From a Buick 8 (29 page)

'Sandy - can you see any of the specimens?'

Sandy shook his head, stood back, and took off the goggles Curt had loaned him. He passed them on to Andy Colucci, who was wild for a look into the shed. Sandy himself headed back to the barracks. Shed B was not going to blow up after all, it seemed. And, he was the acting SC, with a job to do. On the back step, he paused and looked back. Even wearing goggles, Andy Colucci and the others were reluctant to approach the row of windows. There was only one excep-tion, and that was Curtis Wilcox. He stood right there - big as Billy-be-damned, Sandy's mother might have said - as close as he could get and leaning forward to get even closer, goggles actually pressed to the glass, only turning his head aside slightly each time the thing flashed out an especially bright bolt, which it was still doing every twenty seconds or so.

Sandy thought,
He's apt to put his eyes out, or at least go snowblind from it.
Except he wouldn't. He seemed to have almost timed the flashes, to have gotten in rhythm with them. From where Sandy was, it looked as if Curtis was actually turning his face aside a second or two before each flash came. And when it did come he would for a moment become his own exclamatory shadow, an exotic frozen dancer caught against a great sheet of purple light. Looking at him that way was scary. To Sandy it was like watching something that was there and not there at the same time, real but not real, both solid and mirage. Sandy would later think that when it came to the Buick 8, Curt was oddly like Mister Dillon. He wasn't howling like the dog was, upstairs in the common room, but he seemed in touch with the thing just the same, in sync with it.
Dancing
with it: then and later, that was how it would come back to Sandy.
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Dancing with it.

At ten minutes of six that evening, Sandy radioed down the hill to Matt and asked what was up. Matt said nothing
(Nothing, gramma
was what Sandy heard in his tone), and Sandy told him to come on back to base. When he did, Sandy said he was free to step across the parking lot and have a look at Old '54, if he still wanted one. Matt was gone like a shot. When he came back a few minutes later, he looked disappointed.

'I've seen it do
that
before,' he said, leaving Sandy to reflect on how dense and thankless human beings were, for the most part; how quickly their senses dulled, rendering the marvelous mundane. 'All the guys said it really blew its stack an hour ago, but none of them could describe it.' This was said with a contempt Sandy didn't find surprising. In the world of the police communications officer,
everything
is describable; the world's cartography must and can be laid out in ten-codes.

'Well, don't look at
me,'
Sandy said. 'I can tell you one thing, though. It was bright.'

'Oh. Bright.' Matt gave him a look that said
Not just a gramma but a loser gramma.
Then he went back inside.

By seven o'clock, Troop D's TV reception (always an impor-tant consideration when you were off the road) had returned to normal. Dispatch communications were back to normal. Mister Dilloii had eaten his usual big bowl of Gravy Train and then hung out in the kitchen, trolling for scraps, so
he
was back to normal. And when Curt poked his head into the SC's office at seven forty-five to tell Sandy he wanted to go into the shed and check on his specimens, Sandy could think of no way to stop him. Sandy was in charge of Troop D that evening, no argument there, but when it came to the Buick, Curt had as much authority as he did, maybe even a little more. Also, Curt was already wearing the damn yellow rope around his waist. The rest was looped over his forearm in a coil.

'Not a good idea,' Sandy told him. That was about as close to no as he could get.

'Bosh.' It was Curtis's favorite word in 1983. Sandy hated it. He thought it was a snotty word. He looked over Curt's shoulder and saw they were alone. 'Curtis,' he said, 'you've got a wife at home, and the last time we talked about her, you said she might be pregnant. Has that changed?'

'No, but she hasn't been to the - '

'So you've got a wife for sure and a maybe baby. And if she's not preg this time, she probably will be next time. That's nice. It's just the way it should be. What I don't understand is why you'd put all that on the line for that goddam Buick.'

'Come on, Sandy - I put it on the line every time I get into a cruiser and go out on the road. Every time I step out and approach. It's true of everyone who works the job.'

'This is different and we both know it, so you can quit the high school debate crap. Don't you remember what happened to Ennis?'

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'I remember,' Curt said, and Sandy supposed he did, but Ennis Rafferty had been gone almost four years by then. He was, in a way, as out-of-date as the stacks of County
Americans
in Shed B. And as for more recent developments? Well, the frogs had just been frogs. Jimmy might have been named after a President, but he was really just a gerbil. And Curtis was wearing the rope. The rope was supposed to make everything all right.
Sure,
Sandy thought,
and no toddler wearing a pair of water-wings ever
drowned in a swimming pool.
If he said that to Curt, would Curtis laugh? No. Because Sandy was sitting in the big chair that night, the acting SC, the visible symbol of the PSP. But Sandy thought he would see laughter in Curt's eyes, just the same. Curtis had forgotten the rope had never been tested, that if the force hiding inside the Buick decided it wanted him, there might be a single last flash of purple light and then nothing but a length of yellow line lying on the cement floor with an empty loop at the end of it; so long, partner, happy trails to you, one more curious cat off hunting satisfaction in the big nowhere. But Sandy couldn't order him to stand down as he'd ordered Matt Babicki to drive down the hill. All he could do was get into an argument with him, and it was no good arguing with a man who had that bright and twirly let's-play-Bingo look in his eyes. You could cause plenty of hard feelings, but you could never convince the other guy that you had the right side of the argument.

'You want me to hold the other end of the rope?' Sandy asked him. 'You came in here wanting something, and it surely wasn't my opinion.'

'Would you?' Curt grinned. 'I'd like that.'

Sandy went out with him, and he held the rope with most of the coil snubbed around his elbow and Dicky-Duck Eliot standing behind him, ready to grab his belt loops if something happened and Sandy started to slide. The acting SC, standing in the side doorway of Shed 13, not braced but ready to brace if something funny happened, biting his lower lip and breathing just a little too fast. His pulse felt like maybe a hundred and twenty beats a minute. He could still feel the chill in the shed even though the thermometer was by then easing its way back up; in Shed B, early summer had been revoked and what one met at the door was the dank cold of a hunting camp when you arrive in November, the stove in the middle of the room as dead as an unchurched god. Time slowed to a crawl. Sandy opened his mouth to ask Curt if he was going to stay in there forever, then glanced down at his watch and saw only forty seconds had passed. He did tell Curt not to go around to the far side of the Buick. Too much chance of snagging the rope.

'And Curtis? When you open the trunk, stand clear!'

'Roger that.' He sounded almost amused, indulgent, like a kid promising Mother and Dad that no, he
won't
speed, he
won't
take a drink at the party, he
will
watch out for the other guy, oh gosh yes, of course, you bet. Anything to keep them happy long enough to get the Christ out of the house, and then . .

.
yeeeeeee-HAW!

He opened the driver's door of the Buick and leaned in past the steering wheel. Sandy braced again for the pull he more than half-expected, the
yank.
He must have communicated the feeling backward, because he felt Dicky grab his belt loops. Curt reached, reached, and then stood up holding the shoebox with the crickets inside. He peered through the holes. 'Looks like they're all still there,' he said, sounding a little disappointed.

'You'd think they'd be roasted,' Dicky-Duck said. 'All that fire.'

But there had been no fire, just light. There wasn't a single scorch-mark on the shed's walls, they could see the thermometer's needle standing in the fifties, and electing not to believe that number wasn't much of an option, not with the shed's dank chill pushing into their faces. Still, Sandy knew how Dicky Eliot felt.
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When your head was still pounding from the dazzle and the last of the afterimages still seemed to be dancing in front of your eyes, it was hard to believe that a bunch of crickets sitting on ground zero could come through unscathed.

Yet they had. Every single one of them, as it turned out. So did the bullfrog, except its yellow-black eyes had gone cloudy and dull. It was present and accounted for, but when it hopped, it hopped right into the wall of its cage. It had gone blind.

Curt opened the trunk and moved back from it all in the same gesture, a move almost like ballet and one most policemen know. Sandy braced in the doorway again, hands fisted on the slack rope, ready for it to go taut. Dicky-Duck once more snagged a tight hold on his belt loops. And again there was nothing. Curt leaned into the trunk.

'Cold in here,' he called. His voice sounded hollow, oddly distant. 'And I'm getting that smell - the cabbage smell. Also peppermint. And . . . wait . . .'

Sandy waited. When nothing came, he called Curt's name.

'I think it's salt,' Curt said. 'Like the ocean, almost. This is the center of it, the vortex, right here in the trunk. I'm sure of it.'

'I don't care if it's the Lost Dutchman Mine,' Sandy told him. 'I want you out of there. Now.'

'Just a second more.' He leaned deep into the trunk. Sandy almost expected him to jerk forward as if something was pulling him, Curt Wilcox's idea of a knee-slapper. Perhaps he thought of it, but in the end he knew better. He simply got Matt Babicki's windowbox and pulled it out. He turned and held it up so Sandy and Dicky could see. The flowers looked fine and blooming. They were dead a couple of days later, but there was nothing very supernatural about that; they had been frozen in the trunk of the car as surely as they would have been if Curtis had put them in the freezer for awhile.

'Are you done yet?' Sandy was even starting to sound like Old Gammer Dearborn to himself, but he couldn't help it.

'Yeah. Guess so.' Curtis sounding disappointed. Sandy jumped when he slammed the Buick's trunk-lid back down, and Dick's fingers tightened on the back of his pants. Sandy had an idea ole Dicky-Duck had come pretty close to yanking him right out the doorway and on to his ass in the parking lot. Curt, meantime, walked slowly toward them with the frog cage, the sneaker box, and the windowbox stacked up in his arms. Sandy kept coiling up the rope as he came so Curt wouldn't trip over it. When they were all outside again, Dicky took the cage and looked wonderingly at the blind bullfrog.

'That beats everything,' he said.

Curt slipped out of the loop around his waist, then knelt on the macadam and opened the shoebox. Four or five other Troopers had gathered around by then. The crickets hopped out almost as soon as Curt took the lid off the box, but not before both Curtis and Sandy had a chance to take attendance. Eight, the number of cylinders in yonder Buick's useless engine. Eight, the same number of crickets that had gone in.

Curt looked disgusted and disappointed. 'Nothing,' he said. 'In the end, that's what it always comes to. If there's a formula - some binomial theorem or quadratic equation or something like that - I don't see it.'

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'Then maybe you better give it a pass,' Sandy said.

Curt lowered his head and watched the crickets go hopping across the parking lot, widening out from each other, going their separate ways, and no equation or theorem ever invented by any mathematician who ever breathed could predict where any single one of them might end up. They were Chaos Theory hopping. The goggles were still hung around Curt's neck on their elastic strap. He fingered them for a few moments, then glanced at Sandy. His mouth was set. The disappointed look had gone out of his eyes. The other one, the half-crazed let's-play-Bingo-until-the-money's-all-gone look, had come back to take its place.

'Don't think I'm ready to do that,' he said. 'There must be . . .'

Sandy gave him a chance, and when Curtis didn't finish, he asked: 'There must be what?'

But Curtis only shook his head, as if he could not say. Or would not.

Three days went by. They waited for another bat-thing or another cyclone of leaves, but there was nothing immediate in the wake of the lightshow; the Buick just sat there. Troop D's piece of Pennsylvania was quiet, especially on the second shift, which suited Sandy Dearborn right down to the ground. One more clay and he'd be off for two. Huddle's turn to run the show again. Then, when Sandy came back, Tony Schoondist would be in the big chair, where he belonged. The temperature in Shed B still hadn't equalized with the temperature of the outside world, but was getting there. It had risen into the low sixties, and Troop D had come to think of the sixties as safe territory. For the first forty-eight hours after the monster light-quake, they'd kept someone out there around the clock. After twenty-four uneventful hours, some of the men had started grumbling about putting in the extra time, and Sandy couldn't much blame them. It was uncompensated time, of course. Had to be. How could they have sent Overtime Reports for Shed B-watching to Scranton? What would they have put in the space marked
REASON FOR OVERTIME ACTIVITY?

Curt Wilcox wasn't crazy about dropping the full-time surveillance, but he understood the realities of the situation. In a brief conference, they decided on a week's worth of spot checks, most to be performed by Troopers Dearborn and Wilcox. And if Tony didn't like that when he got back from sunny California, he could change it.