From a Buick 8

  "Oil's fine!" the man in the black coat and hat said in his choked voice, and was gone around the corner in a final batlike swirl of dark cloth. In addition to the quality of the voice--that unpleasant, mucusy sound--the man had an accent that made Brad Roach think of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show, Boris Badinoff telling Natasha Ve must stop moose und squeerul!

  Brad went to the Buick, ambled down the side closest to the pumps (the driver had parked carelessly, leaving plenty of room between the car and the island), trailing one hand along the chrome swoop and the smooth paintjob as he went. That stroke was more admiring than impudent, although it might have had a bit of harmless impudence in it; Bradley was then a young man, with a young man's high spirits. At the back, bending over the fuel hatch, he paused. The fuel hatch was there, but the rear license plate wasn't. There wasn't even a plate holder, or screw-holes where a plate would normally go.

  This made Bradley realize what had struck him as wrong as soon as he heard the ding-ding of the bell and looked up at the car for the first time. There was no inspection sticker. Well, no business of his if there was no plate on the back deck and no inspection sticker on the windshield; either one of the local cops or a Static from Troop D just up the road would see the guy and nail him for it . . . or they wouldn't. Either way, Brad Roach's job was to pump gas.

  He twirled the crank on the side of the hi-test pump to turn back the numbers, stuck the nozzle in the hole, and set the automatic feed. The bell inside the pump started to bing and while it did, Brad walked up the driver's side of the Buick, completing the circuit. He looked through the leftside windows as he went, and the car's interior struck him as singularly stark for what had been almost a luxury car back in the fifties. The seat upholstery was wren-brown, and so was the fabric lining the inside of the roof. The back seat was empty, the front seat was empty, and there was nothing on the floor--not so much as a gum-wrapper, let alone a map or a crumpled cigarette pack. The steering wheel looked like inlaid wood. Bradley wondered if that was the way they had come on this model, or if it was some kind of special option. Looked ritzy. And why was it so big? If it had had spokes sticking out of it, you would have thought it belonged on a millionaire's yacht. You'd have to spread your arms almost as wide as your chest just to grip it. Had to be some sort of custom job, and Brad didn't think it would be comfortable to handle on a long drive. Not a bit comfortable.

  Also, there was something funny about the dashboard. It looked like burled walnut and the chromed controls and little appliances--heater, radio, clock--looked all right . . . they were in the right places, anyway . . . and the ignition key was also in the right place (trusting soul, ain't he? Brad thought), yet there was something about that setup that was very much not right. Hard to say what, though.

  Brad strolled back around to the front of the car again, admiring the sneering chrome grille (it was all Buick, that grille; that part, at least, was dead right) and verifying that there was no inspection sticker, not from PA or anyplace else. There were no stickers on the windshield at all. The Buick's owner was apparently not a member of Triple-A, the Elks, the Lions, or the Kiwanis. He did not support Pitt or Penn State (at least not to the extent of putting a sticker on any of the Buick's windows), and his car wasn't protected by Mopar or good old Rusty Jones.

  Pretty cool car just the same . . . although the boss would have told him that his job wasn't to admire the rolling stock but just to fill "em fast.

  The Buick drank eleven dollars" worth of the good stuff before the feed cut off. That was a lot of gas in those days, when a gallon of hi-test could be purchased for seventy cents. Either the tank had been close to empty when the man in the black coat took the car out, or he'd driven it a far piece.

  Then Bradley decided that second idea had to be bullshit. Because the roads were still wet, still brimming over in the dips, for God's sake, but there wasn't a single mudstreak or splatter on the Buick's smooth blue hide. Not so much as a smear on those fat and luxy whitewalls, either. And to Bradley Roach, that seemed flat-out impossible.

  It was nothing to him one way or the other, of course, but he could point out the lack of a valid inspection sticker (hell, there wasn't even an invalid one pasted there in the corner of the glass). Might get him a tip. Enough for a sixpack, maybe. He was still six or eight months from being able to buy legally, but there were ways and means if you were dedicated, and even then, in the early going, Bradley was dedicated.

  He went back to the office, sat down, picked up his Inside View, and waited for the fellow in the black coat to come back. It was a damned hot day for a long coat like that, no doubt about it, but by then Brad thought he had that part figured out. The man was a SKA, just a little different from the ones around Statler. From a sect that allowed car-driving, it seemed. SKAs were what Bradley and his friends called the Amish. It stood for shitkicking assholes.

  Fifteen minutes later, when Brad had finished reading "We Have Been Visited!" by UFO expert Richard T. Rumsfeld (US Army Ret.) and had given close attention to a blonde Page Four Girl who appeared to be fly-fishing a mountain stream in her bra and panties, Brad realized he was still waiting. The guy hadn't gone to make any nickel-and-dime deposit, it seemed; that guy was clearly a shithouse millionaire.

  Snickering, imagining the guy perched on the Jakes under the rusty pipes, sitting there in the gloom (the single lightbulb had burned out a month ago and neither Bradley nor Hugh had gotten around to changing it yet) with his black coat puddled all around him and collecting mouse-turds, Brad picked up his newspaper again. He turned to the joke page, which was good for another ten minutes (some of the jokes were so comical Brad read them three and even four times). He dropped the paper back on the desk and looked at the clock over the door. Beyond it, at the pumps, the Buick Roadmaster sparkled in the sun. Almost half an hour had passed since its driver had cried "Oil's fine!" back over his shoulder in his strangly voice and then disappeared down the side of the building in a fine swirl of black cloth. Was he a SKA? Did any of them drive cars? Brad didn't think so. The SKAs thought anything with an engine was the work of Satan, didn't they?

  Okay, so maybe he wasn't. But whatever he was, why wasn't he back?

  All at once the image of that guy on the gloomy, discolored throne back there by the diesel pump didn't seem so funny. In his mind's eye, Brad could still see him sitting there with his coat puddled around him on the filthy linoleum and his pants down around his ankles, but now Brad saw him with his head down, his chin resting on his chest, his big hat (which didn't really look like an Amish hat at all) slewed forward over his eyes. Not moving. Not breathing. Not shitting but dead. Heart-attack or brain trembolism or something like that. It was possible. If the goddam King of Rock and Roll could croak while doing Number Two, anyone could.

  "Naw," Bradley Roach said softly. "Naw, that ain't . . . he wudd'n . . . naw!"

  He picked up the paper, tried to read about the flying saucers that were keeping an eye on us, and couldn't convert the words into coherent thoughts. He put it down and looked out the door. The Buick was still there, shining in the sun.

  No sign of the driver.

  Half an hour . . . no, thirty-five minutes now. God dang. Bradley picked up Inside View and tried to read about teenage cultists in Florida. One of the girls had a great rack, but as far as Bradley Roach was concerned, Satan could have the rest of them.

  Five more minutes passed and he found himself tearing strips off the newspaper and drifting them down to the wastebasket, where they formed piles of nervous confetti.

  "Fuggit," he said, and got to his feet. He went out the door and around the corner of the little white cinderblock cube where he'd worked since dropping out of high school. The restrooms were down at the back, on the east side. Brad hadn't made up his mind if he should play it straight--Mister, are you all right?--or humorous--Hey Mister, I got a firecracker, if you need one. As it turned out, he got to deliver neither of these carefully crafted phrases.

  The men's room
door had a loose latch and was apt to fly open in any strong puff of wind unless bolted shut from the inside, so Brad and Hugh always stuffed a piece of folded cardboard into the crack to keep the door shut when the restroom wasn't in use. If the man from the Buick had been inside the toilet, the fold of cardboard would either have been in there with him (probably left beside one of the sink's faucets while the man tended his business), or it would be lying on the small cement stoop at the foot of the door. This latter was usually the case, Brad later told Ennis Rafferty; he and Hugh were always putting that cardboard wedge back in its place after the customers left. They had to flush the toilet as well, more often than not. People were careless about that when they were away from home. People were downright nasty when they were away from home. Not all, of course, but a surprising number.

  Right now, that cardboard wedge was poking out of the crack between the door and the jamb, just above the latch exactly where it worked the best. All the same, Brad opened the door to check, catching the little cardboard wedge neatly as it fell--as neatly as he would learn to open a bottle of beer on the driver's-side handle of his own Buick in later years. The little cubicle was empty, just as he'd known in his heart it would be. No sign that the toilet had been used, and there had been no sound of a flush as Brad sat in the office reading his paper. No beads of water on the rust-stained sides of the basin, either.

  It occurred to Brad then that the guy hadn't come around the side of the station to use the can but to take a look at Redfern Stream, which was pretty enough to warrant a peek (or even a snap of the old Kodak) from a passerby, running as it did with the Statler Bluffs on its north side and all those willows up on top, spreading out green like a mermaid's hair (there was a poet in the boy, all right, a regular Dylan Thomas). But around back there was no sign of the Buick's driver, either, only discarded auto parts and a couple of ancient tractor-axles lying in the weeds like rusty bones.

  The stream was babbling at the top of its lungs, running broad and foamy. Its swelling would be a temporary condition, of course--floods in western PA are spring events, as a rule--but that day the normally sleepy Redfern was quite the torrent.

  Seeing how high the water was gave rise to a horrifying possibility in Bradley Roach's mind. He measured the steep slope down to the water. The grass was still wet with rain and probably goddanged slippery, especially if an unsuspecting SKA came thee-ing and thou-ing along in shoes with slippery leather soles. As he considered this, the possibility hardened to a near certainty in his mind. Nothing else explained the unused shithouse and the car still waiting at the hi-test pump, all loaded and ready to go, key still in the ignition. Old Mr. Buick Roadmaster had gone around back for a peek at the Redfern, had foolishly dared the embankment slope to get an even better look . . . and then whoops, there goes your ballgame.

  Bradley worked his own way down to the water's edge, slipping a couple of times in spite of his Georgia Giants but not falling, always keeping near some hunk of junk he could grab if he did lose his footing. There was no sign of the man at the water's edge, but when Brad looked downstream, he saw something caught in the lee of a fallen birch about two hundred yards from where he stood. Bobbing up and down. Black. It could have been Mr. Buick Roadmaster's coat.

  "Aw, shit," he said, and hurried back to the office to call Troop D, which was at least two miles closer to his location than the local cop-shop. And that was how

  Now: Sandy

  "we got into it," I said. "Shirley's predecessor was a guy named Matt Babicki. He gave the call to Ennis Rafferty--"

  "Why Ennis, Ned?" Shirley asked. "Quick as you can."

  "CAU," he said at once. "Closest available unit." But his mind wasn't on that, and he never looked at her. His eyes were fixed on me.

  "Ennis was fifty-five and looking forward to a retirement he never got to enjoy," I said.

  "And my father was with him, wasn't he? They were partners."

  "Yes," I said.

  There was plenty more to tell, but first he needed to get past this. I was quiet, letting him get used to the idea that his father and Roach, the man who had killed him, had once stood face to face and conversed like normal human beings. There Curtis had been, listening to Bradley Roach talk, flipping open his notebook, starting to jot down a time-sequence. By then Ned knew the drill, how we work fresh cases.

  I had an idea this was what would stick with the kid no matter what else I had to tell him, no matter how wild and woolly the narrative might get. The image of the manslaughterer and his victim standing together not four minutes" brisk walk from where their lives would again collide, this time with a mortal thud, twenty-two years later.

  "How old was he?" Ned almost whispered. "My dad, how old was he on the day you're telling me about?"

  He could have figured it out for himself, I suppose, but he was just too stunned. "Twenty-four," I said. It was easy. Short lives make for simple mathematics. "He'd been in the Troop about a year. Same deal then as now, two Troopers per cruiser only on the eleven-to-seven, rookies the single exception to the rule. And your dad was still a rookie. So he was paired with Ennis on days."

  "Ned, are you all right?" Shirley asked. It was a fair question. All of the color had gradually drained out of the kid's face.

  "Yes, ma'am," he said. He looked at her, then at Arky, then at Phil Candleton. The same look directed to all three, half-bewildered and half-accusing. "How much of this did you know?"

  "All of it," Arky said. He had a little Nordic lilt in his voice that always made me think of Lawrence Welk going ah-one and ah-two, now here's da lovely Lennon Sisters, don't dey look swede. "It was no secret. Your dad and Bradley Roach got on all right back den. Even later. Curtis arrested him tree-four times in the eighties--"

  "Hell, five or six," Phil rumbled. "That was almost always his beat, you know. Five or six at least. One time he drove that dimwit direct to an AA meeting and made him stay, but it didn't do any good."

  "Your dad's job was bein a Statie," Arky said, "and by d'middle of d'eighties, Brad's job--his full-time job--was drinkin. Usually while he drove around d'back roads. He loved doin dat. So many of em do." Arky sighed. "Anyway, given dem two jobs, boy, dey was almos certain to bump heads from time to time."

  "From time to time," Ned repeated, fascinated. It was as if the concept of time had gained a new dimension for him. I supposed it had.

  "But all dat was stric'ly business. Cep maybe for dat Buick. Dey had dat between em all d'years after." He nodded in the direction of Shed B. "Ned, dat Buick hung between em like warsh on a close'line. No one's ever kep d'Buick a secret, eider--not edzactly, not on purpose--but I spec it's kinda one, anyway."

  Shirley was nodding. She reached over and took Ned's hand, and he let it be taken.

  "People ignore it, mostly," she said, "the way they always ignore things they don't understand . . . as long as they can, anyway."

  "Sometimes we can't afford to ignore it," Phil said. "We knew that as soon as . . . well, let Sandy tell it." He looked back at me. They all did. Ned's gaze was the brightest.

  I lit a cigarette and started talking again.

  Then

  Ennis Rafferty found his binoculars in his tackle box, which went with him from car to car during fishing season. Once he had them, he and Curt Wilcox went down to Redfern Stream for the same reason the bear went over the mountain: to see what they could see.

  "Whaddya want me to do?" Brad asked as they walked away from him.

  "Guard the car and think about your story," Ennis said.

  "Story? Why would I need a story?" Sounding a little nervous about it. Neither Ennis nor Curt answered.

  Easing down the weedy slope, each of them ready to grab the other if he slipped, Ennis said: "That car isn't right. Even Bradley Roach knows that, and he's pretty short in the old IQ department."

  Curt was nodding even before the older man had finished. "It's like a picture in this activity book I had when I was a kid. FIND TEN THINGS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE."
>
  "By God, it is!" Ennis was struck by this idea. He liked the young man he was partnered with, and thought he was going to make a good Trooper once he got a little salt on his skin.

  They had reached the edge of the stream by then. Ennis went for his binocs, which he had hung over his neck by the strap. "No inspection sticker. No damn license plates. And the wheel! Curtis, did you see how big that thing is?"

  Curt nodded.

  "No antenna for the radio," Ennis continued, "and no mud on the body. How'd it get up Route 32 without getting some mud on it? We were splashing up puddles everywhere. There's even crud on the -windshield."

  "I don't know. Did you see the portholes?"

  "Huh? Sure, but all old Buicks have portholes."

  "Yeah, but these are wrong. There's four on the passenger side and only three on the driver's side. Do you think Buick ever rolled a model off the line with a different number of portholes on the sides? Cause I don't."

  Ennis gave his partner a nonplussed look, then raised his binoculars and looked downstream. He quickly found and focused on the black bobbing thing that had sent Brad hurrying to the telephone.

  "What is it? Is it a coat?" Curt was shading his eyes, which were considerably better than Bradley Roach's. "It's not, is it?"

  "Nope," Ennis said, still peering. "It looks like . . . a garbage can. One of those black plastic garbage cans like they sell down at the Tru-Value in town. Or maybe I'm full of shit. Here. You take a look."

  He handed the binoculars over, and no, he wasn't full of shit. What Curtis saw was indeed a black plastic garbage can, probably washed down from the trailer park on the Bluffs at the height of the previous night's cloudburst. It wasn't a black coat and no black coat was ever found, nor the black hat, nor the man with the white face and the curl of lank black hair beside one strangely made ear. The Troopers might have doubted that there ever was such a man--Ennis Rafferty had not failed to notice the copy of Inside View on the desk when he took Mr. Roach into the office to question him further--but there was the Buick. That odd Buick was irrefutable. It was part of the goddam scenery, sitting right there at the pumps. Except by the time the county tow showed up to haul it away, neither Ennis Rafferty nor Curtis Wilcox believed it was a Buick at all.