From a Buick 8 (32 page)

'I can't tell you this next part,' I said. 'I wasn't there.'

I turned to Huddie, Shirley, Eddie J. None of them looked comfortable. Eddie wouldn't meet my gaze at all.

'What do you say, guys?' I asked them. 'PCO Wilcox doesn't want any calls or codes, he just wants the story.' I gave Ned a satiric look he either didn't understand or chose not to understand.

'Sandy, what - ' Ned began, but I held up my palm like a traffic cop. I had opened the door to this. Probably opened it the first time I'd gotten to the barracks and seen him out mowing the lawn and hadn't sent him home. He wanted the story. Fine. Let him have it and be done.

'This boy is waiting. Which of you will help him out? And I want to have
all
of it. Eddie.'

He jumped as if I'd goosed him, and gave me a ner-vous look.

'What was the guy's name? The guy with the cowboy boots and the Nazi necklace?'

Eddie blinked, shocked. His eyes asked if I was sure. No one talked about that guy. Not, at least, until now. Sometimes we talked about the day of the tanker-truck, laughed about how Herb and that other guy had tried to make up with Shirley by picking her a bouquet of flowers out back (just before the shit hit the fan, that was), but not about the guy in the cowboy boots. Not him. Never. But we were going to talk about him now, by God.

'Leppler? Lippman? Lippier? It was something like that, wasn't it?'

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'His name was Brian Lippy,' Eddie said at last. 'Him and me, we went back a little.'

'Did you?' I asked. 'I didn't know that.'

I began the next part, but Shirley Pasternak told a surprising amount of the tale (once she came into it, that was), speaking warmly, eyes fixed on Ned's and one of her hands lying on top of his. It didn't surprise me that she should be the one, and it didn't surprise me when Huddie chimed in and began telling it with her, turn and turn about. What surprised me was when Eddie J. began to add first sidelights. . . then footlights. . . and finally spotlights. I had told him to stick around until he had something to say, but it still surprised me when his time came and he started talking. His voice was low and tentative at first, but by the time he got to the part about discovering that asshole Lippy had kicked out the window, he was speaking strongly and steadily, his voice that of a man who remembers everything and has made up his mind to hide nothing. He spoke without looking at Ned or me or any of us. It was the shed he looked at, the one that sometimes gave birth to monsters.

THEN:

Sandy

By the summer of 1988, the Buick 8 had become an accepted part of Troop D's life, no more or less a part of it than any other. And why not? Given time and a fair amount of goodwill, any freak can become a part of any family. That was what had happened in the nine years since the disappearance of the man in the black coat ('Oil's fine!') and Ennis Rafferty.

The thing still put on its lightshows from time to time, and both Curt and Tony continued to run experiments from time to time. In 1984, Curtis tried a videocam which could be activated by remote control inside the Buick (nothing happened). In '85, Tony tried much the same thing with a top-of-the-line Wollensak audio recorder (he got a faint off-and-on humming and the distant calling of some crows, nothing more). There were a few other experiments with live test animals. A couple died, but none disappeared.

On the whole, things were settling down. When the lightshows
did
happen, they were nowhere near as powerful as the first few (and the whopper in '83, of course). Troop D's biggest problem in those days
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was caused by someone who knew absolutely nothing about the Buick. Edith Hyams (aka The Dragon) continued to talk to the press (whenever the press would listen, that was) about her brother's disappearance. She continued to insist it was no ordinary disappearance (which once caused Sandy and Curt to muse on just what an 'ordinary disappearance' might be). She also continued to insist that Ennis's fellow officers Knew More Than They Were Telling. She was absolutely right on that score, of course. Curt Wilcox said on more than one occasion that if Troop D ever came to grief over the Buick, it would be that woman's doing. As a matter of public policy, however, Ennis's Troop-mates continued to support her. It was their best insurance, and they all knew it. After one of her forays in the press Tony said,

'Never mind, boys - time's on our side. Just remember that and keep smilin.' And he was right. By the mid-eighties, the representatives of the press were for the most part of longer returning her calls. Even WKML, the tri-country indie station whose Action News at Five broadcasts frequently featured stories about sightings of Sasquatch in the Lassburg Forest and such thoughtful medical briefings as
CANCER

IN THE WATER SUPPLY! IS YOUR TOWN NEXT?,
had begun to lose interest in Edith. On three more occasions, things appeared in the Buick's trunk. Once it was half a dozen large green beetles which looked like no beetles anyone in Troop D had ever seen. Curt and Tony spent an afternoon at Horlicks University, looking through stacks of entomology texts, and there was nothing like those green bugs in the books, either. In fact, the very shade of green was like nothing anyone in Troop D had ever seen before, although none could have explained exactly how it was different. Carl Brundage dubbed it Headache Green. Because, he said, the bugs were the color of the migraines he sometimes got. They were dead when they showed up, the whole half-dozen. Tapping their carapaces with the barrel of a screwdriver produced the sort of noise you would have gotten by tapping a piece of metal on a block of wood.

'Do you want to try a dissection?' Tony asked Curt.

'Do
you
want to try one?' Curt replied.

'Not particularly, no.'

Curt looked at the bugs in the trunk - most of them on their backs with their feet up - and sighed.

'Neither do I. What would be the point?'

So, instead of being pinned to a piece of corkboard and dissected while the video camera ran, the bugs were bagged, tagged with the date (the line on the tag forname/rank of oic was left blank, of course), arid stored away downstairs in that battered green file-cabinet. Allowing the alien bugs to make their journey from the Buick's trunk to the green file-cabinet unexamined was another step down Curt's road to acceptance. Yet the old look of fascination still came into his eyes sometimes. Tony or Sandy would see him standing at the roll-up doors, peering in, and that light would be there, more often than not. Sandy came to think of it as his Kurtis the Krazy Kat look, although he never told anyone that, not even the old Sarge. The rest of them lost interest in the Buick's misbegotten stillbirths, but Trooper Wilcox never did.

In Curtis, familiarity never bred contempt.

On a cold February day in 1984, five months or so after the appearance of the bugs, Brian Cole stuck his head into the SC's office. Tony Schoondist was in Scranton, trying to explain why he hadn't spent his entire budget appropriation for 1983 (there was nothing like one or two scrimpy SCs to make everyone else look bad), and Sandy Dearborn was holding down the big chair. By then it was fitting his ass quite
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nicely.

'Think you better take a little amble out to the back shed, boss,' Brian said. 'Code D.'

'What kind of Code D we talking about, Bri?'

'Trunk's up.'

'Are you sure it didn't just pop open? There haven't been any fireworks since just before Christmas. Usually - '

'Usually there's fireworks, I know. But the temperature's been too low in there for the last week. Besides, I can see something.'

That got Sandy on his feet. He could feel the old dread stealing its fat fingers around his heart and starting to squeeze. Another mess to clean up, maybe. Probably.
Please God don't let it be another
fish,
he thought.
Nothing that has to be hosed out of there by men wearing masks.

'Do you think it might be alive?' Sandy asked. He thought he sounded calm enough, but he did not feel particularly calm. 'The thing you saw, does it look - '

'It looks like some sort of uprooted plant,' Brian said. 'Part of it's hanging down over the back bumper. Tell you what, boss, it looks a little bit like an Easter lily.'

'Have Matt call Curtis in off the road. His shift's almost over, anyway.'

Curt rogered the Code D, told Matt he was out on Sawmill Road, and said he'd be back at base in fifteen minutes. That gave Sandy time to get the coil of yellow rope out of the hutch and to have a good long look into Shed 13 with the pair of cheap but fairly powerful binoculars that were also kept in the hutch. He agreed with Brian. The thing hanging out of the trunk, a draggled and membranous white shading to dark green, looked as much like an Easter lily as anything else. The kind you see about five days after the holiday, drooping and

going on dead.

Curt showed up, parked sloppily in front of the gas pump, and came on the trot to where Sandy, Brian, Huddie, Arky Arkanian, and a few others were standing at the shed windows in those sidewalk superintendent poses. Sandy held the binoculars out and Curt took them. He stood for nearly a full minute, at first making tiny adjustments to the focus-knob, then just looking.

'Well?' Sandy asked when he was finally finished.

'I'm going in,' Curt replied, a response that didn't surprise Sandy in the slightest; why else had he bothered to get the rope? 'And if it doesn't rear up and try to bite me, I'll photograph it, video it, and bag it. Just give me five minutes to get ready.'

It didn't take him even that. He came out of the barracks wearing surgical gloves - what were already coming to be known in the PSP as 'AIDS mittens' - a barber's smock, rubber galoshes, and a bathing cap over his hair. Hung around his neck was a Puff-Pak, a little plastic breathing mask with its own air supply that was good for about five minutes. In one of his gloved hands he had a Polaroid camera. There was a green plastic garbage bag tucked into his belt.

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Huddie had unlimbered the videocam and now he trained it on Curt, who looked
trè
s fantastiqueas he strode manfully across the parking lot in his blue bathing cap and red galoshes (and even more so when Sandy had knotted the yellow rope around his middle).

'You're beautiful!' Huddie cried, peering through the video camera. 'Wave to your adoring fans!'

Curtis Wilcox waved dutifully. Some of his fans would look at this tape in the days after his sudden death seventeen years later, trying not to cry even as they laughed at the foolish, amiable look of him. From the open dispatch window, Matt sang after him in a surprisingly strong tenor voice:
'Hug me . . .
you sexy thing! Kiss me . . . you sexy thing!'

Curt took all the ribbing well, but it was secondary to him, his mates' laughter like something overheard in another room. That light was in his eyes.

'This really isn't very bright,' Sandy said as he cinched the loop of the rope snugly around Curt's waist. Not with any real hope of changing Curt's mind, however. 'We should probably wait and see what develops. Make sure this is all, that there's nothing else coming through.'

'I'll be okay,' Curt said. His tone was absent; he was barely listening. Most of him was inside his own head, running over a checklist of things to do.

'Maybe,' Sandy said, 'and maybe we're starting to get a little careless with that thing.' Not knowing if it was really true, but wanting to say it out loud, try it on for size. 'We're starting to really believe that if nothing's happened to any of us so far, nothing ever will. That's how cops and lion-tamers get hurt.'

'We're fine,' Curt said, and then - appearing not to sense any contradiction - he told the other men to stand back. When they had, he took the video camera from Huddie, put it on the tripod, and told Arky to open the door. Arky pushed the remote clipped to his belt and the door rattled up on its tracks. Curt let the Polaroid's strap slip to his elbow, so he could pick up the videocam tripod, and went into Shed B. He stood for a moment on the concrete halfway between the door and the Buick, one gloved hand touching the Puff-Pak's mask under his chin, ready to pull it up at once if the air was as foul as it had been on the day of the fish.

'Not bad,' he said. 'Just a little whiff of something sweet. Maybe it really
is
an Easter lily.'

It wasn't. The trumpet-shaped flowers - three of them - were as pallid as the palms of a corpse, and almost translucent. Within each was a dab of dark blue stuft that looked like jelly. Hanging in the jelly were little pips. The stalks looked more like treebark than parts of a flowering plant, their green surfaces covered with a network of cracks and crenellations. There were brown spots that looked like some sort of fungoid growth, and these were spreading. The stems came together in a rooty clod of black soil. When he leaned toward this (none of them liked seeing Curt lean into the trunk that way, it was too much like watching a man stick his stupid head into a bear's mouth), Curt said he could smell that cabbagey aroma again. It was faint but unmistakable.

'And I tell you, Sandy, there's the smell of salt, as well. I know there is. I spent a lot of summers on Cape Cod, and you can't miss that smell.'

'I don't care if it smells like truffles and caviar,' Sandy replied. 'Get the hell out of there.'

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Curt laughed -
Silly old Gramma Dearborn! -
but he pulled back. He set the video camera pointing down into the trunk from its tripod, got it running, then took some Polaroids for good measure.

'Come on in, Sandy - check it out.'

Sandy thought it over. Bad idea, very bad idea.
Stupid
idea. No doubt about it. And once he had that clear in his head, Sandy handed the coil of rope to Huddie and went on in. He looked at the deflated flowers lying in the Buick's trunk (and the one hanging over the lip, the one Brian Cole had seen) and couldn't suppress a little shiver.