From a Buick 8 (28 page)

He struck his thigh with his fist, then cupped his hands to the sides of his face and peered in through the glass again. There was nothing to see but the Roadmaster, sitting in two bars of sunlight that crisscrossed on the long dark blue hood like the contending beams of spotlights.

'Get Randy Santerre. And didn't I see Chris Soder mooning around?'

'Yeah. He's technically off duty, but his wife's two sisters are still visiting from over Ohio and he came here to watch TV.' Buck lowered his voice. 'Don't want to tell you your business, Curt, but I think both those guys are jagoffs.'

'They'll do for this. They'll have to. Tell them I want regular reports, too. Standard Code D. And I'll call in by landline before I leave court.'

Curt took a final, almost anguished look at the Buick, then started back to the barracks, where he would shave and get ready for the witness stand. In the afternoon he'd be pokingin the backs of trucks along with some boys from Troop G, looking for coke and hoping nobody decided to unlimber an automatic weapon. He would have found someone to swap with if there had been time, but there wasn't. Soder and Santerre got Buick-watching duty instead, and they didn't mind. Jagoffs never do. They stood beside the hutch, smoking, shooting the shit, taking the occasional look in at the Buick (Santerre too young to know what to expect, and he never lasted long in the PSP, anyway), telling jokes and enjoying the day. It was a June day so simple and so simply beautiful that even a jagoff couldn't help but enjoy it. At some point Buck Flanders spelled Randy Santerre; a little later on, Orville Garrett spelled Chris Soder. Huddie came out for the occasional peek. At three o'clock, when Sandy came in to drop his ass in the SC's chair, Curtis Wilcox finally got back and spelled Buck out by Shed B. Far from rebounding, the shed's temperature had rolled off another ten degrees by then, and off-duty Troopers began to clog the lot out back with their personal vehicles. Word had spread. Code D.

Around four p.m., Matt Babicki stuck his head into the SC's office and told Sandy he was losing the radio. 'Bad static, boss. Worst ever.'

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'Shit.' Sandy closed his eyes, rubbed his knuckles against them, and wished for Tony. This was his first time as acting Sergeant Commanding, and while the temporary bump in his paycheck at the end of the month would no doubt be satisfying, this aggravation was not. 'Trouble with that goddam car. Just what I wanted.'

'Don't take it to heart,' Matt said. 'It'll shoot off a few sparks and then everything'll go back to normal. Including the radio. Isn't that the way it usually goes?'

Yes, that was the way it usually went. Sandy was not, in truth, especially worried about the Buick. But what if someone out on patrol found trouble while communications were FUBAR? Someone who had to call in a 33 -
Help me quick -
or a 47 -
Send an ambulance -
or, worst of all, a 10-99:
Officer down.
Sandy had well over a dozen guys out there, and at that moment it felt as if every one of them was riding him piggyback.

'Listen to me, Matt. Get in my ride - it's Unit 17 - and take it down to the bottom of the hill. You should be clear of interference there. Call every D currently running the roads and tell them base dispatch is temporarily 17. Code D.'

'Aw, Sandy, Jesus! Isn't that a little - '

'I don't have time to listen to your imitation of
Siskel and Ebert at the Movies
just now,' Sandy said. He had never felt more impatient with Police Communications Officer Babicki's whiny brand of foot-dragging bullshit than he did then. 'Just do it.'

'But I won't be here to see - '

'No, probably you won't.' Sandy's voice rising a little now. 'That's one you'll absolutely have to put on your TS list before you send it to the chaplain.'

Matt started to say something else, took a closer look at Sandy's face and wisely decided to keep his mouth shut. Two minutes later, Sandy saw him headed down the hill, behind the wheel of Unit 17.

'Good,' Sandy muttered. 'Stay there awhile, you little backtalking pissant.'

Sandy went out to Shed 13, where there was quite a little crowd. Most of them were Troopers, but some were motor-pool guys in the grease-stained green Dickies that were their unofficial uniform. After four years of living with the Buick, none of them was afraid, exactly, but they were a rather nervy group that day, just the same. When you saw twenty degrees roll off the thermometer on a warm summer day, in a room where the air conditioning consisted of an occasionally opened door, it was hard not to believe that something large was in the works. Curt had been back long enough to set up a number of experiments - all he had time to arrange, Sandy guessed. On the Buick's front seat he'd placed a Nike sneaker box with some crickets in it. The frog cage was on the back seat. There was only one frog in it this time, but it was a whopper, one of those marsh bullfrogs with the bulgy yellow-black eyes. He had also taken the windowbox of flowers which had been outside Matt Babicki's office window and stuck them in the Buick's trunk. Last but not least, he took Mister Dillon for a promenade out there, toured him all around the car on his leash, the full three-sixty, just to see what would happen. Orvie Garrett didn't like that much, but Curt talked him into it. In most respects Curt was still a little rough around the edges and a little wet behind the ears, but when it came to the Buick, he could be as smooth as a riverboat gambler.
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Nothing happened during D's walk - not that time - but it was clear the Troop mascot would rather have been just about anywhere else. He hung at the end of his leash so hard it choked him a little, and he walked with his head down and his tail lowered, giving the occasional dry cough. He looked at the Buick, but he looked at everything else out there as well, as if whatever it was he didn't like had spread out from the bogus car until it contaminated the whole shed.

When Curt brought him outside again and handed the leash back to Orville, he said, 'There's something going on, he feels it and so do I. But it's not like before.' He saw Sandy and repeated it: not like before.

'No,' Sandy said, then nodded at Mister D. 'At least he's not howling.'

'Not yet,' Orville said. 'Come on, D, let's go back in the barracks. You did good. I'll give you a Bonz.'

What Orvie gave Curt was a final reproachful look. Mister Dillon trotted neatly at Trooper Garrett's right knee, no longer needing the leash to keep him at heel.

At four-twenty or so, the TV upstairs in the common room suddenly went goofy. By four-forty, the temperature in Shed B had dropped to forty-nine degrees. At four-fifty, Curtis Wilcox shouted: 'It's starting! I hear it!'

Sandy had been inside to check on dispatch (and what a snafu it was by then, nothing but one big balls-to-the-wall roar of static), and when Curt yelled he was returning across the par-king lot, where there were now so many personals you would have thought it was the Police Benefit Rummage Sale or the Muscular Dystrophy Kids' Carnival they put on each July. Sandy broke into a run, cutting through the knot of spectators craning to look in through the side door, which was still, un-believably, standing wide open. And Curt was there, standing in it. Waves of cold were rolling out, but he seemed not to feel them. His eyes were huge, and when he turned to Sandy he was like a man dreaming. 'Do you see it? Sandy,
do
you see it?'

Of course he did: a waxing violet glow that was spilling out of the car's windows and seeping up through the crack which outlined the trunk-lid and went spilling down the Buick's sides like some thin radioactive fluid. Inside the car Sandy could clearly see the shapes of the seats and the oversized steering wheel. They were outlines, silhouettes. The rest of the cabin was swallowed in a cold purple glare, brighter than any furnace. The hum was loud and getting louder. It made Sandy's skull ache, made his ears almost wish they were deaf. Not that being deaf would do any good, because you seemed to hear that sound not just with your ears but with your whole body.

Sandy yanked Curt out on to the pavement, then grabbed the knob, meaning to shut the door. Curt took hold of his wrist. 'No, Sandy, no! I want to see it! I want - '

Sandy peeled his hand off, not gently. 'Are you crazy? There's a procedure we follow on this, a goddam
procedure.
No one should know that better than you! You helped think it up, for God's sake!'

When Sandy slammed the door shut, cutting off any direct view of the Buick, Curt's eyelids fluttered and he twitched like a man waking out of a deep sleep. 'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, boss. I'm sorry.'

'It's all right.' Not really believing it was. Because the damned fool would have stood right there in the doorway. No question about it in Sandy's mind. Would have stood there and been fried, if frying was on that thing's agenda.

'I need to get my goggles,' Curt said. 'They're in the trunk of my car. I have extras, and they're extra
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dark. A whole box of them. Do you want a pair?' Sandy still got the feeling that Curt wasn't fully awake, that he was only pretending, like you did when the telephone rang in the middle of the night.

'Sure, why not? But we're going to be cautious, right? Because this is looking like a bad one.'

'Looking like a
great
one!' Curt said, and the exuberance in his voice, although slightly scary, made Sandy feel a little better. At least Curt didn't sound as if he were sleepwalking any longer. 'But yes, Mother - we'll follow procedure and be as cautious as hell.'

He ran for his car - not his cruiser but his personal, the restored Bel Aire his boy would wind up driving - and opened the trunk. He was still rummaging in the boxes of stuff he kept back there when the Buick exploded.

It did not literally explode, but there seemed to be no other word for what it
did
do. Those who were there that day never forgot it, but they talked about it remarkably little, even among themselves, because there seemed no way to express the terrifying magnificence of it. The
power
of it. The best they could say was that it darkened the June sun and seemed to turn the shed transparent, into a ghost of itself. It was impossible to comprehend how mere glass could stand between that light and the outside world. The throbbing brilliance poured through the boards of the shed like water through cheesecloth; the shapes of the nails stood out like the dots in a newspaper photograph or purple beads of blood on top of a fresh tattoo. Sandy heard Carl Brundage shout
She's gonna blow this time, she most surely will!
From behind him, in the barracks, he could hear Mister Dillon howling in terror.

'But he still wanted to get out and get at it,' Orville told Sandy later. 'I had im in the upstairs lounge, as far from that goddam shed as I could get him, but it didn't make anydifference. He knew it was there. Heard it, I imagine - heard it humming. And then he saw the window. Holy Christ! If I hadn't been quick, hadn't grabbed him right off, I think he would have jumped right through it, second story or not. He pissed all over me and I never realized it until half an hour later, that's how scared
I
was.'

Orville shook his head, his face heavy and thoughtful.

'Never seen a dog like that.
Never.
His fur was all bushed out, he was foamin at the mouth, and his eyeballs looked like they were poppin right out of his head.
Christ.'

Curt, meanwhile, came running back with a dozen pairs of protective goggles. The Troopers put them on but there was still no way of looking in at the Buick; it was impossible to even approach the windows. And again there was that weird silence when they all felt they should have been standing at the center of a cacophony, hearing thunder and landslides and erupting volcanoes. With the shed's doors shut, they (unlike Mister D) couldn't even hear the humming noise. There was the shuffle of feet and someone clearing his throat and Mister Dillon howling in the barracks and Orvie Garrett telling him to calm down and the sound of Matt Babicki's static-drowned radio from dispatch, where the window (now denuded of its flower box, thanks to Curt) had been left open. Nothing else. Curt walked to the roll-up door like a man walking into a high wind, head bent and hands raised. Twice he tried to lift his face and look inside Shed B, but he couldn't. It was too bright. Sandy grabbed his shoulder and restrained an urge to shout in his ear. There was no need to shout, but the situation made you want to do it, just the same.

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'Quit trying to look. You can't do it. Not yet, anyway. It'll knock the eyes right out of your head.'

'What is it, Sandy?' Curt whispered. 'What in God's name is it?'

Sandy could only shake his head.

For the next half hour the Buick put on the lightshow to end all lightshows, turning Shed B into a kind of fireball, shooting parallel lines of light through all the windows, flashing and flashing, a gaudy neon furnace without heat or sound. If anyone from John Q. Public's family had turned up during that time, God knew what they might have thought or who they would have told or how much those they told might have believed, but no outsiders
did
turn up. And by five-thirty, the D Troopers had started to see individual flashes of light again, as if the power-source driving the phenomenon had begun to wobble. It made Sandy think of the way a motorcycle will lurch and spurt when the gas-tank is almost dry. Curt edged up to the windows again, and although he had to duck down each time one of those bolts of light shot out, he could take little peeks in between. Sandy joined him, ducking away from the brighter pulses
(We probably look like we're practicing some weird drill routine,
he thought), squinting, eyes dazzled in spite of the triple layer of polarized glass in the goggles. The Buick was still perfectly intact and apparently unchanged. The tarp lay in its same draped dune, unsinged by any fire. Arky's tools hung undisturbed on their pegs, and the stacks of old County
American
newspapers were still in the far corner, bundled and tied with twine. A single kitchen match would have been enough to turn those dry piles of old news into pillars of flame, but all that brilliant purple light hadn't charred so much as a single corner of a single Bradlee's circular.