From a Buick 8

  But Curtis was too excited to be mad, too busy trying to prioritize the things he wanted to do, too full of questions. He asked only one of those before pelting clown to look at the corpse of the creature they'd found in Shed B: where had Mister Dillon been last evening? With Orville, he was told. Orville Garrett often took Mister D when he had a few days off.

  Sandy Dearborn was the one who brought Curtis up to speed (with occasional help from Arky). Curt listened silently, brows lifting when Arky described how the whole top of the thing's head had appeared to roll back, disclosing the eye. They lifted again when Sandy told him about the smudges on the door and the walls, and how they had reminded him of mothdust. He asked his question about Mister D, got his answer, then grabbed a pair of surgical gloves out of an evidence kit and headed downstairs at what was nearly a run. Sandy went with him. That much seemed to be his duty, somehow, since Tony had appointed him a co-investigator, but he stayed in the supply room while Curt went into the closet where Tony had left the garbage bag. Sandy heard it rustling as Curt undid the knot in the top; his skin prickled and went cold at the sound.

  Rustle, rustle, rustle. Pause. Another rustle. Then, very low: "Christ almighty."

  A moment later Curt came running out with his hand over his mouth. There was a toilet halfway down the hall leading to the stairs. Trooper Wilcox made it just in time.

  Sandy Dearborn sat at the cluttered worktable in the supply room, listening to him vomit and knowing that the vomiting probably meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. Curtis wasn't going to back off. The corpse of the bat-thing had revolted him as much as it had Arky or Huddie or any of them, but he'd come back to examine it more fully, revulsion or no revulsion. The Buick--and the things of the Buick--had become his passion. Even coming out of the storage closet with his throat working and his cheeks pale and his hand pressed to his mouth, Sandy had seen the helpless excitement in his eyes, dimmed only a little by his physical distress. Passion is the hardest taskmaster.

  From down the hall came the sound of running water. It stopped, and then Curt came back into the supply room, blotting his mouth with a paper towel.

  "Pretty awful, isn't it?" Sandy asked. "Even dead."

  "Pretty awful," he agreed, but he was heading back in there even as he spoke. "I thought I understood, but it caught me by surprise."

  Sandy got up and went to the doorway. Curt was looking into the bag again but not reaching in. Not yet, at least. That was a relief. Sandy didn't want to be around when the kid touched it, even wearing gloves. Didn't even want to think about him touching it.

  "Was it a trade, do you think?" Curt asked.

  "Huh?"

  "A trade. Ennis for this thing."

  For a moment Sandy didn't reply. Couldn't reply. Not because the idea was horrible (although it was), but because the kid had gotten to it so fast.

  "I don't know."

  Curt was rocking back and forth on the heels of his shoes and frowning down at the plastic garbage bag. "I don't think so," he said after awhile. "When you make a swap, you usually do the whole deal at the same time. Right?"

  "Usually, yeah."

  He closed the bag and (with obvious reluctance) reknotted the top. "I'm going to dissect it," he said.

  "Curtis, no! Christ!"

  "Yes." He turned to Sandy, his face drawn and white, his eyes brilliant. "Someone has to, and I can't very well take it up to the Biology Department at Horlicks. Sarge says we keep this strictly in-house, and that's the right call, but who does that leave to do this? Just me. Unless I'm missing something."

  Sandy thought, You wouldn't take it up to Horlicks even if Tony hadn't said a goddam word about keeping it in-house. You can bear to have us in on it, probably because nobody but Tony really wants anything to do with it, but share it with someone else? Someone who doesn't wear Pennsylvania gray and know when to shift the hat-strap from behind the neck to under the chin? Someone who might first get ahead of you and then take it away from you? I don't think so.

  Curt stripped off the gloves. "The problem is that I haven't cut anything up since Chauncey, my fetal pig in high school biology. That was nine years ago and I got a C in the course. I don't want to fuck this up, Sandy."

  Then don't touch it in the first place.

  Sandy thought it but didn't say it. There would have been no point in saying it.

  "Oh well." The kid talking to himself now. Nobody but himself. "I'll bone up. Get ready. I've got time. No sense being impatient. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction--"

  "What if that's a lie?" Sandy asked. He was surprised at how tired of that little jingle-jangle he had grown. "What if there's no satisfaction? What if you're never able to solve for x?"

  Curt looked up at him, almost shocked. Then he grinned. "What do you think Ennis would say? If we could ask him, that is?"

  Sandy found the question both patronizing and insensitive. He opened his mouth to say so--to say something, anyway--and then didn't. Curtis Wilcox didn't mean any harm; he was just flying high on adrenaline and possibility, as hyped as any junkie. And he really was a kid. Even Sandy recognized that, although they were much of an age.

  "Ennis would tell you to be careful," Sandy said. "I'm sure of that much."

  "I will," Curt agreed, starting up the stairs. "Oh yeah, of course I will." But those were just words, like the Doxology you rush through in order to get free of church on Sunday morning. Sandy knew it even if Probationary Trooper Wilcox did not.

  In the weeks that followed, it became obvious to Tony Schoondist (not to mention the rest of the Troop D personnel) that there wasn't enough manpower to institute twenty-four-hour surveillance of the Buick in the shed out back. Nor did the weather cooperate; the second half of that August was rainy and unseasonably cold.

  Visitors added another headache. Troop D didn't live in a vacuum on top of its hill, after all; the motor-pool was next door, the County Attorney (plus his staff) was just down the road, there were lawyers, there were perps cooling their heels in the Bad Boy Corner, the occasional Boy Scout tour, the steady trickle of folks who wanted to lodge complaints (against their neighbors, against their spouses, against Amish buggy-drivers taking too much of the road, against the State Troopers themselves), wives bringing forgotten lunches or sometimes boxes of fudge, and sometimes just interested John Q.'s who wanted a look at what their tax dollars were buying. These latter were usually surprised and disappointed by the calmness of the barracks, the ho-hum sense of bureaucracy at work. It didn't feel like their favorite TV shows.

  One day toward the end of that month, Statler's member of the United States House of Representatives dropped by, along with ten or twelve of his closest media friends, to do a meet-and-greet and to make a statement about the Police Aid, Science, and Infrastructure bill then pending before the House, a bill this fellow just happened to be co-sponsoring. Like many US Representatives from rural districts, this fellow looked like a small-town barber who had had a lucky day at the dog-track and hoped for a blowjob before bedtime. Standing beside one of the cruisers (Sandy thought it was the one with the busted headrest), he told his media friends how important the police were, especially the fine men and women of the Pennsylvania State Police, most especially the fine men and women of Troop D (that was a bit of information shortfall, there being no female Troopers or PCOs in D at that time, but none of the Troopers offered a correction, at least not while the cameras were rolling). They were, the Representative said, a thin gray line dividing Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Taxpayer from the evil of the Chaos Gang, and so on and so on, God bless America, may all your children grow up to play the violin. Captain Diment came down from Butler, presumably because someone felt his stripes would lend a little extra tone to the event, and he later told Tony Schoondist in a low growl: "That toupee-wearing touchhole asked me to fix his wife's speeding ticket."

  And all the time the Representative was blathering and the entourage was touring and the reporters were reporting and the cameras were rolling,
the Buick Roadmaster was sitting just fifty yards away, blue as deep dusk on its fat and luxy whitewalls. It sat under the big round thermometer Tony and Curt had mounted on one of the beams. It sat there with its zeroed odometer and dirt wouldn't stick to it. To the Troopers who knew about it, the damned thing felt like an itch between the shoulderblades, the one place you can't . . . quite . . . reach.

  There was bad weather to contend with, there were all kinds of John Q.'s to contend with--many who came to praise the family but who weren't of the family--and there were also visiting police officers and Troopers from other barracks. These last were in some ways the most dangerous, because cops had sharp eyes and nosy minds. What might they have thought if they'd seen a Trooper in a rain-slicker (or a certain janitor with a Swedish accent) standing out there by Shed B like one of those big-hat soldiers guarding the gate at Buckingham Palace? Occasionally walking over to the roll-up door and peering inside? Might a visiting policeman seeing this have been curious about what was in there? Does a bear shit in the woods?

  Curt solved this as well as it could be solved. He sent Tony a memo that said it was a shame the way the raccoons kept getting into our garbage and scattering it around, and that Phil Candleton and Brian Cole had agreed to build a little hutch to store the garbage cans in. Curt thought that out behind Shed B would be a good place for it, if the SC agreed. SC Schoondist wrote OK across the top of the memo, and that one did get filed. What the memo neglected to mention was that the Troop hadn't had any real problems with coons since Arky bought a couple of plastic garbage cans from Sears, the kind with the snap-down tops.

  The hutch was built, painted (PSP gray, of course), and ready for action three days after the memo landed in Tony's in-basket. Prefab and purely functional, it was just big enough for two garbage cans, three shelves, and one State Trooper sitting on a kitchen chair. It served the dual purpose of keeping the Trooper on watch (a) out of the weather, and (b) out of sight. Every ten or fifteen minutes the man on duty would get up, leave the hutch, and look through one of the windows in Shed B's rear roll-up door. The hutch was stocked with soda, munchies, magazines, and a galvanized pail. The pail had a paper strip reading I COULD NOT HOLD IT ANY LONGER taped to the side. That was Jackie O'Hara's touch. The others called him The Irish Wonder Boy, and he never failed to make them laugh. He was making them laugh even three years later as he lay in his bedroom, dying of esophageal cancer, eyes glassy with morphine, telling stories about Padeen the bogtrotter in a hoarse whisper while his old mates visited and sometimes held his hand when the pain was especially bad.

  Later on, there would be plenty of video cameras at Troop D--at all the PSP barracks, because by the nineties, all the cruisers were equipped with dashboard-mounted Panasonic Eyewitness models. These were made specially for law enforcement organizations, and came without mikes. Video of road-stops was legal; because of existing wiretap laws, audio was not. But all of that was later. In the late summer of 1979, they had to make do with a videocam Huddie Royer had gotten for his birthday. They kept it on one of the shelves out in the hutch, stored in its box and wrapped in plastic to make sure it stayed dry. Another box contained extra batteries and a dozen blank tapes with the cellophane stripped off so they'd be ready to go. There was also a slate with a number chalked on it: the current temperature inside the shed. If the person on duty noticed a change, he erased the last observation, wrote in the current one, and added a chalk arrow pointing either up or down. It vas the closest thing to a written record Sergeant Schoondist would allow.

  Tony seemed delighted with this jury-rig. Curt tried to emulate him, but sometimes his worry and frustration broke through. "There won't be anyone on watch the next time something happens," he said. "You wait and see if I'm not right--it's always the way. Nobody'll volunteer for midnight to four some night, and whoever comes on next will look in and see the trunk-lid up and another dead bat on the floor. You wait and see."

  Curt tried persuading Tony to at least keep a surveillance sign-up sheet. There was no shortage of volunteers, he argued; what they were short on was organization and scheduling, things that would be easy to change. Tony remained adamant: no paper trail. When Curt volunteered to take over more of the sentry duty himself (many of the Troopers took to calling it Hutch Patrol), Tony refused and told him to ease off. "You've got other responsibilities," he said. "Not the least of them is your wife."

  Curt had the good sense to keep quiet while in the SC's office. Later, however, he unburdened himself to Sandy, speaking with surprising bitterness as the two of them stood outside at the far corner of the barracks. "If I'd wanted a marriage counselor, I would have consulted the goddam Yellow Pages," he said.

  Sandy offered him a smile, one without much humor in it. "I think you better start listening for the pop," he said.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The pop. Very distinctive sound. You hear it when your head finally comes out of your ass."

  Curtis stared at him, hard little roses of color burning high up on his cheekbones. "Am I missing something here, Sandy?"

  "Yes."

  "What? For God's sake, what?"

  "Your job and your life," Sandy said. "Not necessarily in that order. You are experiencing a problem of perspective. That Buick is starting to look too big to you."

  "Too . . . !" Curt hit his forehead with the palm of his hand in that way he had. Then he turned and looked out at the Short Hills. At last he swung back to Sandy. "It's something from another world, Sandy--from another world. How can a thing like that look too big?"

  "That's exactly your problem," Sandy replied. "Your problem of perspective."

  He had an idea that the next thing Curtis said would be the beginning of an argument, possibly a bitter one. So before Curt could say anything, Sandy went inside. And perhaps that talk did some good, because as August gave way to September, Curt's all but constant requests for more surveillance time stopped. Sandy Dearborn never tried to tell himself that the kid had seen the light, but he did seem to understand that he'd gone as far as he could, at least for the time being. Which was good, but maybe not quite good enough. Sandy thought that the Buick was always going to look too big to Curtis. But then, there have always been two sorts of people in the world. Curt was of the sort who believed satisfaction actually did bring felines back from the other side of the great divide.

  He began to show up at the barracks with biology books instead of Field and Stream. The one most commonly observed under his arm or lying on the toilet tank in the crapper was Dr. John H. Maturin's Twenty Elementary Dissections, Harvard University Press, 1968. When Buck Flanders and his wife went over to Curt's for dinner one evening, Michelle Wilcox complained about her husband's "gross new hobby". He had started getting specimens from a medical supply house, she said, and the area of the basement which he had designated as his darkroom-to-be only the year before now smelled of mortuary chemicals.

  Curt started with mice and a guinea pig, then moved on to birds, eventually working his way up to a horned owl. Sometimes he brought specimens to work. "You haven't really lived," Matt Babicki told Orville Garrett and Steve Devoe one day, "until you go downstairs for a fresh box of ballpoint pens and find a jar of formaldehyde with an owl-eye in it sitting on top of the Xerox machine. Man, that wakes you up."

  Once the owl had been conquered, Curtis moved on to bats. He did eight or nine of those, each specimen from a different species. A couple he caught himself in his back yard; the rest he ordered from a biological supply house in The Burg. Sandy never forgot the day Curtis showed him a South American vampire bat pinned to a board. The thing was furry, brownish on the belly, and velvet-black on the membranous wings. Its tiny pointed teeth were bared in a psychotic smile. Its guts were laid open in a teardrop shape by Curt's increasingly skilled technique. Sandy believed Curt's high school biology teacher--the one who had given him the C--would have been surprised at how fast his old student was learning.

  Of course when desire drives, any fool
can be a professor.

  It was while Curt Wilcox was learning the fine art of dissection from Dr. Maturin that Jimmy and Roslyn took up residence in the Buick 8. They were Tony's brainstorm. He had it one day at the Tri-Town Mall, while his wife tried on clothes in Country Casuals. An improbable sign in the window of My Pet caught his eye: COME ON IN AND JOIN OUR GERBIL RIOT!

  Tony didn't join the gerbil riot just then--his wife would have had a thousand questions--but he sent big George Stankowski back the very next day with more cash from the contingency fund and orders to buy a pair of gerbils. Also a plastic habitat for them to live in.

  "Should I get them some food, too?" George asked.

  "No," Tony answered. "Absolutely not. We're going to buy a couple of gerbils and then let them starve to death out in the shed."

  "Really? That seems sort of mean to--"

  Tony sighed. "Get them food, George, yes. By all means get them food."

  The only specification Tony made concerning the habitat was that it fit comfortably on the Buick's front seat. George got a nice one, not top-of-the-line but almost. It was made of a yellow see-through plastic and consisted of a long corridor with a boxy room at either end. One was the gerbil dining room and the other was the gerbil version of Gold's Gym. The dining room had a food-trough and a water-bottle clipped to the side; the gym had an exercise wheel.

  "They live better than some people," Orvie Garrett said.

  Phil, who was watching Roslyn take a shit in the food-trough, said: "Speak for yourself."

  Dicky-Duck Eliot, perhaps not the swiftest horse ever to canter around life's great racetrack, wanted to know why they were keeping gerbils in the Buick. Wasn't that sort of dangerous?

  "Well, we'll see about that, won't we?" Tony asked in an oddly gentle voice. "We'll just see if it is or not."

  On a day not long after Troop D acquired Jimmy and Roslyn, Tony Schoondist crossed his own personal Rubicon and lied to the press.

  Not that the representative of the Fourth Estate was in this case very impressive, just a weedy redheaded boy of twenty or so, a summer intern at The Statler County American who would be going back to Ohio State in another week or so. He had a way of listening to you with his mouth hung partway open that made him look, in Arky's words, like a stark raving natural-born fool. But he wasn't a fool, and he'd spent most of one golden September afternoon listening to Mr. Bradley Roach. Brad gave the young reporter quite an earful about the man with the Russian accent (by this time Brad was positive the guy had been Russian) and the car the man had left behind. The weedy redhead, Homer Oosler by name, wanted to do a feature story on all of this and go back to college with a bang. Sandy thought the young man could imagine a front-page headline with the words MYSTERY CAR in it. Perhaps even RUSSIAN SPY'S MYSTERY CAR.