From a Buick 8 (44 page)

'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 compart-ment 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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 moon-light. 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.