From a Buick 8 (9 page)

odometer?'

Ennis shook his head. He looked hypnotized.

'All zeros. Which is fitting, I suppose. That car - thatpurportedcar - would never drive.' His eyes moved from Ennis to Tony and then back to Ennis again. 'Tell me you haven't seen it drive. That you haven't seen it move a single inch under its own power.'

'Actually, I haven't,' Ennis said. Which was true. There was no need to add that Bradley Roach claimed to have seen it moving under its own power, and that Ennis, a veteran of many interrogations, believed him.

'Good.' Bibi looked relieved. He clapped his hands, once more being Miss Frances. 'Time to go, children! Voice your thanks!'

'Thanks, Sergeant,' they chorused. The young woman of extraordinary beauty finished her iced tea, belched, and followed her white-coated colleagues back to the car in which they had come. Tony was fascinated to note that not one of the three gave the Buick a look. To them it was now a closed case, and new cases lay ahead. To them the Buick was just an old car, getting older in the summer sun. So what if pebbles fell out when placed between the knuckles of the tread, even when placed so far up along the curve of the tire that gravity should have held them in? So what if there were three portholes on one side instead of four?

They see it and don't see it at the same time,Bibi had said.
Young people are such wonderful idiots.
Bibi followed his wonderful idiots toward his own car (Bibi liked to ride to crime scenes in solitary splendor, when-ever possible), then stopped. 'I said the wood is wood, the vinyl is vinyl, and the glass is glass. You heard me say that?'

Tony and Ennis nodded.

'It appears to me that this purported car's exhaust system is also made of glass. Of course, I was only peering under from one side, but I had a flashlight. Quite a powerful one.' For a few moments he just stood there, staring at the Buick parked in front of Shed B, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. 'I have never heard of a car with a glass exhaust system,' he said finally, and then walked toward his car. A moment later, he and his children were gone.

Tony was uncomfortable with the car out where it was, not just because of possible storms but because anyone who happened to walk out back could see it. Visitors were what he was thinking of, Mr and Mrs John Q. Public. The State Police served John Q. and his family as well as they could, in some cases at the cost of their lives. They did not, however, completely trust them. John Q.'s family was not Troop D's family. The prospect of word getting around - worse,
of rumor
getting around - made Sergeant Schoondist squirm.

He strolled to Johnny Parker's little office (the County Motor Pool was still next door in those days) around quarter to three and sweet-talked Johnny into moving one of the plows out of Shed B and putting the Buick inside. A pint of whiskey sealed the deal, and the Buick was towed into the oil-smelling darkness that became its home. Shed B had garage doors at either end, and Johnny brought the Buick in through the back one. As a result, it faced the Troop D barracks from out there for all the years of its
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stay. It's something most of the Troopers became aware of as time passed. Not a forebrain thing, nothing like an organized thought, but something that floated at the back of the mind, never quite formed and never quite gone:

the pressure of its chrome grin.

There were eighteen Troopers assigned to Troop D in 1979, rotating through the usual shifts: seven to three, three to eleven, and the graveyard shift, when they rode two to a cruiser. On Fridays and Saturdays, the eleven-to-seven shift was commonly called Puke Patrol. By four o'clock on the afternoon the Buick arrived, most of the off-duty Troopers had heard about it and dropped by for a look. Sandy Dearborn, back from the accident on Highway 6 and typing up the paperwork, saw them going out there in murmuring threes and fours, almost like tour groups. CurtWilcox was off-duty by then and he conducted a good many of the tours himself, pointing out the mismatched portholes and big steering wheel, lifting the hood so they could marvel over the whacked-out mill with buick 8 printed on both sides of the engine block.

Orv Garrett conducted other tours, telling the story of Mister D's reaction over and over again. Sergeant Schoondist, already fascinated by the thing (a fascination that would never completely leave him until Alzheimer's disease erased his mind), came out as often as he could. Sandy remembered him standing just outside the open Shed B door at one point, foot up on the boards behind him, arms crossed. Ennis was beside him, smoking one of those little Tiparillos he liked and talking while Tony nodded. It was after three, and Ennis had changed into jeans and a plain white shirt. After three, and that was the best Sandy could say later on. He wished he could do better, but he couldn't. The cops came, they looked at the engine (the hood permanently up by that point, gaping like a mouth), they squatted down to look at the exotic glass exhaust system. They looked at everything, they touched nothing. John Q. and his family wouldn't have known to keep their mitts off, but these were cops. They understood that, while the Buick might not be an evidential
res
as of right then, later on that might change. Especially if the man who had left it at the Jenny station should happen to turn up dead.

'Unless that happens or something else pops, I intend to keep the car here,' Tony told Matt Babicki and Phil Candleton at one point. It was five o'clock or so by then, all three of them had been officially off-duty for a couple of hours, and Tony was finally thinking about going home. Sandy himself had left around four, wanting to mow the grass before sitting down to dinner.

'Why here?' Matt asked. 'What's the big deal, Sarge?'

Tony asked Matt and Phil if they knew about the Cardiff Giant. They said they didn't, and so Tony told them the story. The Giant had been 'discovered' in upstate New York's Onondaga Valley. It was supposed to be the fossilized corpse of a gigantic humanoid, maybe something from another world or the missing link between men and apes. It turned out to be nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a Binghamton cigar-maker named George Hull.

'But before Hull fessed-up,' Tony said, just about every-one in the whole round world - including P. T. Barnum - dropped by for a look. The crops on the surrounding farms were trampled to mush. Houses were broken into. There was a forest fire started by asshole John Q's camping in the woods. Even after Hull confessed to having the "petrified man" carved in Chicago and shipped Railway Express to upstate New York, people kept coming. They refused to believe the thing wasn't real. You've heard the saying

"There's a sucker born every minute?" That was coined in 1869, in reference to the Cardiff Giant.'

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'What's your point?' Phil asked.

Tony gave him an impatient look. 'The point? The point is that I'm not having any Cardiff fucking Giant on my watch. Not if 1 can help it. Or the goddam Buick of Turin, for that matter.'

As they moved back toward the barracks, Huddie Royer joined them (with Mister Dillon at his side, now heeling as neatly as a pooch in a dog-show). Huddie caught the Buick of Turin line and snickered. Tony gave him a dour look.

'No Cardiff Giant in western PA; you boys mark what I say and pass the word. Because word of mouth's how it's gonna be done - I'm not tacking any memo up on the bulletin board. I know there'll be some gossip, but it'll die down. I will
not
have a dozen Amish farms overrun by lookie-loos in the middle of the growing season, is that understood?'

It was understood.

By seven o'clock that evening, things had returned to something like normal. Sandy Dearborn knew that for himself, because he'd come back after dinner for his own encore look at the car. He found only three Troopers - two off-duty and one in uniform - strolling around the Buick. Buck Flanders, one of the off-duties, was snapping pictures with his Kodak. That made Sandy a bit uneasy, but what would they show? A Buick, that was all, one not yet old enough to be an official antique. Sandy got down on his hands and knees and peered under the car, using a flashlight that had been left nearby (and probably for just that purpose). He took a good gander at the exhaust system. To him it looked like Pyrex glass. He leaned in the driver's window for awhile (no hum, no chill), then went back to the barracks to shoot the shit with Brian Cole, who was in the SC chair that shift. The two of them started on the Buick, moved on to their families, and had just gotten to baseball when Orville Garrett stuck his head in the door.

'Either you guys seen Ennis? The Dragon's on the phone, and she's not a happy lady.'

The Dragon was Edith Hyams, Ennis's sister. She was eight or nine years older than Ennis, a longtime widow-lady. There were those in Troop D who opined that she had murdered her husband, simply nagged him into his grave. 'That's not a tongue in her mouth, that's a Ginsu knife,' Dicky-Duck Eliot observed once. Curt, who saw the lady more than the rest of the Troop (Ennis was usually his partner; they got on well despite the difference in their ages), was of the opinion that Edith was the reason Trooper Rafferty had never married. 'I think that deep down he's afraid they're all like her,' he once told Sandy.

Coming back to work after your shift is through is never a good idea, Sandy thought after spending a long ten minutes on the phone with The Dragon.
Where is he, he promised he'd be home by six-thirty
at the latest, I got the roast he wanted down at Pepper's, eighty-nine cents a pound, now it's
cooked like an old boot, gray as wash-water
(only of course what the lady said was
warsh-warter), if
he's down at The Country Way or The Tap you tell me right now, Sandy, so I can call and tell him
what's what.
She also informed Sandy that she was out of her water-pills, and Ennis was supposed to have brought her a fresh batch. So where the hell was he? Pulling overtime? That would be all right, she reckoned, God knew they could use the money, only he should have called. Or was he drinking?

Although she never came right out and said so, Sandy could tell that the Dragon voted for drinking. Sandy was sitting at the dispatch desk, one hand cupped over his eyes, trying to get a word in
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edgeways, when Curtis Wilcox bopped in, dressed in his civvies and looking every inch the sport. Like Sandy, he'd come back for another peek at the Roadmaster.

'Hold on, Edith, hold on a second,' Sandy said, and put the telephone against his chest. 'Help me out here, rookie. Do you know where Ennis went after he left?'

'He left?'

'Yeah, but he apparently didn't go home.' Sandy pointed to the phone, which was still held against his chest. 'His sister's on the line.'

'If he left, how come his car's still here?' Curt asked.

Sandy looked at him. Curtis looked back. And then, without a word spoken, the two of them jumped like Jack and Jill to the same conclusion.

Sandy got rid of Edith - told her he'd call her back, or have Ennis call her, if he was around. That taken care of, Sandy went out back with Curt.

There was no mistaking Ennis's car, the American Motors Gremlin they all made fun of. It stood not far from the plow Johnny Parker had moved out of Shed B to make room for the Buick. The shadows of both the car and the plow straggled long in the declining sun of a summer evening, printed on the earth like tattoos.

Sandy arid Curt looked inside the Gremlin and saw nothing but the usual road-litter: hamburger wrappers, soda cans, Tiparillo boxes, a couple of maps, an extra uniform shirt hung from the hook in back, an extra citation book on the dusty dashboard, some bits of fishing gear. All that rickrack looked sort of comforting to them after the sterile emptiness of the Buick. The sight of Ennis sitting behind the wheel and snoozing with his old Pirates cap tilted over his eyes would have been even more comforting, but there was no sign of him.

Curt turned and started back toward the barracks. Sandy had to break into a trot in order to catch up and grab his arm. 'Where do you think you're going?' he asked.

'To call Tony.'

'Not yet,' Sandy said. 'Let him have his dinner. We'll call him later if we have to. I hope to God we don't.'

Before checking anything else, even the upstairs common room, Curt and Sandy checked Shed B. They walked all around the car, looked inside the car, looked under the car. There was no sign of Ennis Rafferty in any of those places - at least, not that they could see. Of course, looking for sign in and around the Buick that evening was like looking for the track of one particular horse after a stampede has gone by. There was no sign of Ennis
specifically,
but . . .

'Is it cold in here, or is it just me?' Curt asked. They were about ready to return to the barracks. Curt had been down on his knees with his head cocked, taking a final look underneath the car. Now he stood
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up, brushing his knees. 'I mean, I know it's
not freezing
or anything, but it's colder than it should be, wouldn't you say?'

Sandy actually felt too hot - sweat was running down his face - but that might have been nerves rather than room-temperature. He thought Curt's sense of cold was likely just a holdover from what he'd felt, or thought he'd felt, out at the Jenny station.

Curt read that on his face easily enough. 'Maybe it is. Maybe it
is
just me. Fuck,
I
don't know. Let's check the barracks. Maybe he's downstairs in supply, coopin. Wouldn't be the first time.'

The two men hadn't entered Shed B by either of the big roll-up doors but rather through the doorknob-operated, people-sized door that was set into the east side. Curt paused in it instead of going out, looking back over his shoulder at the Buick.