back inside the barracks, it no longer felt that way at all. That was the scary part, how fast yelling for him stopped feeling silly and started feeling serious.

'Let's take Mister D into the shed and see what he smells there,' Curt proposed.

'No way,' Huddie said. 'He doesn't like the car.'

'Come on, man, Ennie's my partner. Besides, maybe ole D will feel different about that car now.'

But ole D felt just the same. He was okay outside the shed, in fact started to pull on his leash as the Troopers approached the side door. His head was down, his nose all but scraping the macadam. He was even more interested when they got to the door itself. The men had no doubt at all that he had caught Ennis's scent, good and strong.

Then Curtis opened the door, and Mister Dillon forgot all about whatever he had been smelling.

He started to howl at once, and again hunched over as if struck by bad cramps. His fur bushed out like a peacock's finery, and he squirted urine over the doorstep and on to the shed's concrete floor. A moment later he was yanking at the leash Huddie was holding, still howling, still trying in a crazy, reluctant way to get inside. He hated it and feared it, that was in every line of his body - and in his wild eyes - but he was trying to get at it, just the same.

'Aw, never mind! Just get him out!' Curt shouted. Until then he had kept hold of himself very well, but it had been a long and stressful day for him and he was finally nearing the breaking point.

'It's not his fault,' Huddie said, and before he could say more, Mister Dillon raised his snout and howled again . . . only to Sandy it sounded more like a scream than a howl. The dog took another crippled lurch forward, pulling Huddie's arm out straight like a flag in a high wind. He was inside now, howling and whining, lurching to get forward and pissing everywhere like a pup.

Pissing in terror.

'I know it's not!' Curt said. 'You were right to begin with, I'll give you a written apology if you want, just get him the fuck out!'

Huddie tried to reel Mister D back in, but he was a big dog, about ninety pounds, and he didn't want to come. Curt had to lay on with him in order to get D going in the right direction.

In the end they dragged him out on his side, D fighting and howling and gnashing the air with his teeth the whole way. It was like pulling a sack of polecats, Sandy would say later.

When the dog was at last clear of the door, Curtis slammed it shut. The second he did, Mister Dillon relaxed and stopped fighting. It was as if a switch in his head had been flipped. He continued to lie on his side for a minute or two, getting his breath, then popped to his feet. He gave the Troopers a bewildered look that seemed to say, 'What happened, boys? I was going along good, and then I kind of blanked out.'

'Holy . . . fucking . . . shit,' Huddie said in a low voice.

'Take him back to the barracks,' Curt said. 'I was wrong to ask you to let him inside there, but I'm awful worried about Ennis.'

Huddie took the dog back to the barracks, Mister D once again as cool as a strawberry milkshake, just pausing to sniff at the shoes of the Troopers who had helped search the perimeter.

These had been joined by others who had heard Mister D freaking out and had come to see what all the fuss was.

'Go on in, guys,' Sandy said, then added what they always said to the lookie-loos who gathered at accident sites: 'Show's over.'

They went in. Curt and Sandy watched them, standing there by the closed shed door. After awhile Huddie came back without Mister D. Sandy watched Curt reach for the doorknob of the shed door and felt a sense of dread and tension rise in his head like a wave. It was the first time he felt that way about Shed B, but not the last. In the twenty-odd years that followed that day, he would go inside Shed B dozens of times, but never without the rise of that dark mental wave, never without the intuition of almost-glimpsed horrors, of abominations in the corner of the eye.

Not that all of the horrors went unglimpsed. In the end they glimpsed plenty.

The three of them walked in, their shoes gritting on the dirty cement. Sandy flipped on the light-switches by the door and in the glare of the naked bulbs the Buick stood like one prop left on a bare stage, or the single piece of art in a gallery that had been dressed like a garage for the showing. What would you call such a thing? Sandy wondered. From a Buick 8 was what occurred to him, probably because there was a Bob Dylan song with a similar title. The chorus was in his head as they stood there, seeming to illuminate that feeling of dread: And if I fall down dyin, y'know/She's bound to put a blanket on my bed.

It sat there with its Buick headlights staring and its Buick grille sneering. It sat there on its fat and luxy whitewalls, and inside was a dashboard full of frozen fake controls and a wheel almost big enough to steer a privateer. Inside was something that made the barracks dog simultaneously howl in terror and yank forward as if in the grip of some ecstatic magnetism. If it had been cold in there before, it no longer was; Sandy could see sweat shining on the faces of the other two men and feel it on his own.

It was Huddie who finally said it out loud, and Sandy was glad. He felt it, but never could have put that feeling into words; it was too outrageous.

'Fucking thing ate im,' Huddie said with flat certainty. T don't know how that could be, but I think he came in here by himself to take another look and it just . . . somehow . . . ate im.'

Curt said, 'It's watching us. Do you feel it?'

Sandy looked at the glassy headlight eyes. At the down-turned, sneering mouth full of chrome teeth. The decorative swoops up the sides, which could almost have been sleek locks of slick hair.

He felt something, all right. Perhaps it was nothing but childish awe of the unknown, the terror kids feel when standing in front of houses their hearts tell them are haunted. Or perhaps it was really what Curt said. Perhaps it was watching them. Gauging the distance.

They looked at it, hardly breathing. It sat there, as it would sit for all the years to come, while Presidents came and went, while records were replaced by CDs, while the stock market went up and a space shuttle exploded, while movie-stars lived and died and Troopers came and went in the Troop D barracks. It sat there real as rocks and roses. And to some degree they all felt what Mister Dillon had felt: the draw of it. In the months that followed, the sight of cops standing there side by side in front of Shed B became common. They would stand with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to block the light, peering in through the windows running across the front of the big garage door. They looked like sidewalk superintendents at a building site.

Sometimes they went inside, too (never alone, though; when it came to Shed B, the buddy system ruled), and they always looked younger when they did, like kids creeping into the local graveyard on a dare.

Curt cleared his throat. The sound made the other two jump, then laugh nervously. 'Let's go inside and call the Sarge,' he said, and this time NOW:

Sandy

'. . . and that time I didn't say anything. Just went along like a good boy.'

My throat was as dry as an old chip. I looked at my watch and wasn't exactly surprised to see that over an hour had gone by. Well, that was all right; I was off duty. The day was murkier than ever, but the faint mutters of thunder had slid away south of us.

'Those old days,' someone said, sounding both sad and amused at the same time - it's a trick only the Jews and the Irish seem to manage with any grace. 'We thought we'd strut forever, didn't we?'

I glanced around and saw Huddie Rover, now dressed in civilian clothes, sitting on Ned's left.

I don't know when he joined us. He had the same honest Farmer John face he'd worn through the world back in '79, but now there were lines bracketing the corners of his mouth, his hair was mostly gray, and it had gone out like the tide, revealing a long, bright expanse of brow. He was, I judged, about the same age Ennis Rafferty had been when Ennis did his Judge Crater act. Huddie's retirement plans involved a Winnebago and visits to his children and grandchildren. He had them everywhere, so far as I could make out, including the province of Manitoba. If you asked - or even if you didn't - he'd show you a US map with all his proposed routes of travel marked in red.

'Yeah,' I said. 'I guess we did, at that. When did you arrive, Huddie?'

'Oh, I was passing by and heard you talking about Mister Dillon. He was a good old doggie, wasn't he? Remember how he'd roll over on his back if anyone said You're under arrest?'

'Yeah,' I said, and we smiled at each other, the way men do over love or history.

'What happened to him?' Ned asked.

'Punched his card,' Huddie said. 'Eddie Jacubois and I buried him right over there.' He pointed toward the scrubby field that stretched up a hill north of the barracks. 'Must be fifteen years ago. Would you say, Sandy?'

I nodded. It was actually fourteen years, almost to the day.

'I guess he was old, huh?' Ned asked.

Phil Candleton said, 'Getting up there, yes, but - '

'He was poisoned,' Huddie said in a rough, outraged voice, and then said no more.

'If you want to hear the rest of this story - ' I began.

'I do, 'Ned replied at once. .

' - then I need to wet my whistle.'

I started to get up just as Shirley came out with a tray in her hands. On it was a plate of thick sandwiches - ham and cheese, roast beef, chicken - and a big pitcher of Red Zinger iced tea.

'Sit back down, Sandy,' she said. 'I got you covered.'

'What are you, a mind reader?'

She smiled as she set the tray down on the bench. 'Nope. I just know that men get thirsty when they talk, and that men are always hungry. Even the ladies get hungry and thirsty from time to time, believe it or not. Eat up, you guys, and I expect you to put away at least two of these sandwiches yourself, Ned Wilcox. You're too damn thin.'

Looking at the loaded tray made me think of Bibi Roth, talking with Tony and Ennis while his crew - his children, much older than Ned was now - drank iced tea and gobbled sandwiches made in the same kitchenette, nothing different except for the color of the tiles on the floor and the microwave oven. Time is also held together by chains, I think.

'Yes, ma'am, okay.'

He gave her a smile, but I thought it was dutiful rather than spontaneous; he kept looking over at Shed B. He was under the spell of the thing now, as so many men had been over the years.

Not to mention one good dog. And as I drank my first glass of iced tea, cold and good going down my parched throat, loaded with real sugar rather than that unsatisfying artificial shit, I had time to wonder if I was doing Ned Wilcox any favors. Or if he'd even believe the rest of it. He might just get up, walk away all stiff-shouldered and angry, believing I'd been making a game of him and his grief. It wasn't impossible. Huddie, Arky, and Phil would back me up - so would Shirley, for that matter. She hadn't been around when the Buick came in, but she'd seen plenty -

and done plenty -since taking the dispatch job in the mid-eighties. The kid still might not believe it, though. It was a lot to swallow.

Too late to back out now, though.

'What happened about Trooper Rafferty?' Ned asked.

'Nothing,' Huddie said. 'He didn't even get his ugly mug on the side of a milk carton.'

Ned gazed at him uncertainly, not sure if Huddie was joking or not.

'Nothing happened,' Huddie repeated, more quietly this time. 'That's the insidious thing about disappearing, son. What happened to your dad was terrible, and I'd never try to convince you any different. But at least you know. That's something, isn't it? There's a place where you can go and visit, where you can lay down flowers. Or take your college acceptance letter.'

'That's just a grave you're talking about,' Ned said. He spoke with a strange patience that made me uneasy. 'There's a piece of ground, and there's a box under it, and there's something in the box that's dressed in my father's uniform, but it's not my father.'

'But you know what happened to him,' Huddie insisted. 'With Ennis . . .' He spread his hands with the palms down, then turned them up, like a magician at the end of a good trick.

Arky had gone inside, probably to take a leak. Now he came back and sat down. , 'All quiet?'

I asked.

'Well, yes and no, Sarge Steff tole me to tell you she's getting dose bursts of interference on d'radio again, dose I'il short ones. You know what I mean. Also, DSS is kaputnik. Jus' dat sign on the TV screen dat say STAND BY SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL.'

Steff was Stephanie Colucci, Shirley's second-shift replacement in dispatch and old Andy Colucci's niece. The DSS was our little satellite dish, paid for out of our own pockets, like the exercise equipment in the corner upstairs (a year or two ago someone tacked a poster to the wall beside the free weights, showing buff biker types working out in the prison yard up at Shabene -

THEY NEVER TAKE A DAY OFF is the punchline beneath).

Arky and I exchanged a glance, then looked over at Shed B. If the microwave oven in the kitchenette wasn't on the fritz now, it soon would be. We might lose the lights and the phone, too, although it had been awhile since that had happened.

'We took up a collection for that rotten old bitch he was married to,' Huddie said. 'That was mighty big of Troop D, in my view.'

'I thought it was to shut her up,' Phil said.

'Wasn't nothing going to shut that one up,' Huddie said. 'She meant to have her say. Anyone who ever met her knew that.'

'It wasn't exactly a collection and he wasn't married to her,' I said. 'The woman was his sister. I thought I made that clear.'

'He was married to her,' Huddie insisted. 'They were like any old couple, with all the yaps and grumps and sore places. They did everything married folks do except for the old in-out, and for all I know - '

'Snip, snip, bite your lip,' Shirley said mildly.

'Yeah,' Huddie said. 'I s'pose.'

'Tony passed the hat, and we all tossed in as much as we could,' I told Ned. 'Then Buck Flanders's brother - he's a stockbroker in Pittsburgh - invested it for her. It was Tony's idea to do it that way rather than just hand her a check.'

Huddie was nodding. 'He brought it up at that meeting he called, the one in the back room at The Country Way. Taking care of The Dragon was just about the last item on the agenda.'

Huddie turned directly to Ned.

'By then we knew nobody was going to find Ennis, and that Ennis wasn't just going to walk into a police station somewhere in Bakersfield, California, or Nome, Alaska, with a case of amnesia from a knock on the head. He was gone. Maybe to the same place the fella in the black coat and hat went off to, maybe to some other place, but gone either way. There was no body, no signs of violence, not even any clothes, but Ennie was gone.' Huddie laughed. It was a sour sound. 'Oh, that bad-natured bitch he lived with was so wild. Of course she was half-crazy to begin with - '

'More dan half,' Arky said complacently, and helped himself to a ham and cheese sandwich. 'She call all d'time, tree-four times a day, made Matt Babicki in dispatch jus' about tear his hair out. You should count your blessings she's gone, Shirley. Edit' Hyams! What a piece of work!'

'What did she think had happened?' Ned asked.

'Who knows?' I said. 'That we killed him over poker debts, maybe, and buried him in the cellar.'

'You played poker in the barracks back then?' Ned looked both fascinated and horrified. 'Did my father play?'

'Oh, please,' I said. 'Tony would have scalped anyone he caught playing poker in the barracks, even for matches. And I'd do exactly the same. I was joking.'

'We're not firemen, boy,' Huddie said with such disdain that I had to laugh. Then he returned to the subject at hand. 'That old woman believed we had something to do with it because she hated us. She would have hated anyone that distracted Ennis's attention from her. Is hate too strong a word, Sarge?'

'No,' I said.

Huddie once more turned to Ned. 'We took his time and we took his energy. And I think the part of Ennis's life that was the most vivid was the part he spent here, or in his cruiser. She knew that, and she hated it - 'the job, the job, the job,' she'd say. 'That's all he cares about, his damned jot.' As far as she was concerned, we must have taken his life. Didn't we take everything else?'

Ned looked bewildered, perhaps because hate of the job had never been a part of his own home life. Not that he'd seen, anyway. Shirley laid a gentle hand on his knee. 'She had to hate somebody, don't you see? She had to blame somebody.'

Ned looked pale and thoughtful. Maybe a few hateful thoughts had crossed his own mind. Surely it had occurred to him that if not for the gray uniform, his dad would still be alive.

I said, 'Edith called, Edith hectored us, Edith wrote letters to her Congressman and to the state Attorney General, demanding a full investigation. I think Tony knew all that was in the offing, but he went right ahead with the meeting we had a few nights later, and laid out his proposal to take care of her. If we didn't, he said, no one would. Ennis hadn't left much, and without our help she'd be next door to destitute. Ennis had insurance and was eligible for his pension - probably eighty per cent of full by then - but she wouldn't see a penny of either one for a long time. Because - '

' - he just disappeared,' Ned said.

'Right. So we got up a subscription for The Dragon. A couple of thousand dollars, all told, with Troopers from Lawrence, Beaver, and Mercer also chipping in. Buck Flanders's brother put it in computer stocks, which were brand-new then, and she ended up making a small fortune.

'As for Ennis, a story started going around the various troops over here in "western PA that he'd run off to Mexico. He was always talking about Mexico, and reading magazine stories about it.

Pretty soon it was being taken as gospel: Ennis had run away from his sister before she could finish the job of cutting him up with that Ginsu Knife tongue of hers. Even guys who knew better -

or should have - started telling that story after awhile, guys who were in the back room of The Country Way when Tony Schoondist said right out loud that he believed the Buick in Shed B had something to do with Ennie's disappearance.'

'Stopped just short of calling it a transporter unit from Planet X,' Huddie said.

'Sarge was very forceful dat night,' Arky said, sounding so much like Lawrence Welk - Now here's da lovely Alice-uh Lon - that I had to raise my hand to cover a smile.

'When she wrote her Congressman, I guess she didn't talk about what you guys had over there in the Twilight Zone, did she?' Ned asked.

'How could she?' I asked. 'She didn't know. That was the main reason Sergeant Schoondist called the meeting. Basically it was to remind us that loose lips sink sh - '

'What's that?' Ned asked, half-rising from the bench. I didn't even have to look to know what he was seeing, but of course I looked anyway. So did Shirley, Arky, and Huddie. You couldn't not look, couldn't not be fascinated. None of us had ever pissed and howled over the Roadmaster like poor old Mister D, but on at least two occasions I had screamed.

Oh yes. I had damned near screamed my guts out. And the nightmares afterward. Man oh man.

The storm had gone away to the south of us, except in a way it hadn't. In a way it had been caged up inside of Shed B. From where we sat on the smokers' bench we could see bright, soundless explosions of light going off inside. The row of windows in the roll-up door would be as black as pitch, and then they'd turn blue-white. And with each flash, I knew, the radio in dispatch would give out another bray of static. Instead of showing 5:18 PM the clock on the microwave would be reading ERROR.

But on the whole, this wasn't a bad one. The flashes of light left afterimages - greenish squares that floated in front of your eyes - but you could look. The first three or four times that pocket storm happened, looking was impossible - it would have fried the eyes right out of your head.

'Holy God,' Ned whispered. His face was long with surprise-No, that's too timid. It was shock I saw on his face that afternoon. Nor was shock the end of it. When his eyes cleared a little, I saw the same look of fascination I had seen on his father's face. On Tony's. Huddie's. Matt Babicki's and Phil Candleton's. And hadn't felt it on my own face?

It's how we most often appear when we confront the deep and authentic unknown, I think - when we glimpse that place where our familiar universe stops and the real blackness begins.

Ned turned to me. 'Sandy, Jesus Christ, what is it? What is it?'

'If you have to call it something, call it a lightquake. A mild one. These days, most of them are mild. Want a closer look?'

He didn't ask if it was safe, didn't ask if it was going to explode in his face or bake the old sperm-factory down below. He just said 'Yeah!' Which didn't surprise me in the least.

We walked over, Ned and I in the lead, the others not far behind. The irregular flashes were very clear in the gloom of the late day, but they registered on the eye even in full sunshine. And when we first took possession (that was right around the time Three Mile Island almost blew, now that I think about it), the Buick Roadmaster in one of its throes literally outshone the sun.

'Do I need shades?' Ned asked as we approached the shed door. I could now hear the humming from inside - the same hum Ned's father had noticed as he sat behind the Buick's oversized wheel out at the Jenny station.

'Nah, just squint,' Huddie said. 'You would have needed shades in '79, though, I can tell you that.'

'You bet your ass,' Arky said as Ned put his face to one of the windows, squinting and peering in.

I slotted myself in next to Ned, fascinated as always. Step right up, see the living crocodile.

The Roadmaster stood entirely revealed, the tarp it had somehow shrugged off lying crumpled in a tan drift on the driver's side. To me, it looked more like an objet d'art than ever - that big old automotive dinosaur with its curvy lines and hardtop styling, its big wheels and sneermouth grille. Welcome, ladies and gentleman! Welcome to this evening's viewing of From a Buick 8! Just keep a respectful distance, because this is the art that bites!

It sat there moveless and dead . . . moveless and dead . . . and then the cabin lit up a brilliant flashbulb purple. The oversized steering wheel and the rearview mirror stood out with absolute dark clarity, like objects on the horizon during an artillery barrage. Ned gasped and put up a hand to shield his face.

It flashed again and again, each silent detonation printing its leaping shadow across the cement floor and up the board wall, where a few tools still hung from the pegs. Now the humming was very clear. I directed my gaze toward the circular thermometer hanging from the beam which ran above the Buick's hood, and when the light bloomed again, I was able to read the temperature easily: fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Not great, but not terrible, either. It was mostly when the temperature in Shed B dropped below fifty that you had to worry; fifty-four wasn't a bad number at all. Still, it was best to play safe. We had drawn a few conclusions about the Buick over the years - established a few rules - but we knew better than to trust any of them very far.

Another of those bright soundless flashes went off inside the Buick, and then there was nothing for almost a full minute. Ned never budged. I'm not sure he even breathed.

'Is it over?' he asked at last.

'Wait,' I said.

We gave it another two minutes and when there was still nothing I opened my mouth to say we might as well go back and sit down, the Buick had exhausted its supply of fireworks for tonight.

Before I could speak, there was a final monstrous flash. A wavering tendril of light, like a spark from some gigantic cyclotron, shot outward and upward from the Buick's rear passenger window. It rose on a jagged diagonal to the back corner of the shed, where there was a high shelf loaded with old boxes, most filled with hardware oddments. These lit up a pallid, somehow eldritch yellow, as if the boxes were filled with lighted candles instead of orphan nuts, bolts, screws, and springs.

The hum grew louder, rattling my teeth and actually seeming to vibrate along the bridge of my nose. Then it quit. So did the light. To our dazzled eyes, the interior of the shed now looked pitch-black instead of just gloomy. The Buick was only a hulk with rounded corners and furtive gleams which marked the chrome facings around its headlights.

Shirley let out her breath in a long sigh and stepped back from the window where she had been watching. She was trembling. Arky slipped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a comforting hug.

Phil, who had taken the window to my right, said: 'No matter how many times I see it, boss, I never get used to it.'

'What is it?' Ned asked. His awe seemed to have wound ten or twelve years off his face and turned him into a child younger than his sisters. 'Why does it happen?'

'We don't know,'I said.

'Who else knows about it?'

'Every Trooper who's worked out of Troop D over the last twenty-plus years. Some of the motor-pool guys know. The County Road Commissioner, I think - '

'Jamieson?' Huddie said. 'Yeah, he knows.'

' - and the Statler Township Chief of Police, Sid Brownell. Beyond that, not many.'

We were walking back to the bench now, most of us lighting up. Ned looked like he could use a cigarette himself. Or something. A big knock of whiskey, maybe. Inside the barracks, things would be going back to normal. Steff Colucci would already be noting an improvement in her radio reception, and soon the DSS dish on the roof would be receiving again - all the scores, all the wars, and six Home Shopping stations. If that wouldn't make you forget about the hole in the ozone layer, by God, nothing would.

'How could folks not know?' Ned asked. 'Something as big as this, how could it not get out?'

'It's not so big,' Phil said. 'I mean, it's a Buick, son. A Cadillac, now . . . that would be big.'

'Some families can't keep secrets and some families can,' I said. 'Ours can. Tony Schoondist called that meeting in the The Country Way, two nights after the Buick came in and Ennis disappeared, mostly to make sure we would. Tony briefed us on any number of things that night.

Ennis's sister, of course - how we were going to take care of her and how we were supposed to respond to her until she cooled down - '

'If she ever did, I wasn't aware of it,' Huddie said.

' - and how we were to handle any reporters if she went to the press.'

There had been a dozen Troopers there that night, and with the help of Huddie and Phil, I managed to name most of them. Ned wouldn't have met all of them face to face, but he'd probably heard the names at his dinner table, if his dad talked shop from time to time. Most Troopers do.

Not the ugly stuff, of course, not to their families - the spitting and cursing and the bloody messes on the highway - but there's funny stuff, too, like the time we got called out because this Amish kid was roller-skating through downtown Statler, holding on to the tail of a galloping horse and laughing like a loon. Or the time we had to talk to the guy out on the Culverton Road who'd done a snow-sculpture of a naked man and woman in a sexually explicit position. But it's art! he kept yelling. We tried to explain that it wasn't art to the neighbors; they were scandalized. If not for a warm spell and a storm of rain, we probably would have wound up in court on that one.

I told Ned about how we'd dragged the tables into a big hollow square without having to be asked, and how Brian Cole and 'Dicky-Duck' Eliot escorted the waitresses out and closed the doors behind them. We served ourselves from the steam tables which had been set up at the front of the room. Later there was beer, the off-duty Troopers pulling their own suds and running their own tabs, and a fug of blue cigarette smoke rising to the ceiling. Peter Quinland, who owned the restaurant in those days, loved The Chairman of the Board, and a steady stream of Frank Sinatra songs rained down on us from the overhead speakers as we ate and drank and smoked and talked:

'Luck Be a Lady', 'The Autumn Wind', 'New York, New York', and of course 'My Way', maybe the dumbest pop song of the twentieth century. To this day I can't listen to it - or any Sinatra song, really - without thinking of The Country Way and the Buick out in Shed B.

Concerning the Buick's missing driver, we were to say we had no name, no description, and no reason to believe the fellow in question had done anything against the law. Nothing about theft of services, in other words. Queries about Ennis were to be taken seriously and treated honestly - up to a point, anyway. Yes, we were all puzzled. Yes, we were all worried. Yes, we had put out watch-and-want bulletins - what we called W2's. Yes, it was possible that Ennis had just pulled up stakes arid moved on. Really, we were instructed to say, anything was possible, and Troop D was doing its best to take care of Trooper Rafferty's sister, a dear lady who was so deeply upset she might say anything.

'As for the Buick itself, if anyone asks about it at all, tell them it's an impound,' Tony had said. 'No more than that. If anyone does say more than that, I'll find out who and smoke him out like a cigar.' He looked around the room; his men looked back at him, and no one was stupid enough to smile. They'd been around the Sarge long enough to know that when he looked the way he did just then, he was not joking. 'Are we clear on this? Everyone got the scoop?'

A general rumble of agreement had temporarily blotted out The Chairman singing 'It was a Very Good Year'. We had the scoop, all right.

Ned held up a hand, and I stopped talking, which was actually a pleasure. I hadn't much wanted to revisit that long-gone meeting in the first place.

'What about the tests that guy Bibi Roth did?'

'All inconclusive,' I said. 'The stuff that looked like vinyl wasn't exactly vinyl - close, but not quite. The paint-chips didn't match up to any of the automotive paints Bibi had samples of. The wood was wood. 'Likely oak,' Bibi said, but that was all he would say, no matter how much Tony pressed him. Something about it bothered him, but he wouldn't say what.'

'Maybe he couldn't,' Shirley said. 'Maybe he didn't know.'

I nodded. 'The glass in the windows and windshield is plain old sandwich safety glass, but not trademarked. Not installed on any Detroit assembly line, in other words.'

'The fingerprints?'

I ticked them off on my own fingers. 'Ennis. Your father. Bradley Roach. End of story. No prints from the man in the black trenchcoat.'