From a Buick 8 (6 page)

He could have figured it out for himself, 1 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 Enriis 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 exacly, 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.
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I lit a cigarette and started talking again.

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

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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.

By then, they didn't know
what
it was.

Older cops are entitled to their hunches, and Ennis had one as he and his young partner walked back to Brad Roach. Brad was standing beside the Roadmaster with the three nicely chromed portholes on one side and the four on the other. Ennis's hunch was that the oddities they had so far noticed were only the whipped cream on the sundae. If so, the less Mr Roach saw now, the less he could talk about later. Which was why, although Ennis was extremely curious about the abandoned car and longed for a big dose of satisfaction, he turned it over to Curt while he himself escorted Bradley into the office. Once they were there, Ennis called for a wrecker to haul the Buick up to Troop D, where they could put it in the parking lot out back, at least for the time being. He also wanted to question Bradley while his recollections were relatively fresh. Ennis expected to get his own chance to look over their odd catch, and at his leisure, later on.

'Someone modified it a little, I expect that's all' was what he said to Curt before taking Bradley into the office. Curt looked skeptical. Modifying was one thing, but this was just nuts. Removing one of the portholes, then refinishing the surface so expertly that the scar didn't even show? Replacing the usual Buick steering wheel with something that looked like it belonged in a cabin cruiser? Those were modifi-cations?

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'Aw, just look it over while I do some business,' Ennis said.

'Can I check the mill?'

'Be my guest. Only keep your mitts off the steering wheel, so we can get some prints if we need them. And use good sense. Try not to leave your own dabs anywhere.'

They had reached the pumps again. Brad Roach looked eagerly at the two cops, the one he would kill in the twenty-first century and the one who would be gone without a trace that very evening.

'What do you think?' Brad asked. 'Is he dead down there in the stream? Drownded? He is, isn't he?'

'Not unless he crawled into the garbage can floating around in the crotch of that fallen tree and drowned there,' Ennis said.

Brad's face fell. 'Aw, shit. Is that all it is?'

"Fraid so. And it would be a tight fit for a grown man. Trooper Wilcox? Any questions for this young man?'

Because he was still learning and Ennis was still teaching, Curtis did ask a few, mostly to make sure Bradley wasn't drunk and that he was in his right mind. Then he nodded to Ennis, who clapped Bradley on the shoulder as if they were old buddies.

'Step inside with me, what do you say?' Ennis suggested. 'Pour me a slug of mud and we'll see if we can figure this thing out.' And he led Brad away. The friendly arm slung around Bradley Roach's shoulder was very strong, and it just kept hustling Brad along toward the office, Trooper Rafferty talking a mile a minute the whole time.

As for Trooper Wilcox, he got about three-quarters of an hour with that Buick before the county tow showed up with its orange light flashing. Forty-five minutes isn't much time, but it was enough to turn Curtis into a lifetime Roadmaster Scholar. True love always happens in a flash, they say. Ennis drove as they headed back to Troop D behind the tow-truck and the Buick, which rode on the clamp with its nose up and its rear bumper almost dragging on the road. Curt rode shotgun, in his excitement squirming like a little kid who needs to make water. Between them, the Motorola police radio, scuffed and beat-up, the victim of God knew how many coffee and cola-dousings but still as tough as nails, blatted away on channel 23, Matt Babicki and the Troopersin the field going through the call-and-response that was the constant background soundtrack of their lives. It was there, but neither Ennis nor Curt heard it anymore unless their own number came up.

'The first thing's the engine,' Curt said. 'No, I suppose the first thing's the hood-latch. It's way over on the driver's side, and you push it in rather than pulling it out - '

'Never heard of that before,' Ennis grunted.

'You wait, you wait,' his young partner said. 'I found it, anyway, and lifted the hood. The engine . . . man, that
engine
. . .'

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Ennis glanced at him with the expression of a man who's just had an idea that's too horribly plausible to deny. The yellow glow from the revolving light on the tow-truck's cab pulsed on his face like jaundice.

'Don't you dare tell me it doesn't have one,' he said. 'Don't dare tell me it doesn't have anything but a glow-crystal or some damn thing like in Dumbwit's flying saucers.'

Curtis laughed. The sound was both cheerful and wild. 'No, no, there's an engine, but it's all wrong. It saysbuick 8 on both sides of the engine block in big chrome letters, as if whoever made it was afraid of forgetting what the damn thing was. There are eight plugs, four on each side, and
that's
right - eight cylinders, eight sparkplugs - but there's no distributor cap and no distributor, not that I can see. No generator or alternator, either.'

'Get out!'

'Ennis, if I'm lyin I'm dyin.'

'Where do the sparkplug wires go?'

'Each one makes a big loop and goes right back into the engine block, so far as I can tell.'

'Get . . .
out!'

'Yes! But listen, Ennis, just listen!' Stop interrupting and let me talk, in other words. Curtis Wilcox squirming in his seat but never taking his eyes off the Buick being towed along in front of him.

'All right, Curt. I'm listening.'

'It's got a radiator, but so far as I can tell, there's nothing inside it. No water and no antifreeze. There's no fanbelt, which sort of makes sense, because there's no fan.'

'Oil?'

'There's a crankcase and the dipstick is normal, except there's no markings on it. There's a battery, a Delco, but Ennis, dig this,
it's not hooked up to anything.
There are no battery cables.'

'You're describing a car that couldn't possibly run,' Ennis said flatly.

'Tell me about it. I took the key out of the ignition. It's on an ordinary chain, but the chain's all there is. No fob with initials or anything.'

'Other keys?'

'No. And the ignition key's not really a key. It's just a slot of metal, about so long.' Curt held his thumb and forefinger a key's length apart.

'A blank, is that what you're talking about? Like a keymaker's blank?'

'
No
. It's nothing like a key at all. It's just a little steel stick.'

'Did you try it?'

Curt, who had been talking almost compulsively, didn't answer that at once.
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'Go on,' Ennis said. 'I'm your partner, for Christ's sake. I'm not going to bite you.'

'All right, yeah, I tried it. I wanted to see if that crazy engine worked.'

'Of course it works. Someone drove it in, right?'

'Roach says so, but when I got a good look under that hood, I had to wonder it he was lying or maybe hypnotized. Anyway, it's still an open question. The key-thing won't turn. It's like the ignition's locked.'

'Where's the key now?'

'I put it back in the ignition.'

Ennis nodded. 'Good. When you opened the door, did the dome light come on? Or isn't there one?'

Curtis paused, thinking back. 'Yeah. There was a dome light, and it came on. I should have noticed that. How could it come on, though? How could it, when the battery's not hooked up?'

'There could be a couple of C-cells powering the dome light, for all
we
know.' But his lack of belief was clear in his voice.

'What about the circuit from the door to the light? Are C-cells running that, too?'

But Ennis was tired of discussing the dome light. 'What else?'

'I saved the best for last,' Curtis told him. 'I had to do some touching inside, but I used a hanky, and I know where I touched, so don't bust my balls.'

Ennis said nothing out loud, but gave the kid a look that said he'd bust Curt's balls if they needed busting.

'The dashboard controls are all fake, just stuck on there for show. The radio knobs don't turn and neither does the heater control knob. The lever you slide to switch on the defroster doesn't move. Feels like a post set in concrete.'