From a Buick 8

I still felt sick in my stomach. I could drink the beer Cynthia was bringing, the bubbles might even help, but eat a cheeseburger? I didn't think so. It had been years since the night Curtis dissected the bat-thing, but I was thinking about it now. How he'd said Inquiring minds want to know and then poked his scalpel into its eye. The eye had made a popping sound and then collapsed, dribbling out of its socket like a black tear. Tony and I had screamed, and how was I supposed to eat a cheeseburger now, remembering that? Stop it, this is pointless, I'd said, but he hadn't stopped. The father had been as insistent as the son. Let's look in the lower gut and then we're done, he had said, only he had never been clone. He had poked, he had prodded, he had investigated, and the Buick had killed him for his pains.

I wondered if the boy knew it. I wondered if he under stood the Buick Roadmaster 8 had killed his father as surely as Huddie, George, Eddie, Shirley, and Mister Dillon had killed the shrieking monstrosity that had come out of the car's trunk in 1988.

Here was 'Billy Don't Be a Hero' by BO DONALDSON AND THE HEYWOODS. Gone from the charts and our hearts.

Tell me about the bat, tell me about the fish, tell me about the E. T. with the pink cords for hair, the thing that could think, the thing that showed up with something like a radio. Tell me about my father, too, because I have to come to terms with him. Of course I do, I see his life in my face and his ghost in my eyes every time I stand at the mirror to shave. Tell me everything . .

. but don't tell me there's no answer. Don't you dare. I reject that. I repudiate it.

'Oil's fine,' I murmured, and turned the steel levers on top of the booth's mini-juke a little faster. There was sweat on my forehead. My stomach felt worse than ever. I wished I could believe it was the flu, or maybe food poisoning, but it wasn't either one and I knew it. 'Oil's just fuckin ducky.'

Here was 'Indiana Wants Me' and 'Green-Eyed Lady' and 'Love Is Blue'. Songs that had somehow slipped between the cracks. 'Surfer Joe', by THE SURFARIS.

Tell me everything, tell me the answers, tell me the one answer.

The kid had been clear about the things he wanted, you had to give him that. He'd asked for it with the pure untinctured selfishness of the lost and the grief-stricken.

Except once.

He'd started to ask for one piece of the past . . . and then changed his mind. What piece had that been? I reached for it, fumbled at it, felt it shrink slyly from my touch. When that happens, it's no good to chase. You have to back off and let the recollection come back to you of its own free will.

I thumbed the pages of the useless jukebox back and forth. Little pink stickers like tongues.

'Polk Salad Annie', by TONY JOE WHITE and Tell me about The Year of the Fish.

'When', by THE KALIN TWINS and Tell me about the meeting you had, tell me everything, tell me everything but the one thing that might pop up a red flag in your suspicious cop's mind-

'Here's your beer - ' Cynthia Garris began, and then there was a light gasp.

I looked up from twiddling the metal levers (the pages flipping back and forth under the glass had half-hypnotized me by then). She was looking at me with fascinated horror.

'Sandy - you got a fever, hon? Because you're just running with sweat.'

And that was when it came to me. Telling him about the Labor Day picnic of 1979. The more we talked, the more we drank, Phil Candleton had said. My head ached for two days after.

'Sandy?' Cynthia standing there with a bottle of IC and a glass. Cynthia with the top button of her uniform undone so she could show me her heart. So to speak. She was there but she wasn't.

She was years from where I was at that moment.

All that talk and not one single conclusion, I'd said, and the talk had moved on - to the O'Day farm, among other things - and then all at once the boy had asked . . . had begun to ask . . .

Sandy, that day at the picnic, did any of you talk about . . .

And then he had trailed off.

'Did any of you talk about destroying it,' I said. 'That's the question he didn't finish.' I looked into Cynthia Garris's frightened, concerned face. 'He started to ask and then he stopped.'

Had I thought storytime was over and Curt's boy was heading home? That he'd let go that easily? A mile or so down the road, headlights had passed me going the other way. Going back toward the barracks at a good but not quite illegal clip. Had Curt Wilcox's Bel Aire been behind those lights, and Curt Wilcox's son behind the wheel? Had he gone back just as soon as he could be sure we were gone?

I thought yes.

I took the bottle of Iron City from Cynthia's tray, watching my arm stretch out and my hand grasp the neck the way you watch yourself do things in dreams. I felt the cold ring of the bottle's neck slip between my teeth and thought of George Morgan in his garage, sitting on the floor and smelling cut grass under the mower. That good green smell. I drank the beer, all of it.

Then I stood up and put a ten on Cynthia's tray.

'Sandy?'

'I can't stay and eat,' I said. 'I forgot something back at the barracks.'

I kept a battery-powered Kojak light in the glove compartment of my personal and put it on the roof as soon as I was out of town, running my car up to eighty and trusting to the red flasher to get anyone ahead of me out of my way. There weren't many. Western Pennsylvania folks roll up the sidewalks early on most weeknights. It was only four miles back to the barracks, but the run seemed to take an hour. I kept thinking about how my heart sank each time Ennis's sister - The Dragon - walked into the barracks under the haystack heap of her outrageous henna hair. I kept thinking, Get out of here, you're too close. And I didn't even like her. How much worse would it be to have to face Michelle Wilcox, especially if she had the twins, the Little J's, with her?

I drove up the driveway too fast, just as Eddie and George had done ten years before, wanting to be rid of their unpleasant prisoner so they could go over to Poteenville, where it must have seemed half the world was going up in smoke. The names of old songs - 'I Met Him on a Sunday',

'Ballroom Blitz', 'Sugar Sugar' - jigged senselessly up and down in my head. Foolish, but better than asking myself what I'd do if the Bel Aire was back but empty; what I'd do if Ned Wilcox was gone off the face of the earth.

The Bel Aire was back, as I'd known it would be. He'd parked it where Arky's truck had been earlier. And it was empty. I could see that in the first splash of my headlights. The song titles dropped out of my head. What replaced them was a cold readiness, the kind that comes by itself, empty-handed and without plans, ready to improvise.

The Buick had taken hold of Curt's boy. Even while we'd been sitting with him, conducting our own peculiar kind of wake for his dad and trying to be his friend, it had reached out and taken hold of him. If there was still a chance to take him back, I'd do well not to bitch it up by thinking too much.

Steff, probably worried at the sight of a single Kojak instead of a rack of roof-lights, poked her head out the back door. 'Who's that? Who's there?'

'It's me, Steff.' I got out of the car, leaving it parked where it was with the red bubble flashing on the roof over the driver's seat. If anyone came hauling in behind me, it would at least keep them from rear-ending my car. 'Go back inside.'

'What's wrong?'

'Nothing.'

'That's what he said.' She pointed at the Bel Aire, then stalked back inside.

I ran for the roll-up door of Shed B in the stutter-pulse of the light - so many stressful moments of my life have been lit by flashers. A John Q. stopped or overtaken by flashers is always frightened. They have no idea what those same lights sometimes do to us. And what we have seen by their glow.

We always left a light on in the shed, but it was brighter than a single night-light in there now, and the side door was standing open. I thought about diverting to it, then kept on as I was.

I wanted a look at the playing-field before anything else.

What I'd been most afraid of seeing was nothing but the Buick. Looking in, I discovered something scarier. The boy was sitting behind the Roadmaster's oversized steering wheel with his chest smashed in. There was nothing where his shirt had been except a bright bloody ruin. My legs started to unbuckle at the knees, and then I realized it wasn't blood I was looking at, after all.

Maybe not blood. The shape was too regular. There was a straight red line running just below the round neck of his blue T-shirt . . . and corners . . . neat right-angled corners . . .

No, not blood.

The gas can Arky kept for the mower.

Ned shifted behind the wheel and one of his hands came into view. It moved slowly, dreamily.

There was a Beretta in it. Had he been driving around with his father's sidearm in the trunk of the Bel Aire? Perhaps even in the glove compartment?

I decided it didn't matter. He was sitting in that deathtrap with gas and a gun. Kill or cure, I'd thought. It had never crossed my mind to think he might try doing both at the same time.

He didn't see me. He should've - my white, scared face filling one of those dark windows should have been perfectly visible to him from where he sat - and he should've seen the red pulse from the light I'd stuck on the roof of my car. He saw neither. He was as hypnotized as Huddie Royer had been when Huddie decided to crawl into the Roadmaster's trunk and pull the lid shut behind him. I could feel it even from outside. That tidal pulse. That liveliness. There were even words in it. I suppose I might have made them up to suit myself, but it almost doesn't matter because it was the pulse that called them forth, the throb all of us had felt around the Buick from the very start. It was a throb some of us - this boy's father, for one - had felt more strongly than others.

Come in or stay out, the voice in my head told me, and it spoke with perfect chilling indifference. I'll take one or two, then sleep. That much more mischief before I'm done jar good.

One or two, I don't care which.

I looked up at the round thermometer mounted on the beam. The red needle had stood at sixty-one before I went down to The Country Way, but now it had dropped back to fifty-seven. I could almost see it slumping to even colder levels as I watched, and all at once I was struck by a memory so vivid it was frightening.

On the smokers' bench, this had been. I had been smoking and Curt had just been sitting. The smokers' bench had assumed odd importance in the six years since the barracks itself was declared a smoke-free zone. It's where we went to compare notes on the cases we were rolling, to work out scheduling conflicts, to mull over retirement plans and insurance plans and the GDR. It was on the smokers' bench that Carl Brundage told me his wife was leaving him and taking the kids. His voice hadn't wavered but tears had gone rolling down his cheeks as he talked. Tony had been sitting on the bench with me on one side and Curt on the other ('Christ and the two thieves,' he'd said with a sardonic smile) when he told us he was putting me up for the SC post his own retirement would leave vacant. If I wanted it, that was. The little gleam in his eyes saying he knew goddam well I wanted it. Curtis and I had both nodded, not saying much. And it was on the smokers' bench that Curt and I had our final discussion about the Buick 8. How soon before his death had that been? I realized with a nasty chill that it might well have been on the very day. Certainly that would explain why the vividness of the memory seemed so terrible to me.

Does it think? Curt had asked. I could remember strong morning sun on his face and - I think -

a paper cup of coffee in his hand. Does it watch and think, wait for its chances, pick its moments?

I'm almost sure not, I had replied, but I'd been troubled. Because almost covers a lot of territory, doesn't it? Maybe the only word in the language that covers more is if.

But it saved its biggest horror show for a time when this place was almost entirely deserted, Ned's father had said. Thoughtful. Setting his coffee aside so he could turn his Stetson over and over in his hands, an old habit of his. If I was right about the day, that hat was less than five hours from being knocked from his head and cast bloody into the weeds, where it would later be found among the McDonald's wrappers and castaway Coke cans. As if it knew. As if it can think.

Watch. Wait.

I had laughed. It was one of those gruff little ha-ha laughs that don't really have much amusement in them. I told him he was cuckoo on the subject. I said, Next thing you'll be telling me it sent out a ray or something to make that Norco tanker crash into the schoolbus that day.

He made no verbal reply, but his eyes had looked a question at me. How do you know it didn't?

And then I had asked the boy's question. I had asked-A warning bell went off inside my head, very dim and deep. I stepped back from the window and raised my hands to my face, as if I thought I could block off that tidal ache simply by blocking off sight of the Buick. And sight of Ned, looking so white and lost behind the oversized steering wheel. It had taken hold of him and just now, briefly, it had taken hold of me. Had tried to sidetrack me with a lot of old useless memories. Whether or not it had consciously waited for its chance to get at Ned didn't matter. What mattered was that the temperature in there was going down fast, almost diving, and if I intended doing something, now was the time.

Maybe you ought to get some backup in on this, the voice in my head whispered. It sounded like my own voice, but it wasn't. Might be someone in the barracks. I'd check, if I were you. Not that it matters to me. Doing one more piece of mischief before I sleep, that's what matters to me.

Pretty much all that matters to me. And why? Because I can, hoss - just because I can.

Backup seemed like a good idea. God knows I was terrified at the idea of going into Shed B on my own and approaching the Buick in its current state. What got me going was the knowledge that I had caused this. I was the one who had opened Pandora's Box.

I ran around to the hutch, not pausing at the side door although I registered the smell of gasoline, heavy and rich. I knew what he'd done. The only question was how much gas he'd poured under the car and how much he'd saved back in the can.

The door to the hutch was secured with a padlock. For years it had been left open, the curved steel arm just poked through the hasp to keep the door from swinging open in a breeze. The lock was open that night, too. I swear that's the truth. It wasn't noontime bright out there, but there was enough glow from the open side door to see the lock clearly. Then, as I reached for it, the steel post slid down into the hole on the body of the lock with a tiny audible click. I saw that happen . . . and I felt it, too. For just a moment the pulse in my head sharpened and focused. It was like a gasp of effort.

I keep two keyrings: cop-keys and personals. There were about twenty on the 'official' ring, and I used a trick I'd learned a long time before, from Tony Schoondist. I let the keys fall on my palm as they would, like pickup sticks, then simply felt among them without looking. It doesn't always work but this time it did, likely because the key to the hutch padlock was smaller than all the others except the one to my locker downstairs, and the locker key has a square head.

Now, faintly, I heard the humming begin. It was faint, like the sound of a motor buried in the earth, but it was there.

I took the key my fingers had found and rammed it into the padlock. The steel arm popped up again. I yanked the lock out of the hasp and dropped it on the ground.Then I opened the door to the hutch and stepped inside.

The little storage space held the still and explosive heat which belongs only to attics and sheds and cubbyholes that have been closed up for a long time in hot weather. No one came out here much anymore, but the things which had accumulated over the years (except for the paint and the paint thinner, flammable items that had been prudently removed) were still here; I could see them in the faint wash of light. Stacks of magazines, the kind men read, for the most part (women think we like to look at naked women but mostly I think we like tools). The kitchen chair with the tape-mended seat. The cheap police-band radio from Radio Shack. The videocam, its battery undoubtedly dead, on its shelf next to the old box of blank tapes. A bumper sticker was pasted to one wall: SUPPORT THE MENTALLY HANDICAPPED, TAKE AN FBI AGENT TO LUNCH. I could smell dust. In my head the pulse that was the Buick's voice was getting stronger and stronger.

There was a hanging lightbulb and a switch on the wall, but I didn't even try it. I had an idea the bulb would be dead, or the switch would be live enough to give me a real walloper of a shock.

The door swung shut behind me, cutting off the moonlight. That was impossible, because when it was left to its own devices, the door always swung the other way, outward. We all knew it. It was why we left the padlock threaded through the hasp. Tonight, however, the impossible was selling cheap. The force inhabiting the Buick wanted me in the dark. Maybe it thought being in the dark would slow me down.

It didn't. I'd already seen what I needed: the coil of yellow rope, still hanging on the wall below the joke sticker and next to a forgotten set of jumper cables. I saw something else, too.

Something Curt Wilcox had put up on the shelf near the videocam not long after the E.T. with the lashing pink ropes had made its appearance.

I took this item, stuck it in my back pocket, and grabbed the coil of rope from the wall. Then I banged out again. A dark form loomed up in front of me and I almost screamed. For one mad moment I was sure it was the man in the dark coat and hat, the one with the malformed ear and the Boris Badinov accent. When the boogeyman spoke up, however, the accent was pure Lawrence Welk.

'Dat damn kid came back,' Arky whispered. 'I got halfway home and Yudas Pries' I jus' turned around. I knew it, somehow. I just - '

I interrupted then, told him to stay clear, and ran back around the corner of Shed B with the rope looped over my arm.

'Don' go in dere, Sarge!' Arky said. I think he might've been trying to shout, but he was too scared to get much in the way of volume. 'He's t'rown down gas an' he got a gun, I seen it.'

I stopped beside the door, slipped the rope off my arm, started to tie one end to the stout hook mounted there, then gave the coil of rope to Arky instead.

'Sandy, can you feel it?' he asked. 'An' the radio gone all blooey again, nuttin but static, I heard Steff cussin at it t'rough d'window.'

'Never mind. Tie the end of the rope off. Use the hook.'

'Huh?'

'You heard me.'

I'd held on to the loop in the end of the rope and now I stepped into it, yanked it up to my waist, arid ran it tight. It was a hangman's knot, tied by Curt himself, and it ran shut easily.

'Sarge, you can't do dis.' Arky made as if to grab my shoulder, but without any real force.

'Tie it off and then hold on,' I said. 'Don't go in, no matter what. If we . . .' I wasn't going to say if we disappear, though - didn't want to hear those words come out of my mouth. 'If anything happens, tell Steff to put out a Code D as soon as the static clears.'

'Jesus!' Only from Arky it sounded more like Yeesus. 'What are you, crazy? Can't you feel it?'

'I feel it,' I said, and went inside. I shook the rope continually as I went to keep it from snagging. I felt like a diver starting down to some untried depth, min ling his airhose not because he really thinks minding it will help, but because it's at least something to do, something to keep your mind off the things that may be swimming around in the blackness just beyond the reach of your light.

The Buick 8 sat fat and luxy on its whitewalls, our little secret, humming deep down in the hollows of itself. The pulse was stronger than the humming, and now that I was actually inside I felt it stop its halfhearted efforts to keep me out. Instead of pushing with its invisible hand, it pulled.

The boy sat behind the wheel with the gas can in his lap, his cheeks and forehead white, the skin there taut and shiny. As I came toward him, his head turned with robotic slowness on his neck and he looked at me. His gaze was wide and dark. In it was the stupidly serene look of the deeply drugged or the cataclysmically wounded. The only emotion that remained in his eyes was a terrible weary stubbornness, that adolescent insistence that there must be an answer and he must know the answer. He had a right. And that was what the Buick had used, of course. What it had used against him.

'Ned.'

'I'd get out of here if I were you, Sarge.' Speaking in slow, perfectly articulated syllables.

'There's not much time. It's coming. It sounds like footsteps.'

And he was right. I felt a sudden surge of horror. The hum was some sort of machinery, perhaps. The pulse was almost certainly a kind of telepathy. This was something else, though, a third thing.

Something was coming.

'Ned, please. You can't understand what this thing is and you certainly can't kill it. All you can do is get yourself sucked up like dirt in a vacuum cleaner. And that'll leave your mother and your sisters on their own. Is that what you want, to leave them alone with a thousand questions no one can answer? It's hard for me to believe that the boy who came here looking so hard for his father could be so selfish.'

Something flickered in his eyes at that. It was the way a man's eyes may flicker \vheri, deep in concentration, he hears a loud noise on the next block. Then the eyes grew serene again. 'This goddamned car killed my father,' he said. Spoken calmly. Even patiently.

I certainly wasn't going to argue that. 'All right, maybe it did. Maybe in some way it was as much to blame for what happened to your dad as Bradley Roach was. Does that mean it can kill you, too? What is this, Ned? Buy one, get one free?'

'I'm going to kill it,' he said, and at last something rose in his eyes, disturbing the surface serenity. It was more than anger. To me it looked like a kind of madness. He raised his hands. In one was the gun. In the other he now held a butane match. 'Before it sucks me through, I'm going to light its damned transporter on fire. That'll shut the door to this side forever.

That's step one.' Spoken with the scary, unconscious arrogance of youth, positive that this idea has occurred to no one before it has occurred to him. 'And if I live through that experience, I'm going to kill whatever's waiting on the other side. That's step two.'

'Whatever's waiting? I realized the enormity of his assumptions and was staggered by them.

'Oh, Ned! Oh, Christ!'

The pulse was stronger now. So was the hum. I could feel the unnatural cold that marked the Buick's periods of activity settling against my skin. And saw purple light first blooming in the air just above the oversized steering wheel and then starting to skate across its surface. Coming.

It was coming. Ten years ago it would have been here already. Maybe even five. Now it took a little longer.

'Do you think there's going to be a welcoming party, Ned? Are you expecting them to send the Exalted President of the Yellow-Skin Pink-Hair People or maybe the Emperor of the Alternate Universe to say howdy and give you the key to the city? Do you think they'd take the trouble? For what? A kid who can't accept the fact that his father is dead and get on with his own life?'

'Shut up!'

'Know what I think?'

'I don't care what you think!'

'I think the last thing you see is going to be a whole lot of nothing much before you choke to death on whatever they breathe over there.'

The uncertainty flickered in his eyes again. Part of him wanted to do a George Morgan and just finish it. But there was another part of him as well, one that might not care so much about Pitt anymore but still wanted to go on living. And above both, above and under and around, binding everything, was the pulse and the quietly calling voice. It wasn't even seductive. It just pulled at you.

'Sarge, come outta dere!' Arky called.

I ignored him and kept my eyes on Curt's boy. 'Ned, use the brains that got you this far.

Please.' Not shouting at him, but raising my voice to get it over the strengthening hum. And at the same time I touched the thing I'd put in my back pocket.

'This res you're sitting in may be alive, but that still doesn't make it worth your time. It's not much different from a Venus flytrap or a pitcher plant, don't you see that? You can't get revenge out of this thing, not even a nickel's worth. It's brainless.'

His mouth began to tremble. That was a start, but I wished to God he'd let go of the gun or at least lower it. And there was the butane match. Not as dangerous as the automatic, but bad enough; my shoes were in gasoline as I stood near the driver's door of the Buick, and the fumes were strong enough to make my eyes water. Now the purple glow had begun to spin lazy lines of light across the bogus dashboard controls and to fill up the speedometer dial, making it look like the bubble in a carpenter's level.

'It killed my daddy!' he shouted in a child's voice, but it wasn't me he was shouting at. He couldn't find whatever it was he wanted to shout at, and that was precisely what was killing him.

'No, Ned. Listen, if this thing could laugh, it'd be laughing now. It didn't get the father the way it wanted to - not the way it got Ennis and Brian Lippy - but now it's got a damned fine chance at the son. If Curt knows, if he sees, he must be screaming in his grave. Everything he feared, everything he fought to prevent. All of it happening again. To his own son.'

'Stop it, stop it!' Tears were spilling over his eyelids.

I bent down, bringing my face into that growing purple glow, into the welling coldness. I brought my face down to Ned's face, where the resistance was finally crumbling. One more blow would do it. I pulled the can I'd taken from the hutch out of my back pocket and held it against my leg and said, 'He must be hearing it laugh, Ned, he must know it's too late - '

'No!'

' - that there's nothing he can do. Nothing at all.'

He raised his hands to cover his ears, the gun in the left, the butane match in the right, the gas can balanced on his thighs, his legs dimming out to lavender mist below his shins, that glow rising like water in a well, and it wasn't great - I hadn't knocked him as completely off-balance as I would have liked - but it would have to be good enough. I pushed the cap off the aerosol can with my thumb, had just one fraction of a second to wonder if there was any pressure left in the damned thing after all the years it had stood unused on the shelf in the hutch, and then I maced him.

Ned howled with surprise and pain as the spray hit his eyes and nose. His finger squeezed the trigger of his dad's Beretta. The report was deafening in the shed.

'Gah-DAM!' I heard Arky shout through the ringing in my ears.

I grabbed the doorhandle, and as I did the little locking post went down by itself, just like the arm of the padlock on the hutch door. I reached through the open window, made a fist, and punched the side of the gas can. It flew off the convulsing boy's lap, tumbled into the misty lavender light rising up from the floor of the car, and disappeared. I had a momentary sense of it tumbling, the way things do when you drop them off a high place. The gun went off again and I felt the wind of the slug. It wasn't really close - he was still firing blind into the Buick's roof, probably unaware that he was shooting at all - but whenever you can feel the air stir with a bullet's passage, it's too damned close.

I fumbled down inside the door, finally found the inside handle, and pulled. If it didn't come up I wasn't sure what I'd do next - he was too big arid too heavy to yank through the window - but it did come up and the door opened. As it did, a brilliant purple flash rose up from where the Roadmaster's floorboards had been, the trunk banged open, and the real pulling began. Sucked up like dirt in a vacuum cleaner, I'd said, but I hadn't known the half of it. That tidal beat suddenly sped up to a ferocious, arrhythmic pounding, like precursor waves before the tsunami that will destroy everything. There was a sense of an inside-out wind that seemed to pull instead of push, that wanted to suck your eyeballs from their sockets and then peel the skin right off your face, and yet not a hair on my head stirred.

Ned screamed. His hands dropped suddenly, as if invisible ropes had been tied around his wrists and now someone below him was yanking on them. He started to sink in his seat, only the seat was no longer precisely there. It was vanishing, dissolving into that stormy bubble of rising violet light. I grabbed him under the arms, yanked, stumbled backward first one step and then two. Fighting the incredible traction of the force trying to pull me into the descending purple throat that had been the Buick's interior. I fell over backward with Ned on top of me.

Gasoline soaked through the legs of my pants.

'Pull us!' I screamed at Arky. I paddled with my feet, trying to slide away from the Buick and the light pouring out of it. My feet could find no good purchase. They kept slipping in the gasoline.

Ned was yanked, pulled toward the open driver's door so hard he was almost torn out of my grip. At the same time I felt the rope tighten around my waist. We were tugged sharply backward as I resettled my grip around Ned's chest. He was still holding the gun, but as I watched his arm shot out straight in front of him and the gun flew from his hand. The throbbing purple light in the cabin of the car swallowed it up, and I thought I heard it fire twice more, all by itself, as it disappeared. At the same time the pull around us seemed to weaken a little. Maybe enough to make our escape if we went now, just exited stage left with no hesitation.

'Pull!' I screamed at Arky.

'Boss, I'm pullin as hard as I - '

'Pull harder!'

There was another furious yank, one that cut my breath off as Curtis's hangman's noose pulled tight around my mid-section. Then I was scrambling to my feet and stumbling backward at the same time with the boy still clasped in front of me. He was gasping, his eyes puffed shut like the eyes of a fighter who's had the worst of it for twelve rounds. I don't think he saw what happened next.

The inside of the Buick was gone, cored out by purple light. Some unspeakable, unknowable conduit had opened. I was looking down an infected gullet and into another world. I might have frozen in place long enough for the suction to renew its hold on me and pull me in - to pull both of us in - but then Arky was screaming, high and shrill: 'Help me, Steff! God's sake! Muckle on here and help me!' She must have done it, too, because a second or so later, Ned and I were yanked backward like a couple of well-hooked fish.

I went down again and banged my head, aware that the pulse and the hum had merged, had turned into a howl that seemed to be drilling a hole in my brains. The Buick had begun flashing like a neon sign, and a flood of green-backed beetles came tumbling out of the blazing trunk. They struck the floor, scuttered, died. The suction took hold yet again, and we started moving back toward the Buick. It was like being caught in a hideously strong undertow.

Back and forth, back and forth.

'Help me!' I shouted in Ned's ear. 'You have to help me or we're going in!' What I was thinking by that time was that we were probably going in whether he helped me or not.

He was blind but not deaf and had decided he wanted to live. He put his sneakered feet down on the cement floor and shoved backward just as hard as he could, his skidding heels splashing up little flurries of spilled gasoline. At the same time, Arky and Stephanie Colucci gave the rope another hard tug. We shot backward almost five feet toward the door, but then the undertow grabbed hold again. I was able to wrap a bight of slack rope around Ned's chest, binding him to me for better or worse. Then we were off again, the Buick taking back all the ground we'd gained and more. It moved us slowly but with a terrible relentlessness. There was a breathless, claustrophobic pressure in my chest. Part of it was being wrapped in the rope. Part of it was the sense of being pinched and petted and jerked by a huge invisible hand. I didn't want to go into the place I'd seen, but if we got much closer to the car, I would. We both would. The closer we got, the more the force pulling us stacked up. Soon it would snap the yellow nylon rope. The two of us would fly away, still bound together. Into that sick purple throat we'd go and into whatever lay beyond it.

'Last chance!' I screamed. 'Pull on three! One . . . two . . . THREE!'

Arky and Stephanie, standing shoulder to shoulder just outside the door, gave it all they had.

Ned and I pushed with our feet. We flew backward, this time all the way to the door before that force seized us yet again, pulling as inexorably as a magnet pulls iron filings.

I rolled over on my side. 'Ned, the doorframe! Grab the doorframe!'

He reached blindly out, extending his left arm fully. His hand groped.

'To your right, kid!' StefFscreamed. 'Your right!'

He found the doorjamb and gripped. Behind us there was another monstrous purple flash from the Buick, and I could feel the pull of the thing ratchet up another notch. It was like some hideous new gravity. The rope around my chest had turned into a steel band and I couldn't get a single inch of fresh breath. I could feel my eyes bulging and my teeth throbbing in their gums. My guts felt all in a plug at the base of my throat. The pulse was filling up my brain, burning out conscious thought. I began slipping toward the Buick again, the heels of my shoes skidding on the cement. In another moment I would be sliding, and a moment after that I'd be flying, like a bird sucked into a jet turbine engine. Arid when I went the boy would go with me, likely with splinters of the doorjamb sticking out from under his fingernails. He would have to come with me. My metaphor about chains had become literal reality.

'Sandy, grab my hand!'

I craned my neck to look and wasn't exactly surprised to see Huddie Royer - and behind him, Eddie. They'd come back. It had taken them a little longer than it had taken Arky, but they'd come. And not because Steff had radioed them a Code D, either; they'd been in their personals, and radio communications out of our barracks were FUBAR, for the time being, anyway. No, they had just

. . . come.

Huddie was kneeling in the doorway, holding on with one hand to keep from being sucked in. His hair didn't move around his head and his shirt didn't ripple, but he swayed back and forth like a man in a high wind just the same. Eddie was behind him, crouching, looking over Huddie's left shoulder. Probably holding on to Huddie's belt, although I couldn't see that. Huddie's free hand was held out to me, and I seized it like a drowning man. I felt like a drowning man.

'Now pull, goddammit,' Huddie growled at Arky and Eddie and Steff Colucci. The Buick's purple light was flashing in his eyes. 'Pull your guts out.'

They might not have gone quite that far, but they pulled hard and we tumbled out the door like a cork coming out of a bottle, landing in a pigpile with Huddie on the bottom. Ned was panting, his face turned sideways against my neck, the skin of his cheek and forehead burning against me like embers. I could feel the wetness of his tears.

'Ow, Sarge, Christ, get your elbow outta my nose!' Huddie yelled in a muffled, furious voice.

'Shut the door!' Steff cried. 'Hurry, before something bad gets out!'

There was nothing but a few harmless bugs with green backs, but she was right, just the same.

Because the light was bad enough. That flashing, stuttery purple light.

We were still tangled together on the pavement, arms pinned by knees, feet caught under torsos, Eddie now somehow tangled in the rope as well as Ned, yelling at Arky that it was around his neck, it was choking him, and Steff kneeling beside him, trying to get her fingers under one of the bright yellow loops while Ned gasped and flailed against me. There was no one to shut the door but it did slam shut and I craned my head at an angle only raw panic would permit, suddenly sure it was one of them, it had come through unseen and now it was out and maybe wanting a little payback for the one that had been slaughtered all those years ago. And I saw it, a shadow against the shed's white-painted side. Then it shifted and the shadow's owner came forward and I could see the curves of a woman's breast and hip in the dim light.

'Halfway home and I get this feeling,' Shirley said in an unsteady voice. 'This really bad feeling. I decided the cats could wait a little longer. Stop thrashing, Ned, you're making everything worse.'

Ned stilled at once. She bent down and with a single deft gesture freed Eddie from the loop around his neck. 'There, ya baby,' she said, and then her legs gave out. Shirley Pasternak sprawled on the hottop and began to cry.

We got Ned into the barracks and flushed his eyes in the kitchen. The skin around them was puffed and red, the whites badly bloodshot, but he said his vision was basically okay. When Huddie held up two fingers, that was what the kid reported. Ditto four.

'I'm sorry,' he said in a thick, clogged voice. 'I don't know why I did that. I mean, I do, I meant to, but not now . . . not tonight - '

'Shhh,' Shirley said. She cupped more water from the tap and bathed his eyes with it. 'Don't talk.'

But he wouldn't be stopped. 'I meant to go home. To think about it, just like I said.' His swelled, horribly bloodshot eyes peered at me, then they were gone as Shirley brought up another palm filled with warm water. 'Next thing I knew I was back here again, and all I can remember thinking is "I've got to do it tonight, I've got to finish it once and for all." Then . . .'

Except he didn't know what had happened then; the rest was all a blur to him. He didn't come right out and say that, but he didn't need to. I didn't even have to see it in his bloodshot bewildered eyes. I had seen him, sitting behind the Roadmaster's steering wheel with the gas can in his lap, looking pale and stoned and lost.

'It took hold of you,' I said. 'It's always had some kind of pull, it's just never had anyone to use it on the way it could on you. When it called you, though, the rest of us heard, too. In our own ways. In any case, it's not your fault, Ned. If there's fault, it's mine.'

He straightened up from the sink, groped, took hold of my forearms. His face was dripping and his hair was plastered to his forehead. In truth he looked rather funny. Like a slapstick baptism.

Steff, who'd been watching the shed from the back door of the barracks, came over to us. 'It's dying down again. Already.'

I nodded. 'It missed its chance. Maybe its last chance.'

'To do mischief,' Ned said. 'That's what it wanted. I heard it in my head. Or, I don't know, maybe I just made that part up.'

'If you did,' I said, 'then I did, too. But there might have been more to tonight than just mischief.'

Before I could say any more, Huddie came out of the bathroom with a first-aid kit. He set it down on the counter, opened it, and took out ajar of salve. 'Put this all around your eyes, Ned.

If some gets in them, don't worry. You won't hardly notice.'

We stood there, watching him put the salve around his eyes in circles that gleamed under the kitchen fluorescents. When he was done, Shirley asked him if it was any better. He nodded.

'Then come outside again,' I said. 'There's one other thing I need to tell you. I would have earlier, but the truth is I never thought of it except in passing until I actually saw you sitting in that goddam car. The shock must have kicked it loose.'

Shirley looked at me with her brow furrowed. She'd never been a mother but it was a mother's sternness I saw on her face right then. 'Not tonight,' she said. 'Can't you see this boy has had enough? One of you needs to take him home and make up some sort of story for his mother - she always believed Curtis's, I expect she'll believe one of yours if you can manage to stay together on the details - and then get him into bed.'

'I'm sorry, but I don't think this can wait,' I said.

She looked hard into my face and must have seen that I at least thought I was telling the truth, and so we all went back out to the smokers' bench, and as we watched the dying fireworks from the shed - the second show of the night, although there wasn't much to this one, at least not now - I told Ned one more story of the old days. I saw this one as you might see a scene from a play, two characters on a mostly bare stage, two characters beneath a single bright stagelight, two men sitting

THEN:

Curtis

Two men sitting on the smokers' bench by the light of a summer sun and one will soon be dead -

when it comes to our human lives there's a noose at the end of every chain and Curtis Wilcox has nearly . reached his. Lunch will be his last meal and neither of them knows it. This condemned man watches the other man light a cigarette and wishes he could have one himself but he's quit the habit. The cost of them is bad, Michelle was always ragging on him about that, but mostly it's wanting to see his children grow up. He wants to see their graduations, he wants to see the color of their children's hair. He has retirement plans as well, he and Michelle have talked them over a lot, the Winnebago that will take them out west where they may finally settle, but he will be retiring sootier than that, and alone. As for smoking, he never had to give up the pleasure at all but a man can't know that. Meanwhile the summer sun is pleasant. Later on the day will be hot, a hot day to die on, but now it's pleasant, and the thing across the way is quiet. It is quiet now for longer and longer stretches. The lightquakes, when they come, are milder. It is winding down, that's what the condemned State Trooper thinks. But Curtis can still sometimes feel its heartbeat and its quiet call and knows it will bear watching. This is his job; he has repudiated any chance of promotion in order to do it. It was his partner the Buick 8 got but in a way, he realizes, it got all of Curtis Wilcox it ever had to. He never locked himself in its trunk, as Huddie Royer once almost did in 1988, and it never ate him alive as it probably ate Brian Lippy, but it got him just the same. It's always close to his thoughts. He hears its whisper the way a fisherman sleeping in his house hears the whisper of the sea even in his sleep. And a whisper is a voice, and a thing with a voice can-He turns to Sandy Dearborn and asks 'Does it think? Does it watch, think, wait for its chances?'

Dearborn - the old hands still call him the New Sarge behind his back - doesn't need to ask what his friend is talking about. When it comes to the thing in Shed B they are of one mind, all of them, and sometimes Curtis thinks it calls even to those who have transferred out of D or quit the PSP altogether for some other, safer job; he thinks sometimes that it has marked them all like the Amish in their black clothes and black buggies are marked, or the way the priest dirties your forehead on Ash Wednesday, or like roadgang convicts linked together and digging a ditch of endless length.

'I'm almost sure not,' the New Sarge says.

'Still, it saved its biggest horror show for a time when this place was almost completely deserted,' says the man who quit cigarettes so he could watch his children grow up and bear him grandchildren. 'As if it knew. As if it could think. And watch. And wait.'

The New Sarge laughs - a sound of amusement which contains just the thinnest rind of contempt.

'You're gaga on the subject, Curt, Next you'll be telling me it sent out a ray or something to make that Norco tanker crash into the schoolbus that day.'

Trooper Wilcox has set his coffee aside on the bench so he can take off his big hat - his Stetson. He begins turning it over and over in his hands, an old habit of his. Kitty-corner from where they sit, Dicky-Duck Eliot pulls up to the gas pump and begins filling D-12, something they will not be able to do much longer. He spots them on the bench and waves. They give him a little of the old right-back-atcha, but the man with the hat- the gray Trooper's Stetson that will finish its tour of duty in the weeds with the soda cans and fast-food wrappers - keeps his gaze mostly on the New Sarge. His eyes are asking if they can rule that out, if they can rule anything out.

The Sarge, irritated by this, says: 'Why don't we just finish it off, then? Finish it off and have done? Tow it into the back field, pour gasoline into her until it runs out the windows, then just light 'er up?'

Curtis looks at him with an evenness that can't quite hide his shock. 'That might be the most dangerous thing we could do with it,' he says. 'It might even be what it wants us to do. What it was sent to provoke. How many kids have lost fingers because they found something in the weeds they didn't know was a blastingcap and pounded it with a rock?'

'Tins isn't the same.'

'How do you know it's not? How do you know?'

And the New Sarge, who will later think, It should have been me whose hat wound up lying blood-bolted on the side of the road, can say nothing. It seems almost profane to disagree with him, and besides, who knows? He could be right. Kids do blow off their fingers with blastingcaps or kill their little brothers with guns they find in their parents' bureau drawers or burn down the house with some old sparklight they found out in the garage. Because they don't know what they're playing with.

'Suppose,' says the man twirling his Stetson between his hands, 'that the 8 is a kind of valve. Like the one in a scuba diver's regulator. Sometimes it breathes in and sometimes it breathes out, giving or receiving according to the will of the user. But what it does it always limited by the valve.'

'Yes, but - '

'Or think of it. another way. Suppose it breathes like a man lying on the bottom of a swamp and using a hollow reed to sip air with so he won't be seen.'

'All right, but - '

'Either way, everything comes in or goes out in small breaths, they must be small breaths, because the channel through which they pass is small. Maybe the thing using the valve or the reed has put itself into a kind of suspended state, like sleep or hypnosis, so it can survive on so little breath. And then suppose some misguided fool comes along and throws enough dynamite into the swamp to drain it and make the reed unnecessary. Or, if you're thinking in terms of a valve, blows it clean off. Would you want to risk that? Risk giving it all the goddam air it needs?'

'No,' the New Sarge says in a small voice.

Curtis says: 'Once Buck Flanders and Andy Colucci made up their minds to do that very thing.'

'The hell you say!'

'The hell I don't,' Curtis returns evenly. 'Andy said if a couple of State Troopers couldn't get away with a little vehicular arson, they ought to turn in their badges. They even had a plan.

They were going to blame it on the paint and the thinner out there in the hutch. Spontaneous combustion, poof, all gone. And besides, Buck said, who'd send for the Fire Marshal in the first place? It's just an old shed with some old beater of a Buick inside it, for Christ's sake.'

The New Sarge can say nothing. He's too amazed.

'I think it may have been talking to them,' Curt says.

'Talking.' He's trying to get the sense of this. 'Talking to them.'

'Yes.' Curt puts his hat - what they always call the big hat - back on his head and hooks the strap under his chin the way you wear it in warm weather and adjusts the brim purely by feel.

Then, to his old friend he says: 'Can you say it's never talked to you, Sandy?'

The New Sarge opens his mouth to say of course it hasn't, but the other man's eyes are on him, and they are grave. In the end the SC says nothing.

'You can't. Because it does. To you, to me, to all of us. It talked loudest to Huddie on the day that monster came through, but we hear it even when it whispers. Don't we? And it talks all the time. Even in its sleep. So it's important not to listen.'

Curt stands up.

'Just to watch. That's our job and I know it now. If it has to breathe through that valve long enough, or that reed, or that whatever-it-is, sooner or later it'll choke. Stifle. Give out. And maybe it won't really mind. Maybe it'll more or less die in its sleep. If no one riles it up, that is. Which mostly means doing no more than staying out of snatching distance. But it also means leaving it alone.'

He starts away, his life running out from under his feet like sand and neither of them knowing, then stops and takes one more look at his old friend. They weren't quite rookies together but they grew into the job together and now it fits both of them as well as it ever will. Once, when drunk, the Old Sarge called law enforcement a case of good men doing bad chores.

'Sandy.'

Sandy gives him a whatnow look.

'My boy is playing Legion ball this year, did I tell you?'

'Only about twenty times.'

'The coach has a little boy, must be about three. And one day last week when I went overtown to pick Ned up, I saw him down on one knee, playing toss with that little hoy in left field. And I fell in love with my kid all over again, Sandy. As strong as when I first held him in my arms, wrapped in a blanket. Isn't that funny?'

Sandy doesn't think it's funny. He thinks it's maybe all the truth the world needs about men.

'The coach had given them their uniforms and Ned had his on and he was down on one knee, tossing underhand to the little boy, and I swear he was the whitest, purest thing any summer sky ever looked down on.' And then he says

NOW:

Sandy

In the shed there was a sallow flash, so pale it was almost lilac. It was followed by darkness . .

. then another flash . . . then more darkness . . . darkness this time unbroken.

'Is it done?' Huddie asked, then answered his own question: 'Yeah, I think it is.'

Ned ignored this. 'What?' he asked me. 'What did he say then?'

'What any man says when things are all right at home,' I told him. 'He said he was a lucky man.'

Steff had gone away to mind her microphone and computer screen, but the others were still here. Ned took no notice of any of them. His puffy, red-lidded eyes never left me. 'Did he say anything else?'

'Said you hit two homers against the Rocksburg Railroad the week before, and that you gave him a wave after the second one, while you were coming around third. He liked that, laughed telling me about it. He said you saw the ball better on your worst day than he ever had on his best. He also said you needed to start charging ground balls if you were serious about playing third base.'

The boy looked down and began to struggle. We looked away, all of us, to let him do it in reasonable privacy. At last he said: 'He told me not to be a quitter, but that's what he did with that car. That fucking 8. He quit on it.'

I said, 'He made a choice. There's a difference.'

He sat considering this, then nodded. 'All right.'

Arky said: 'Dis time I'm really going home.' But before he went he did something I'll never forget: leaned over and put a kiss on Ned's swollen cheek. I was shocked by the tenderness of it.

'G'night, lad.'

'Goodnight, Arky.'

We watched him drive away in his rattletrap pickup and then Huddie said, 'I'll drive Ned home in his Chevy. Who wants to follow along and bring me back here to get my car?'

'I will,' Eddie said. 'Only I'm waiting outside when you take him in. If Michelle Wilcox goes nuclear, I want to be outside the fallout zone.'

'It'll be okay,' Ned told him. 'I'll say I saw the can on the shelf and picked it up to see what it was and maced my stupid self.'

I liked it. It had the virtue of simplicity. It was exactly the sort of story the boy's father would have told.

Ned sighed. 'Tomorrow bright and early I'll be sitting in the optometrist's chair over in Statler Village, that's the downside.'

'Won't hurt you,' Shirley said. She also kissed him, planting hers on the corner of his mouth.

'Goodnight, boys. This time everyone goes and no one comes back.'

'Amen to that,' Huddie said, and we watched her walk away. She was forty-five or so, but there was still plenty to look at when she put her backfield in motion. Even by moonlight. (Especially by moonlight.)

Off she went, driving past us, a quick flick of right-back-atcha and then nothing but the taillights.

Darkness from Shed B. No taillights there. No fireworks, either. It was over for the night and someday it would be over for good. But not yet. I could still feel the sleepy beat of it far down in my mind, a tidal whisper that could be words if you wanted them to be.

What I'd seen.

What I'd seen when I had the boy hugged in my arms, him blinded by the spray.

'You want to ride along, Sandy?' Huddie asked.

'Nah, guess not. I'll sit here awhile longer, then get on home. If there are problems with Michelle, you have her call me. Here or at the house, makes no difference.'

'There won't be any problem with Mom,' Ned said.

'What about you?' I asked. 'Are there going to be any more problems with you?'

He hesitated, then said: 'I don't know.'

In some ways I thought it was the best answer he could have given. You had to give him points for honesty.

They walked away, Huddie and Ned heading toward the Bel Aire. Eddie split apart from them, going toward his own car and pausing long enough at mine to take the Kojak light off the roof and toss it inside.

Ned stopped at the rear bumper of his car and turned back to me. 'Sandy.'

'What is it?'

'Didn't he have any idea at all about where it came from? What it was? Who the man in the black coat was? Didn't any of you?'

'No. We blue-skied it from time to time, but no one ever had an idea that felt like the real deal, or even close. Jackie O'Hara probably nailed it when he said the Buick was like a jigsaw piece that won't fit into the puzzle anywhere. You worry it and worry it, you turn it this way and that, try it everywhere, and one day you turn it over and see the back is red and the backs of all the pieces in your puzzle are green. Do you follow that?'

'No,' he said.

'Well, think about it,' I said, 'because you're going to have to live with it.'

'How am I supposed to do that?' There was no anger in his voice. The anger had been burned away. Now all he wanted was instructions. Good.

'You don't know where you came from or where you're going, do you?' I asked him. 'But you live with it just the same. Don't rail against it too much. Don't spend more than an hour a day shaking your fists at the sky and cursing God.'

'But - '

'There are Buicks everywhere,' I said.

Steff came out after they were gone and offered me a cup of coffee. I told her thanks, but I'd pass. I asked her if she had a cigarette. She gave me a prim look - almost shocked -and reminded me she didn't smoke. As though that was her toll-booth, one with the sign reading ALL BUICK

ROADMASTERS MUST DETOUR BEYOND THIS POINT. Man, if we lived in that world. If only.

'Are you going home?' she asked.

'Shortly.'

She went inside. I sat by myself on the smokers' bench. There were cigarettes in my car, at least half a pack in the glovebox, but getting up seemed like too much work, at least for the moment. When I did get up, I reckoned it would be best just to stay in motion. I could have a smoke on the way home, and a TV dinner when I got in - The Country Way would be closed by now, and I doubted if Cynthia Garris would be very happy to see my face in the place again soon, anyway.

I'd given her a pretty good scare earlier, her fright nothing to mine when the penny finally dropped and I realized what Ned was almost certainly planning to do. And my fear then was only a shadow of the terror I'd felt as I looked into that rising purple glare with the boy hanging blind in my arms and that steady beat-beat-beat in my ears, a sound like approaching footfalls. I had been looking both down, as if into a well, and on an uptilted plane . . . as if my vision had been split by some prismatic device. It had been like looking through a periscope lined with lightning.

What I saw was very vivid - I'll never forget it - arid fabulously strange. Yellow grass, brownish at the tips, covered a rocky slope that rose before me and then broke off at the edge of a drop.

Green-backed beetles bustled

in the grass, and off to one side there grew a clump of those waxy lilies. I hadn't been able to see the bottom of the drop, but I could see the sky. It was terrible engorged purple, packed with clouds and ripe with lightnings. A prehistoric sky. In it, circling in ragged flocks, were flying things. Birds, maybe. Or bats like the one Curt had tried to dissect. They were too far away for me to be sure. And all this happened very quickly, remember. I think there was an ocean at the foot of that drop but don't know why I think it - perhaps only because of the fish that came bursting out of the Buick's trunk that time. Or the smell of salt. Around the Roadmaster there was always that vague, teary smell of salt.

Lying in the yellow grass close to where the bottom of my window (if that's what it was) ended was a silvery ornament on a fine chain: Brian Lippy's swastika. Years of being out in the weather had tarnished it. A little farther off was a cowboy boot, the fancy-stitched kind with the stacked heel. Much of the leather had been overgrown with a blackgray moss that looked like spiderwebs.

The boot had been torn down one side, creating a ragged mouth through which I could see a yellow gleam of bone. No flesh; twenty years in the caustic air of that place would have decayed it, though I doubt the absence of flesh was due to mere decay alone. What I think is that Eddie J.'s old school pal was eaten. Probably while still alive. And screaming, if he could catch enough breath to do so.

And two things more, near the top of my momentary window. The first was a hat, also furry with patches of that blackgray moss; it had grown all around the brim and also in the crease of the crown. It wasn't exactly what we wear now, that hat, the uniform has changed some since the nineteen-seventies, but it was a PSP Stetson, all right. The big hat. It hadn't blown away because someone or something had driven a splintery wooden stake down through it to hold it in place. As if Ennis Rafferty's killer had been afraid of the alien intruder even after the intruder's death, and had staked the most striking item of his clothing to make sure he wouldn't rise and walk the night like a hungry vampire.

Near the hat, rusty and almost hidden by scrub grass, was his sidearm. Not the Beretta auto we carry now but the Ruger. The kind George Morgan had used. Had Ennis also used his to commit suicide? Or had he seen something coming, and died firing his weapon at it? Had it even been fired at all?

There was no way to tell, and before I could look more closely, Arky had screamed at Steff to help him and I'd been yanked backward with Ned hanging in my arms like a big doll. I saw no more, but one question at least was answered. They'd gone there, all right, Ennis Rafferty and Brian Lippy both.

Wherever there was.

I got up from the bench and walked over to the shed a final time. And there it was, midnight blue and not quite right, casting a shadow just as if it were sane. Oil's fine, the man in the black coat had told Bradley Roach, and then he was gone, leaving behind this weird steel callingcard.

At some point, during the last listless lightstorm, the trunk had shut itself again. About a dozen dead bugs lay scattered on the floor. We'd clean them up tomorrow. No sense saving them, or photographing them, or any of that; we no longer bothered. A couple of guys would burn them in the incinerator out back. I would delegate this job. Delegating jobs is also part of what sitting in the big chair is about, and you get to like it. Hand this one the shit and that one the sweets.

Can they complain? No. Can they put it on their TS list and hand it to the chaplain? Yes. For all the good it does.

'We'll outwait you,' I said to the thing in the shed. 'We can do that.'

It only sat there on its whitewalls, and far down in my head the pulse whispered: Maybe.

. . . and maybe not.

LATER

Obituaries are modest, aren't they? Yeah. Shirt always tucked in, skirt kept below the knee. Died unexpectedly. Could be anything from a heart attack while sitting on the jakes to being stabbed by a burglar in the bedroom. Cops mostly know the truth, though. You don't always want to know, especially when it's one of your own, but you do. Because most of the time we're the guys who show up first, with our reds lit and the walkie-talkies on our belts crackling out what sounds like so much gibble-gabble to the John Q's. For most folks who die unexpectedly, we're the first faces their staring open eyes can't see.

When Tony Schoondist told us he was going to retire I remember thinking, Good, that's good, he's getting a little long in the tooth. Not to mention a little slow on the uptake. Now, in the year 2006, I'm getting ready to pull the pin myself and probably some of my younger guys are thinking the same thing: long in the tooth and slow on the draw. But mostly you know I feel the same as I ever did, full of piss and vinegar, ready to work a double shift just about any day of the week. Most days when I note the gray hair which now predominates the black or how much more forehead there is below the place where the hair starts, I think it's a mistake, a clerical error which will eventually be rectified when brought to the attention of the proper authorities. It is impossible, I think, that a man who still feels so profoundly twenty-five can look so happast fifty. Then there'll be a stretch of bad days and I'll know it's no error, just time marching on, that shuffling, rueful tread. But was there ever a moment as bad as seeing Ned behind the wheel of the Buick Roadmaster 8?

Yes. There was one.

Shirley was on duty when the call came in: a crackup out on SR 32, near the Humboldt Road intersection. Where the old Jenny station used to be, in other words. Shirley's face was pale as ashes when she came and stood in the open door of my office.

'What is it?' I asked. 'What the hell's wrong with you?'

'Sandy . . . the man who called it in said the vehicle was an old Chevrolet, red and white. He says the driver's dead.' She swallowed. 'In pieces. That's what he said.'

That part I didn't care about, although I would later, when I had to look at it. At him. 'The Chevrolet - have you got the model?'

'I didn't ask. Sandy, I couldn't.' Her eyes were full of tears. 'I didn't dare. But how many old red and white Chevrolets do you think there are in Statler County?'

I went out to the scene with Phil Candleton, praying the crashed Chevy would turn out to be a Malibu or a Biscayne, anything but a Bel Aire, vanity plate MY 57. But that's what it was.

'Fuck,' Phil said in a low and dismayed voice.

He'd piled it into the side of the cement bridge which spans Redfern Stream less than five minutes' walk from where the Buick 8 first appeared and where Curtis was killed. The Bel Aire had seatbelts, but he hadn't been wearing one. Nor were there any skidmarks.

'Christ almighty,' Phil said. 'This ain't right.'

Not right and not an accident. Although in the obituary, where shirts are kept neatly tucked in arid skirts are kept discreetly below the knee, it would only say he died unexpectedly, which was true. Lord yes.

Lookie-loos had started showing up by then, slowing to stare at what lay facedown on the bridge's narrow walkway. I think one asshole actually took a picture. I wanted to run after him and stuff his shitty little disposable camera down his throat.

'Get some detour signs up,' I told Phil. 'You and Carl. Send the traffic around by County Road. I'll cover him up. Jesus, what a mess! Jesus! Who's gonna tell his mother?'

Phil wouldn't look at me. We both knew who was going to tell his mother. Later that day I bit the bullet and did the worst job that comes with the big chair. Afterward I went down to The Country Way with Shirley, Huddie, Phil, and George Stankowski. I don't know about them, but I myself didn't pass go or collect two hundred dollars; old Sandy went directly to shitfaced.

I only have two clear memories of that night. The first is of trying to explain to Shirley how weird The Country Way's jukeboxes were, how all the songs were the very ones you never thought of anymore until you saw their names again here. She didn't get it.

My other memory is of going into the bathroom to throw up. After, while I was splashing cold water on my face, I looked at myself in one of the wavery steel mirrors. And I knew for sure that the getting-to-be-old face I saw looking back at me was no mistake. The mistake was believing that the twenty-five-year-old guy who seemed to live in my brain was real.

I remembered Huddie shouting Sandy, grab my hand! and then the two of us, Ned and I, had spilled out on to the pavement, safe with the rest of them. Thinking of that, I began to cry.

Died unexpectedly, that shit is all right for the County American, but cops know the truth. We clean up the messes and we always know the truth.

Everyone not on duty went to the funeral, of course. He'd been one of us. When it was over, George Stankowski gave his mother and his two sisters a ride home and I drove back to the barracks with Shirley. I asked her if she was going to the reception - what you call a wake, I guess, if you're Irish - and she shook her head. 'I hate those things.'

So we had a final cigarette out on the smokers' bench, idly watching the young Trooper who was looking in at the Buick. He stood in that same legs-apart, goddam-the-Democrats, didya-hear-the-one-about-the-traveling-salesman pose that we all assumed when we looked into Shed B. The century had changed, but everything else was more or less the same.

'It's so unfair,' Shirley said. 'A young man like that - '

'What are you talking about?' I asked her. 'Eddie J. was in his late forties, for God's sake .

. . maybe even fifty. I think his sisters are both in their sixties. His mother's almost eighty!'

'You know what I mean. He was too young to do that.'

'So was George Morgan,' I said.

'Was it . . . ?' She nodded toward Shed B.

'I don't think so. Just his life. He made an honest effort to get sober, busted his ass. This was right after he bought Curt's old Bel Aire from Ned. Eddie always liked that car, you know, and Ned couldn't have it at Pitt anyway, not as a freshman. It would've just been sitting there in his driveway - '

' - and Ned needed the money.'

'Going off to college from a single-parent home? Every penny. So when Eddie asked him, he said okay, sure. Eddie paid thirty-five hundred dollars - '

'Thirty-two,' Shirley said with the assurance of one who really knows.

'Thirty-two, thirty-five, whatever. The point is, I think Eddie saw getting it as a new leaf he was supposed to turn over. He quit going to The Tap; I think he started going to AA meetings instead. That was the good part. For Eddie, the good part lasted about two years.'

Across the parking lot, the Trooper who'd been looking into Shed B turned, spotted us, and began walking in our direction. I felt the skin on my arms prickle. In the gray uniform the boy -

only he wasn't a boy any longer, not really - looked strikingly like his dead father. Nothing strange about that, I suppose; it's simple genetics, a correspondence that runs in the blood. What made it eerie was the big hat. He had it in his hands and was turning it over and over.

'Eddie fell off the wagon right around the time that one there decided he wasn't cut out for college,' I said.

Ned Wilcox left Pitt and came home to Statler. For a year he'd done Arky's job, Arky by then having retired and moved back to Michigan, where everyone no doubt sounded just like him (a scary thought). When he turned twenty-one, Ned made the application and took the tests. Now, at twenty-two, here he was. Hello, rookie.

Halfway across the parking lot, Curt's boy paused to look back at the shed, still twirling his Stetson in his hands.

'He looks good, doesn't he?' Shirley murmured.

I put on my Old Sarge face - a little aloof, a little disdainful. 'Relatively squared away.

Shirley, do you have any idea how much bright red dickens his ma raised when she finally found out what he had in mind?'

Shirley laughed and put out her cigarette. 'She raised more when she found out he was planning to sell his dad's Bel Aire to Eddie Jacubois - at least that's what Ned told me. I mean, c'mon, Sandy, she had to know it was coming. Had to. She was married to one, for God's sake. And she probably knew this was where he belonged. Eddie, though, -where did he belong? Why couldn't he just stop drinking? Once and for all?'

'That's a question for the ages,' I said. 'They say it's a disease, like cancer or diabetes.

Maybe they're right.'

Eddie had begun showing up for duty with liquor on his breath, and no one covered for him very long; the situation was too serious. When he refused counseling, and a leave of absence to spend four weeks in the spin-dry facility the PSP favors for their stricken officers, he was given his choice: quit quietly or get fired noisily. Eddie had quit, with about half the retirement package he would have received if he'd managed to hang on to his job for another three years - at the end, the benefits really stack up. And I could understand the outcome no more than Shirley - why hadn't he just quit? With that kind of incentive, why hadn't he just said I'll be thirsty for three years and then I'll pull the pin and take a bath in it? I didn't know.

The Tap became Eddie J.'s home away from home. Along with the old Bel Aire, that was. He'd kept it waxed on the outside and spotlessly clean on the inside right up to the day when he'd driven it into a bridge abutment near Redfern Stream at approximately eighty miles an hour. He had plenty of reasons to do it by then - he was not a happy man - but I had to wonder if maybe there weren't a few reasons just a little closer to home. Specifically I had to wonder if he hadn't heard that pulse near the end, that tidal whisper that's like a voice in the middle of your head.

Do it, Eddie, go on, why not? There's not much else, is there? The rest is pretty well used up. Just step down a little brisker on the old go-pedal and then twist the wheel to the right. Do it. Go on. Make a little mischief for your buddies to clean up.

I thought about the night we'd sat out on this same bench, the young man I currently had my eye on four years younger than he was now and listening raptly as Eddie told the tale of stopping Brian Lippy's bigfoot truck. The kid listening as Eddie told about trying to get Lippy's girl to do something about her situation before her boyfriend fucked her up beyond all recognition or maybe killed her. The joke turned out to be on Eddie, of course. So far as I knew, that bloodyface girl is the only one of that roadside quartet still alive. Yeah, she's around. I don't road-patrol much anymore, but her name and picture come across my desk from time to time, each picture showing a woman closer to the beerbreath brokennose fuck-ya-for-a-pack-of-smokes hag she will, barring a miracle, become. She's had lots of DUIs, quite a few D-and-Ds, a trip to the hospital one night with a broken arm and hip after she fell downstairs. I imagine someone like Brian Lippy probably helped her down those stairs, don't you? Because they do pick the same kind over and over. She has two or maybe it's three kids in foster care. So yeah, she's around, but is she living? If you say she is, then I have to tell you that maybe George Morgan and Eddie J. had the right idea.

'I'm going to make like a bee and buzz,' Shirley said, getting up. 'Can't take any more hilarity in one day. You doin okay with it?'

'Yeah,' I said.

'Hey, he came back that night, didn't he? There's that.'

She didn't have to be any more specific. I nodded, smiling.

'Eddie was a good guy,' Shirley said. 'Maybe he couldn't leave the booze alone, but he had the kindest heart.'

Nope, I thought, watching her walk across to Ned, watching them talk a little. I think you're the one with the kindest heart, Shirl.

She gave Ned a little peck on the cheek, putting one hand on his shoulder and going up on her toes to do it, then headed toward her car. Ned came over to where I was sitting. 'You okay?' he asked.

'Yeah, good.'

'And the funeral . . . ?'

'Hey, shit, it was a funeral. I've been to better and I've been to worse. I'm glad the coffin was closed.'

'Sandy, can I show you something? Over there?' He nodded his head at Shed B.

'Sure.' I got up. 'Is the temperature going down?' If so, it was news. It had been two years since the temp in there had dropped more than five degrees below the outside temperature. Sixteen months since the last lightshow, and that one had consisted of no more than eight or nine pallid flickers.

'No,' he said.

'Trunk open?'

'Shut tight as a drum.'

'What, then?'

'I'd rather show you.'

I glanced at him sharply, for the first time getting out of my own head enough to register how excited he was. Then, with decidedly mixed feelings - curiosity and apprehension were the dominant chords, I guess- I walked across the parking lot with my old friend's son. He took up his sidewalk super's pose at one window and I took up mine at the next.

At first I saw nothing unusual; the Buick sat on the concrete as it had for a quarter of a century, give or take. There were no flashing lights, no exotic exhibits. The thermometer's red needle stood at an unremarkable seventy-three degrees.

'So?' I asked.

Ned laughed, delighted. 'You're looking spang at it and don't see it! Perfect! I didn't see it myself, at first. I knew something had changed, but I couldn't tell what.'

'What are you talking about?'

He shook his head, still smiling. 'Nossir, Sergeant, nossir. I think not. You're the boss; you're also one of just three cops who were there then and are still here now. It's right in front of you, so go to it.'

I looked in again, first squinting and then raising my hands to the sides of my face to block the glare, that old gesture. It helped, but what was I seeing? Something, yes, he was right about that, but just what? What had changed?

I remembered that night at The Country Way, nipping the pages of the dead jukebox back and forth, trying to isolate the most important question, which was the one Ned had decided not to ask. It had almost come, then had slipped shyly away again. When that happened, it was no good to chase. I'd thought that then and still did now.

So instead of continuing to give the 8 my cop stare, I unfocused my eyes and let my mind drift away. What it drifted to were song-titles, of course, titles of the ones they never seem to play, even on the oldies stations, once their brief season of popularity has gone. 'Society's Child' and

'Pictures of Matchstick Men' and 'Quick Joey Small' and-

-and bingo, there it was. Like he'd said, it was right in front of me. For a moment I couldn't breathe.

There was a crack in the windshield.

A thin silver lightning-bolt jigjagging top to bottom on the driver's side.

Ned clapped me on the shoulder. 'There you go, Sherlock, I knew you'd get there. After all, it's only right there in front of you.'

I turned to him, started to talk, then turned back to make sure I'd seen what I thought I'd seen. I had. The crack looked like a frozen stroke of quicksilver.

'When did it happen?' I asked him. 'Do you know?'

'I take a fresh Polaroid of it every forty-eight hours or so,' he said. 'I'll check to make sure, but I'll bet you a dead cat and a string to swing it with that the last picture I took doesn't show a crack. So this happened between Wednesday evening and Friday afternoon at . . .' He checked his watch, then gave me a big smile. 'At four-fifteen.'

'Might even have happened while we were at Eddie's funeral,' I said.

'Possible, yeah.'

We looked in again for a little while, neither of us talking. Then Ned said, 'I read the poem you told me about. "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay."'

'Did you?'

'Uh-huh. It's pretty good. Pretty funny.'

I stepped back from the window and looked at him.

'It'll happen fast now, like in the poem,' he said. 'Next thing a tire'll blow . . . or the muffler will fall off. . . or a piece of the chrome. You know how you can stand on a frozen lake in January and listen to the ice creak and thunk?'

I nodded.

'This is going to be like that.' His eyes were alight, and a curious idea came to me: I was seeing Ned Wilcox really, genuinely happy for the first time since his father had died.

'You think?'

'Yes. Only instead of ice creaking, the sound will be snapping bolts and cracking glass. Cops will line up at these windows like they did in the old days . . . only now it'll be to watch things break and come loose and fall off. Until, finally, the -whole thing goes. They'll wonder if there isn't going to be one more flash of light at the very end, like the final Chinese Flower at the end of the fireworks display on the Fourth of July.'

'Will there be, do you think?'

'I think the fireworks are over. I think we're going to hear one last big steel clank and then you can take the pieces to the crusher.'

'Are you sure?'

'Nah,' he said, and smiled. 'You can't be sure. I learned that from you and Shirley and Phil and Arky and Huddie.' He paused. 'And Eddie J. But I'll watch. And sooner or later . . .' He raised one hand, looked at it, then closed it into a fist and turned back to his window. 'Sooner or later.'

I turned back to my own window, cupping my hands to the sides of my face to cut the glare. I peered in at the thing that looked like a Buick Roadmaster 8. The kid was absolutely right.

Sooner or later.

Bangor, Maine

Boston, Massachusetts

Naples, Florida

Lovell, Maine

3 April, 1999-11 May, 2001

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I've had ideas fall into my lap from time to time - I suppose this is true of any writer - but From a Buick 8 was almost comically the reverse: a case of me falling into the lap of an idea.

That's worth a note, I think, especially when it leads to an important acknowledgment.

My wife and I spent the winter of 1999 on Longboat Key in Florida, where I tinkered at the final draft of a short novel (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) and wrote little else of note. Not did I have plans to write anything in the spring of that year.

In late March, Tabby flew back to Maine from Florida. I drove. I hate to fly, love to drive, and besides, I had a truckload of furnishings, books, guitars, computer components, clothes, and paper to transport. My second or third day on the road found me in western Pennsylvania. I needed gas and got off I-87 at a rural exit. At the foot of the ramp I found a Conoco (not a Jenny) station. There was an actual attendant who actually pumped the gas. He even threw in a few words of tolerably pleasant conversation at no extra charge.

I left him doing his thing and went to the restroom to do mine. When I finished, I walked around to the back of the station. Here I found a rather steep slope littered with auto parts and a brawling stream at the foot. There was still a fair amount of snow on the ground, in dirty strips and runners. I walked a little way down the slope to get a better look at the water, and my feet went out from beneath me. I slid about ten feet before grabbing a rusty truck axle and bringing myself to a stop. Had I missed it, I might well have gone into the water. And then? All bets are off, as they say.

I paid the attendant (so far as I know, he had no idea of my misadventure) and got back on the highway. I mused about my slip as I drove, wondering about what would have happened if I'd gone into the stream (which, with all that spring runoff, was at least temporarily a small river). How long would my truckload of Florida furnishings and our bright Florida clothes have stood at the pumps before the gas-jockey got nervous? Who would he have called? How long before they'd have found me, had I drowned?

This little incident happened around ten in the morning. By afternoon I was in New York. And by then I had the story you've just read pretty much set in my mind. I have said before that first drafts are only about story; if there is meaning, it should come later, and arise naturally from the tale itself. This story became - I suppose - a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in those events. The first draft was written in two months. By then I realized I had made myself a whole host of problems by writing of two things I knew nothing about: western Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State Police. Before I could address either of these concerns, I suffered my own road-accident and my life changed radically. I came out of the summer of '99 lucky to have any life at all, in fact.

It was over a year before I even thought of this story again, let alone worked on it.

The coincidence of having written a book filled with grisly vehicular mishaps shortly before suffering my own has not been lost on me, but I've tried not to make too much of it. Certainly I don't think there was anything premonitory about the similarities between what happens to Curtis Wilcox in Buick 8 and what happened to me in real life (for one thing, I lived). I can testify at first hand, however, that I got most of it right from imagination: as with Curtis, the coins were stripped from my pockets and the watch from my wrist. The cap I was wearing was later found in the woods, at least twenty yards from the point of impact. But I changed nothing in the course of my story to reflect what happened to me; most of what I wanted was there in the completed draft. The imagination is a powerful tool.

It never crossed my mind to re-set From a Buick 8 in Maine, although Maine is the place I know (and love) the best. I stopped at a gas station in Pennsylvania, went on my ass in Pennsylvania, got the idea in Pennsylvania. I thought the resulting tale should stay in Pennsylvania, in spite of the aggravations that presented. Not that there weren't rewards, as well; for one thing, I got to set my fictional town of Statler just down the road apiece from Rocksburg, the town which serves as the locale for K.C. Constantine's brilliant series of novels about small-town police chief Mario Balzic. If you've never read any of these stories, you ought to do yourself a favor.

The continuing story of Chief Balzic and his family is like The Sopranos turned inside-out and told from a law enforcement point of view. Also, western Pennsylvania is the home of the Amish, whose "way of life I wanted to explore a little more fully.

This book could never have been finished without the help of Trooper Lucien Southard of the Pennsylvania State Police. Lou read the manuscript, managed not to laugh too hard at its many howlers, and wrote me eight pages of notes and corrections that could be printed in any writer's handbook without a blush (for one thing, Trooper Southard has been taught to print in large, easy-to-read block letters). He took me to several PSP barracks, introduced me to three PCOs who were kind enough to show me what they do and how they do it (to begin with they ran the license plate of my Dodge pickup - it came back clean, I'm relieved to say, with no wants or warrants), and demonstrated all sorts of State Police equipment.

More importantly, Lou and some of his mates took me to lunch at a restaurant in Amish country, where we consumed huge sandwiches and drank pitchers of iced tea, and where they regaled me with stories of Trooper life. Some of these were funny, some of them were horrible, and some managed to be both at the same time. Not all of these tales made it into Buick 8, but a number of them did, in suitably fictionalized form. I was treated kindly, and no one moved too fast, which was good.

At that time, I was still hopping along on one crutch.

Thanks, Lou - and thanks to all the Troopers who work out of the Butler barracks - for helping me keep my Pennsylvania book in Pennsylvania. Much more important, thanks for helping me understand exactly what it is that State Troopers do.

And the price they pay to do it well.