Mile 81

5. JIMMY GOLDING (’11 Crown Victoria)

A child’s scream may be one of Mother Nature’s more efficient survival mechanisms, but one of mankind’s — at least when it comes to automotive traffic on roads with high speed limits — is the parked State Police cruiser, especially if the black bulb of the radar detector is facing the oncoming traffic. Drivers doing seventy ease back to sixty-five; drivers doing eighty step on the brake and begin mentally figuring out how many points they’ll lose off their licenses if the blue lights go on behind them. (It’s a salutary effect that wears off quickly; ten or fifteen miles farther up or down the line, the stampeders are once again stampeding.)

The beauty of the parked cruiser, at least in Maine State Trooper Jimmy Golding’s opinion, was that you didn’t really need to do nything. You just pulled over and let nature (human nature, in this case) take its guilty course. On this overcast April afternoon, his Simmons SpeedCheck radar gun wasn’t even on, and the traffic passing southbound on I-95 was just a background drone. All his attention was on the iPad propped against the lower arc of the steering wheel.

He was playing a Scrabble-like game called Words With Friends, his Internet connection provided by AT&T. His opponent was an old barracks-mate named Nick Avery, now with the Oklahoma State Patrol. Jimmy couldn’t imagine why anyone would trade Maine for Oklahoma, seemed like a bad decision to him, but there could be no doubt that Nick was an excellent Words With Friends player. He beat Jimmy nine games out of every ten, and was leading in this one. But Nick’s current lead was unusually small, and all the letters were out of the electronic draw-bag. If he, Jimmy, could play the four letters he had left, he would win a hard-earned victory. Currently he was fixated on FIX. The four letters he had left were A, E, S, and another F. If he could somehow modify FIX, he would not only win, he would kick his old pal’s ass. But it didn’t look hopeful.

He was examining the rest of the board, where the prospects seemed even less fruitful, when his radio gave two high-pitched tones. It was an all-units alert from 911 in Westbrook. Jimmy tossed his iPad aside and turned up the gain.

“All units, attention. Who’s close to the Mile Eighty-one rest area? Anyone?”

Jimmy pulled his mike. “Nine-one-one Dispatch, this is Seventeen. I’m currently at Mile Eighty-Five, just south of the Lisbon-Sabattus exit.”

The woman Rachel Lussier thought of as the 911 lady didn’t bother to ask if anyone else was closer; in one of the new Crown Vic cruisers, Jimmy was just three minutes away, maybe less.

“Seventeen, I got a call three minutes ago from a little girl who says her parents are dead, and since then I’ve had multiple calls from people who say there are two unaccompanied little kids at the edge of that rest area.”

He didn’t bother to ask why none of those multiple callers had stopped. He had seen it before. Sometimes it was a fear of legal entanglements. More often it was just a case of don’t-give-a-shit. There was a lot of that going around. Still. kids. Jesus.

“Nine-one-one, I’m on this. Seventeen out.”

Jimmy lit his blues, checked his rearview to make sure he had the road, and then peeled out of the gravel pass-through with its sign reading NO U-TURN, OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY. The Crown Vic’s V-8 surged; the digital speedometer blurred up to 92, where it hung. Trees reeled giddily past on both sides of the road. He came up on a lumbering old Buick that stubbornly refused to pull over and swept around it. When he pulled back into the travel lane, Jimmy saw the rest area. And something else. Two little kids — a boy in shorts, a girl in pink pants — sitting on the guardrail cables beside the entrance ramp. They looked like the world’s smallest vagrants, and Jimmy’s heart went out to them. He had kids of his own.

They stood up when they saw the flashing lights, and for one terrible second Jimmy thought the little boy was going to step in front of his cruiser. God bless the little girl, who grabbed him by the arm and reeled him in.

Jimmy decelerated hard enough to activate the ABS system. His citation book, logbook, and iPad went cascading off the seat onto the floor. The Vic’s front end drifted a little, but he brought it back and parked blocking the ramp, where several other cars were already parked. What was going on here?

The sun came out then, and a word completely unrelated to the current situation flashed through Trooper Jimmy Golding’s mind: AFFIXES. I can make AFFIXES, and go out clean.

The little girl was running toward the driver’s side of the cruiser, dragging her weeping, stumbling kid brother with her. Her face, white and terrified, looked years older than it should have, and there was a big wet patch on the little boy’s shorts.

Jimmy got out, being careful not to hit them with his door. He dropped on one knee to get on their level and they rushed into his arms, almost knocking him over. “Whoa, whoa, take it easy, you’re all ri—”

“The bad car ate Mommy and Daddy,” the little boy said, and pointed. “The bad car right there. It ate them all up like the big bad woof ate Riddle Red Riding Hoop. You have to get them back!”

It was impossible to tell which vehicle the chubby finger was pointing at. Jimmy saw four: a station wagon that looked like it had been rode hard along nine miles of woods road, a spandy-clean Prius, a Dodge Ram hauling a horse-trailer, and a Ford Expedition.

“Little girl, what’s your name? I’m Trooper Jimmy.”

“Rachel Lussier,” she said. “This is Blakie. He’s my little brother. We live at Nineteen Fresh Winds Way, Falmouth, Maine, 04105. Don’t go near it, Trooper Jimmy. It looks like a car, but it’s not. It eats people.”

“Which car are we talking about, Rachel?”

“That one in front, next to my daddy’s. The muddy one.”

“The muddy car ate Daddy and Mommy!” the little boy — Blakie — proclaimed. “You get them back, you’re a policeman, you got a gun!”

Still on one knee, Jimmy held the children in his arms and eyeballed the muddy station wagon. The sun went back in; their shadows disappeared. On the turnpike, traffic swished past, but slower now, mindful of those flashing blue lights.

No one in the Expedition, the Prius, or the truck. He was guessing there was no one in the horse-trailer, either, unless they were hunkered down, and in that case the horse would probably seem a lot more nervous than it did. The only vehicle he couldn’t see into was the one these kids claimed had eaten their parents. Jimmy didn’t like the way the mud was smeared on all its windows. It looked like deliberate mud, somehow. He didn’t like the cracked cell phone lying by the driver’s door, either. Or the ring beside it. The ring was downright creepy.

Like the rest of this isn’t.

The driver’s door suddenly creaked partway open, upping the Creepy Quotient a bit more. Jimmy tensed and put his hand the butt of his Glock, but no one came out. The door just hung there, six inches ajar.

“That’s how it tries to get you to come in,” the little girl said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “It’s a monster car.”

Jimmy Golding hadn’t believed in monster cars since he saw that movie Christine as a kid, but he believed that sometimes monsters could lurk in cars. And someone was in this one. How else had the door opened? It could be one of the kids’ parents, hurt and unable to cry out. It could also be a man lying down on the seat, so he wouldn’t make a shape visible through the mud-smeared rear window. Maybe a man with a gun.

“Who’s in the station wagon?” Jimmy called. “I’m a state trooper, and I need you to announce yourself.”

No one announced himself.

“Come out. Hands first, and I want to see them empty.”

The only thing that came out was the sun, printing the door’s shadow on the pavement for a second or two before ducking back into the clouds. Then there was only the hanging door.

“Come with me, kids,” Jimmy said, and shepherded them to his cruiser. He opened the back door. They looked at the backseat with its litter of paperwork, Jimmy’s fleece-lined jacket (which he didn’t need today), and the shotgun clipped and locked to the back of the bench seat. Especially that.

“Mommy-n-daddy say never get into a stranger’s car,” the boy named Blakie said. “They say it at school, too. Stranger-danger.”

“He’s a policeman with a policeman’s car,” Rachel said. “It’s okay. Get in. And if you touch that gun, I’ll smack you.”

“Good advice on the gun, but it’s secured and the trigger lock’s on,” Jimmy said.

Blakie got in, and peered over the seat. “Hey, you got a iPad!”

“Shut up,” Rachel said. She started to get in, then looked at Jimmy Golding with tired, horrified eyes. “Don’t touch it. It’s sticky.”

Jimmy almost smiled. He had a daughter only a year or so younger than this little girl, and she might have said the same thing. He guessed little girls divided naturally into two groups, tomboys and dirt-haters. Like his Ellen, this one was a dirt-hater.

It was with this soon-to-be fatal misconception of what Rachel Lussier meant by sticky that he closed them in the backseat of Unit 17. He leaned in the front window of the cruiser and snared his mike. He never took his eyes from the hanging front door of the station wagon, and so did not see the little boy standing next to the rest area restaurant, holding an imitation-leather saddlebag against his chest like a small blue baby. A moment later the sun peeked out again, and Pete Simmons was swallowed up by the restaurant’s shadow.

Jimmy called in to the Gray barracks.

“Seventeen, come back.”

“I’m at the old Mile 81 rest area. I have four abandoned vehicles, one abandoned horse, and two abandoned children. One of the vehicles is a station wagon. The kids say. ” He paused, then thought what the hell. “The kids say it ate their parents.”

“Come back?”

“I think they mean someone inside grabbed them. I want you to send all available units over here, copy?”

“Copy all available units, but it’ll be ten minutes before the first one gets there. That’s Unit Twelve. He’s Code Seventy-three in Waterville.”

Al Andrews, no doubt chowing down at Bob’s Burgers and talking politics. “Copy that.”

“Give me MML on the wagon, Seventeen, and I’ll run it.”

“Negative on all three. No plate. As far as make and model, the thing’s so covered with mud I can’t tell. It’s American, though.” I think. “Probably a Ford or a Chevy. The kids are in my cruiser. Names are Rachel and Blakie Lussier. Fresh Winds Way, Falmouth. I forget the street number.”

“Nineteen!” Rachel and Blakie shouted together.

“They say—”

“I got it, Seventeen. And which car did they come in?”

“Daddy’s Expundition!” Blakie cried, happy to be of help.

“Ford Expedition,” Jimmy said. “Plate number three-seven-seven-two-I-Y. I’m going to approach that station wagon.”

“Copy. Be careful there, Jimmy.”

“Copy that. Oh, and will you reach out to nine-one-one dispatch and tell her the kids are all right?”

“Is that you talking or Peter Townshend?”

Very funny. “Seventeen, I’m sixty-two.”

He started to replace the mike, then handed it to Rachel. “If anything happens — anything bad — you push that button on the side and yell ‘Thirty.’ That means officer needs help. Have you got it?”

“Yes, but you shouldn’t go near that car, Trooper Jimmy. It bites and it eats and it’s sticky.”

Blakie, who, in his wonder at being in an actual police car, had temporarily forgotten what had befallen his parents, now remembered and began to cry again. “I want mommy-n-daddy!”

In spite of the weirdness and potential danger of the situation, Rachel Lussier’s eye-rolling you see what I have to deal with expression almost made Jimmy laugh. How many times had he seen that exact same expression on the face of five-year-old Ellen Golding?

“Listen, Rachel,” Jimmy said, “I know you’re scared, but you’re safe in here, and I have to do my job. If your parents are in that car, we don’t want them hurt, do we?”

“GO GET MOMMY-N-DADDY, TROOPER JIMMY!” Blakie trumpeted. “WE DON’T WANT THEM HURRRT!”

Jimmy saw hope spark in the girl’s eyes, but not as much as he might have expected. Like Agent Mulder on the old X-Files show, she wanted to believe. but like Mulder’s partner, Agent Scully, she didn’t. What had these kids seen?

“Be careful, Trooper Jimmy.” She raised one finger. It was a schoolteacherly gesture made even more endearing by a slight tremble. “Don’t touch it.”

As Jimmy approached the station wagon, he drew his Glock service automatic but left the safety on. For the time being. Standing slightly south of the hanging door, he once again invited anyone inside to exit the vehicle, open and empty hands foremost. No one came out. He reached for the door, then remembered the little girl’s parting admonition, and hesitated. He reached out with the barrel of his gun to swing the door open. Only, the door didn’t open, and the barrel of the pistol stuck fast. The thing was a glue-pot.

He was jerked forward, as if a powerful hand had gripped the Glock’s barrel and yanked. There was a second when he could have let go, but such an idea never even surfaced in his mind. One of the first things they taught you at the Academy after weapons issue was that you never let go of your sidearm. Never.

So he held on, and the car that had already eaten his gun now ate his hand. And his arm. The sun came out again, casting his diminishing shadow on the pavement. Somewhere, children were screaming.

The station wagon AFFIXES itself to the Trooper, he thought. Now I know what she meant by stick —

Then the pain bloomed large and all thought ceased. There was time for one scream. Only one.