From a Buick 8

  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 s
aid. 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 when, 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.