From a Buick 8 (5 page)

black hair falling beside one oddly made ear. Brad remembered the ear best, remembered it with great clarity. Something about it disturbed him deeply, perhaps even horrified him, but he couldn't explain just what it was. At this point, poesy failed him.
Melted, kinda, like he'd been in a fire
seemed to be the best he could do.

'Oil's fine!' the man in the black coat and hat said in his choked voice, and was gone around the corner in a final batlike swirl of dark cloth. In addition to the quality of the voice - that unpleasant, mucusy sound

- the man had an accent that made Brad Roach think of the old
Rocky and Bullwinkle
show, Boris Badinoff telling Natasha
Ve must stop moose und squeerul!

Brad went to the Buick, ambled down the side closest to the pumps (the driver had parked carelessly, leaving plenty of room between the car and the island), trailing one hand along the chrome swoop and the smooth paintjob as he went. That stroke was more admiring than impudent, although it might have had a bit of harmless impudence in it; Bradley was then a young man, with a young man's high spirits. At the back, bending over the fuel hatch, he paused. The fuel hatch was there, but the rear license plate wasn't. There wasn't even a plate
holder,
or screw-holes where a plate would normally go. This made Bradley realize what had struck him as wrong as soon as he heard the
ding-ding
of the bell and looked up at the car for the first time. There was no inspection sticker. Well, no business of his if there was no plate on the back deck and no inspection sticker on the windshield; either one of the local cops or a Static from Troop D just up the road would see the guy and nail him for it . . . or they wouldn't. Either way, Brad Roach's job was to pump gas.

He twirled the crank on the side of the hi-test pump to turn back the numbers, stuck the nozzle in the hole, and set the automatic feed. The bell inside the pump started to bing and while it did, Brad walked up the driver's side of the Buick, completing the circuit. He looked through the leftside windows as he went, and the car's interior struck him as singularly stark for what had been almost a luxury car back in the fifties. The seat upholstery was wren-brown, and so was the fabric lining the inside of the roof. The back seat was empty, the front seat was empty, and there was nothing on the floor -not so much as a gum-wrapper, let alone a map or a crumpled cigarette pack. The steering wheel looked like inlaid wood. Bradley wondered if that was the way they had come on this model, or if it -was some kind of special option. Looked ritzy. And why was it so
big'?
If it had had spokes sticking out of it, you would have thought it belonged on a millionaire's yacht. You'd have to spread your arms almost as wide as your chest just to grip it. Had to be some sort of custom job, and Brad didn't think it would be comfortable to handle on a long drive. Not a bit comfortable.

Also, there was something funny about the dashboard. It looked like burled walnut and the chromed controls and little appliances - heater, radio, clock - looked all right . . . they were in the right
places,
anyway . . . and the ignition key was also in the right place
(trusting soul, ain't he?
Brad thought), yet there was something about that setup that was very much not right. Hard to say what, though. Brad strolled back around to the front of the car again, admiring the sneering chrome grille (it was all Buick, that grille; that part, at least, was dead right) and verifying that there was no inspection sticker, not from PA or anyplace else. There were no stickers on the windshield at all. The Buick'sowner was apparently not a member of Triple-A, the Elks, the Lions, or the Kiwanis. He did not support Pitt or Penn State (at least not to the extent of putting a sticker on any of the Buick's windows), and his car wasn't protected by Mopar or good old Rusty Jones.

Pretty cool car just the same . . . although the boss would have told him that his job wasn't to admire the rolling stock but just to fill 'em fast.

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The Buick drank eleven dollars' worth of the good stuff before the feed cut off. That was a lot of gas in those days, when a gallon of hi-test could be purchased for seventy cents. Either the tank had been close to empty when the man in the black coat took the car out, or he'd driven it a far piece. Then Bradley decided that second idea had to be bullshit. Because the roads were still wet, still brimming over in the dips, for God's sake, but there wasn't a single mudstreak or splatter on the Buick's smooth blue hide. Not so much as a smear on those fat and luxy whitewalls, either. And to Bradley Roach, that seemed flat-out impossible.

It was nothing to him one way or the other, of course, but he could point out the lack of a valid inspection sticker (hell, there wasn't even an
invalid
one pasted there in the corner of the glass). Might get him a tip. Enough for a sixpack, maybe. He was still six or eight months from being able to buy legally, but there were ways and means if you were dedicated, and even then, in the early going, Bradley was dedicated.

He went back to the office, sat down, picked up his
Inside View,
and waited for the fellow in the black coat to come back. It was a damned hot day for a long coat like that, no doubt about it, but by then Brad thought he had that part figured out. The man was a SKA, just a little different from the ones around Statler. From a sect that allowed car-driving, it seemed. SKAs were what Bradley and his friends called the Amish. It stood for shitkicking assholes.

Fifteen minutes later, when Brad had finished reading 'We
Have
Been Visited!' by UFO expert Richard T. Rumsfeld(US Army Ret.) and had given close attention to a blonde Page Four Girl who appeared to be fly-fishing a mountain stream in her bra and panties, Brad realized he was
still
waiting. The guy hadn't gone to make any nickel-and-dime deposit, it seemed; that guy was clearly a shithouse millionaire.

Snickering, imagining the guy perched on the Jakes under the rusty pipes, sitting there in the gloom (the single lightbulb had burned out a month ago and neither Bradley nor Hugh had gotten around to changing it yet) with his black coat puddled all around him and collecting mouse-turds, Brad picked up his newspaper again. He turned to the joke page, which was good for another ten minutes (some of the jokes were so comical Brad read them three and even four times). He dropped the paper back on the desk and looked at the clock over the door. Beyond it, at the pumps, the Buick Roadmaster sparkled in the sun. Almost half an hour had passed since its driver had cried 'Oil's fine!' back over his shoulder in his strangly voice and then disappeared down the side of the building in a fine swirl of black cloth.
Was
he a SKA? Did
any
of them drive cars? Brad didn't think so. The SKAs thought anything with an engine was the work of Satan, didn't they?

Okay, so maybe he wasn't. But whatever he was, why wasn't he back?

All at once the image of that guy on the gloomy, discolored throne back there by the diesel pump didn't seem so funny. In his mind's eye, Brad could still see him sitting there with his coat puddled around him on the filthy linoleum and his pants down around his ankles, but now Brad saw him with his head down, his chin resting on his chest, his big hat (which didn't really look like an Amish hat at all) slewed forward over his eyes. Not moving. Not
breathing.
Not shitting but dead. Heart-attack or brain trembolism or something like that. It was possible. If the goddam King of Rock and Roll could croak while doing Number Two,
anyone
could.

'Naw,' Bradley Roach said softly. 'Naw, that ain't . . . he wudd'n . . .
naw!'

He picked up the paper, tried to read about the flying saucers that were keeping an eye on us, and
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couldn't convert the words into coherent thoughts. He put it down and looked out the door. The Buick was still there, shining in the sun.

No sign of the driver.

Half an hour . . . no, thirty-five minutes now. God
dang.
Bradley picked up
Inside View
and tried to read about teenage cultists in Florida. One of the girls had a great rack, but as far as Bradley Roach was concerned, Satan could have the rest of them.

Five more minutes passed and he found himself tearing strips off the newspaper and drifting them down to the wastebasket, where they formed piles of nervous confetti.

'Fuggit,' he said, and got to his feet. He went out the door and around the corner of the little white cinderblock cube where he'd worked since dropping out of high school. The restrooms were down at the back, on the east side. Brad hadn't made up his mind if he should play it straight -
Mister, are you all right? -
or humorous -
Hey Mister, I got a firecracker, if you need one.
As it turned out, he got to deliver neither of these carefully crafted phrases. The men's room door had a loose latch and was apt to fly open in any strong puff of wind unless bolted shut from the inside, so Brad and Hugh always stuffed a piece of folded cardboard into the crack to keep the door shut when the restroom wasn't in use. If the man from the Buick had been inside the toilet, the fold of cardboard would either have been in there with him (probably left beside one of the sink's faucets while the man tended his business), or it would be lying on the small cement stoop at the foot of the door. This latter was usually the case, Brad later told Ennis Rafferty; he and Hugh were always putting that cardboard wedge back in its place after the customers left. They had to flush the toilet as well, more often than not. People were careless about that when they were away from home. People were downright
nasty
when they were away from home. Not all, of course, but a surprising number. Right now, that cardboard wedge was poking out of the crack between the door and the jamb, just above the latch exactly where it worked the best. All the same, Brad opened the door to check, catching the little cardboard wedge neatly as it fell - as neatly as he would learn to open a bottle of beer on the driver's-side handle of his own Buick in later years. The little cubicle was empty, just as he'd known in his heart it would be. No sign that the toilet had been used, and there had been no sound of a flush as Brad sat in the office reading his paper. No beads of water on the rust-stained sides of the basin, either. It occurred to Brad then that the guy hadn't come around the side of the station to use the can but to take a look at Redfern Stream, which was pretty enough to warrant a peek (or even a snap of the old Kodak) from a passerby, running as it did with the Statler Bluffs on its north side and all those willows up on top, spreading out green like a mermaid's hair (there was a poet in the boy, all right, a regular Dylan Thomas). But around back there was no sign of the Buick's driver, either, only discarded auto parts and a couple of ancient tractor-axles lying in the weeds like rusty bones. The stream was babbling at the top of its lungs, running broad and foamy. Its swelling would be a temporary condition, of course - floods in western PA are spring events, as a rule - but that day the normally sleepy Redfern was quite the torrent.

Seeing how high the water was gave rise to a horrifying possibility in Bradley Roach's mind. He measured the steep slope down to the water. The grass was still wet with rain and probably goddanged slippery, especially if an unsuspecting SKA came thee-ing and thou-ing along in shoes with slippery leather soles. As he considered this, the possibility hardened to a near certainty in his mind. Nothing else explained the unused shithouse and the car still waiting at the hi-test pump,all loaded and ready to go, key
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still in the ignition. Old Mr Buick Roadmaster had gone around back for a peek at the Redfern, had foolishly dared the embankment slope to get an even better look . . . and then whoops, there goes your ballgame.

Bradley worked his own way down to the water's edge, slipping a couple of times in spite of his Georgia Giants but not falling, always keeping near some hunk of junk he could grab if he did lose his footing. There was no sign of the man at the water's edge, but when Brad looked downstream, he saw something caught in the lee of a fallen birch about two hundred yards from where he stood. Bobbing up and down. Black. It could have been Mr Buick Roadmaster's coat.

'Aw, shit,' he said, and hurried back to the office to call Troop D, which was at least two miles closer to his location than the local cop-shop. And that was how

NOW:

Sandy

we got into it,' I said. 'Shirley's predecessor was a guy named Matt Babicki. He gave the call to Ennis Rafferty - '

'Why Ennis, Ned?' Shirley asked. 'Quick as you can.'

'CAU,' he said at once. 'Closest available unit.' But his mind wasn't on that, and he never looked at her. His eyes were fixed on me.

'Ennis was fifty-five and looking forward to a retirement he never got to enjoy,' I said.

'And my father was with him, wasn't he? They were partners.'

'Yes,' I said.

There was plenty more to tell, but first he needed to get past this. 1 was quiet, letting him get used to the idea that his father and Roach, the man who had killed him, had once stood face to face and
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conversed like normal human beings. There Curtis had been, listening to Bradley Roach talk, flipping open his notebook, starting to jot down a time-sequence. By then Ned knew the drill, how we work fresh cases.

I had an idea this was what would stick with the kid no matter what else I had to tell him, no matter how wild and woolly the narrative might get. The image of the manslaughterer and his victim standing together not four minutes' brisk walk from where their lives would again collide, this time with a mortal thud, twenty-two years later.

'How old was he?' Ned almost whispered. 'My dad, how old was he on the day you're telling me about?'