From a Buick 8

Both of them, the Sarge who was and the Sarge who would be, knew what the press called such information-management, at least when the managers were cops: fascism. That was a little heavy, no doubt, but neither of them actually questioned the fact that all sorts of abuses lay a turn or two down that road. ('You want to see cops out of control, look at LA,' Tony said once. 'For every three good ones, you've got two Hitler Youth dingbats on motorcycles.') The business of the Buick was a bona fide Special Case, however. Neither of them questioned that, either.

Huddie wanted to know if he'd been right not to call Curtis. He was worried Curt would feel left out, passed over. If the Sarge wanted, Huddle said, he could go in the barracks that very second and make a telephone call. Happy to do it.

'Curtis is fine right where he is,' Tony said, 'and when it's explained to him why he wasn't called, he'll understand. As for the rest of you fellows . . .'

Tony stepped away from the roll-up door. His posture was easy and relaxed, but his face was very pale. The sight of that thing in the corner had affected him, too, even through a pane of glass. Sandy felt the same way himself. But he could also sense Sergeant Schoondist's excitement, the balls-to-the-wall curiosity he shared with Curt. The throbbing undertone that said Holy shit, do you fuckin BELIEVE it! Sandy heard it and recognized it for what it was, although he felt none of it himself, not a single iota. He didn't think any of the others did, either. Certainly Huddie's curiosity - and Arky's - had faded quickly enough. 'Gone the way of the blue suede shoe,'

as Curtis might have said.

'You men on duty listen up to me, now,' Tony said. He was wearing his slanted little grin, but to Sandy it looked a bit forced that night. 'There's fires in Statler, floods in Leesburg, and a rash of Piggly Wiggly robberies down in Pogus County; we suspect the Amish.'

There was some laughter at this.

'So what are you waiting for?'

'There was a general exodus of Troopers on duty followed by the sound of Chevrolet V-8 engines starting up. The off-duty fellows hung around for awhile, but nobody had to tell them to move along, move along, come on, boys, show's over. Sandy asked the Sarge if he should also saddle up and ride.

'No, Trooper,' he said. 'You're with me.' And he started briskly toward the walk-in door, pausing only long enough to examine the items Sandy had put into the carton: one of the evidence-documenting Polaroids, extra film, a yardstick, an evidence-collection kit. Sandy had also grabbed a couple of green plastic garbage bags from the kitchenette.

'Good job, Sandy.'

'Thanks, sir.'

'Ready to go in?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Scared as me, or not quite that scared?'

'I don't know.'

'Me, either. But I'm scared, all right. If I faint, you catch me.'

'Just fall in my direction, sir.'

He laughed. 'Come on. Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.'

Scared or not, the two of them made a pretty thorough investigation. They collaborated on a diagram of the she'd interior, and when Curt later complimented Sandy on it, Sandy nodded and agreed that it had been a good one. Good enough to take into court, actually. Still, a lot of the lines on it were wavery. Their hands began to shake almost from the moment they entered the shed, and didn't stop until they were back out again.

They opened the trunk because it had been open when Arky first looked in and noticed the thing in the corner, and although it was as empty as ever, they took Polaroids of it. They likewise photo'd the thermometer (which by then had gotten all the way up to seventy degrees), mostly because Tony thought Curt would want them to. And they took pictures of the corpse in the corner, took them from every angle they could think of. Every Polaroid showed that unspeakable single eye.

It was shiny, like fresh tar. Seeing himself reflected in it made Sandy Dearborn feel like screaming. And every two or three seconds, one of them would look back over his shoulder at the Buick Roadmaster.

When they were done with the photos, some of which they took with the yardstick lying beside the corpse, Tony shook out one of the garbage bags. 'Get a shovel,' he said.

'Don't you want to leave it where it is until Curt - '

'Probationary Trooper Wilcox can look at it down in the supply closet,' Tony said. His voice was oddly tight - strangled, almost - and Sandy realized he was working very hard not to be sick.

Sandy's own stomach took a queasy little lurch, perhaps in sympathy. 'He can look at it there to his heart's content. For once we don't have to worry about breaking the chain of evidence, because no district attorney is ever going to be involved. Meantime, we're scooping this shit up.' He wasn't shouting, but a raw little edge had come into his voice.

Sandy took a shovel from where it hung on the wall and slid the blade beneath the dead creature. The wings made a papery and somehow terrible crackling sound. Then one of them fell back, revealing a black and hairless side. For the second time since the two of them had stepped in, Sandy felt like screaming. He could not have told why, exactly, but there was something deep down in his head begging not to be shown any more.

And all the time they were smelling it. That sour, cabbagey reek.

Sandy observed sweat standing out all over Tony Schoondist's forehead in fine little dots.

Some of these had broken and run down his cheeks, leaving tracks like tears.

'Go on,' he said, holding the bag open. 'Go on, now, Sandy. Drop it in there before I lose my groceries.'

Sandy tilted it into the bag and felt a little bit better when the weight slid off the shovel.

After Tony had gotten a sack of the liquid-absorbing red sawdust they kept for oil-spills and sprinkled it over the gooey stain in the corner, both of them felt better. Tony twirled the top of the garbage bag with the creature inside, then knotted it. Once that was done, the two of them started backing toward the door.

Tony stopped just before they reached it. 'Photo that,' he said, pointing to a place high on the roll-up door behind the Buick - the door through which Johnny Parker had towed the car in the first place. To Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn, that already seemed like a long time ago. 'And that, arid there, and over there.'

At first Sandy didn't see what the Sarge was pointing at. He looked away, blinked his eyes once or twice, then looked back. And there it was, three or four dark green smudges that made Sandy think of the dust that rubs off a moth's wings. As kids they had solemnly assured each other that mothdust was deadly poison, it would blind you if you got some on your fingers and then rubbed your eyes.

'You see what happened, don't you?' Tony asked as Sandy raised the Polaroid and sighted in on the first mark. The camera seemed very heavy and his hands were still shivering, but he got it done.

'No, Sarge, I, ah . . . don't guess I do.'

'Whatever that thing is - bird, bat, some kind of robot drone - it flew out of the trunk when the lid came open. It hit the back door, that's the first smudge, and then it started bouncing off the walls. Ever seen a bird that gets caught in a shed or a barn?'

Sandy nodded.

'Like that.' Tony wiped sweat off his forehead and looked at Sandy. It was a look the younger man never forgot. He had never seen the Sarge's eyes so naked. It was, he thought, the look you sometimes saw on the faces of small children when you came to break up a domestic disturbance.

'Man,' Tony said heavily. 'Fuck.'

Sandy nodded.

Tony looked down at the bag. 'You think it looks like a bat?'

'Yeah,' Sandy said, then, 'No.' After another pause he added, 'Bullshit.'

Tony barked a laugh that sounded somehow haggard. 'That's very definitive. If you were on the witness stand, no defense attorney could peel that back.'

'I don't know, Tony.' What Sandy did know was that he wanted to stop shooting the shit and get back out into the open air. 'What do you think?'

'Well, if I drew it, it'd look like a bat,' Tony said. The Polaroids we took also make it look like a bat. But. . . I don't know exactly how to say it, but . . .'

'It doesn't feel like a bat,' Sandy said.

Tony smiled bleakly and pointed a finger at Sandy like a gun. 'Very zen, Grasshoppah. But those marks on the wall suggest it at least acted like a bat, or a trapped bird. Flew around in here until it dropped dead in the corner. Shit, for all we know, it died of fright.'

Sandy recalled the glaring dead eye, a thing almost too alien to look at, and thought that for the first time in his life he could really understand the concept Sergeant Schoondist had articulated. Die of fright? Yes, it could be done. It really could. Then, because the Sarge seemed to be waiting for something, he said: 'Or maybe it hit the wall so hard it broke its neck.'

Another idea came to him. 'Or - listen, Tony - maybe the air killed it.'

'Say what?'

'Maybe - '

But Tony's eyes had lit up and he was nodding. 'Sure,' he said. 'Maybe the air on the other side of the Buick's trunk is different air. Maybe it'd taste like poison gas to us . . . rupture our lungs . . .'

For Sandy, that was enough. 'I have to get out of here, Tony, or I'm gonna be the one who throws up.' But what he really felt in danger of was choking, not vomiting. All at once the normally broad avenue of his windpipe was down to a pinhole.

Once they were back outside (it was nearly dark by then and an incredibly sweet summer breeze had sprung up), Sandy felt better. He had an idea Tony did, too; certainly some of the color had come back into the Sarge's cheeks. Huddie and a few other Troopers came over to the two of them as Tony shut the walk-in side door, but nobody said anything. An outsider with no context upon which to draw might have looked at those faces and thought that the President had died or war had been declared.

'Sandy?' Tony asked. 'Any better now?'

'Yeah.' He nodded at the garbage bag, hanging like a dead pendulum with its strange weight at the bottom. 'You really think it might have been our air that killed it?'

'It's possible. Or maybe just the shock of finding itself in our world. I don't think I could live for long in the world this thing came from, tell you that much. Even if I could breathe the .

. .' Tony stopped, because all at once Sandy looked bad again. Terrible, in fact. 'Sandy, what is it? What's wrong?'

Sandy wasn't sure he wanted to tell his SC what was wrong, wasn't even sure he could. What he'd thought of was Ennis Rafferty. The idea of the missing Trooper added to what they had just discovered in Shed B suggested a conclusion that Sandy didn't •want to consider. Once it had come into his mind, though, it was hard to get it back out. If the Buick was a conduit to some other world, and the bat-thing had gone through it in one direction, then Ennis Rafferty had almost certainly gone through in the other.

'Sandy, talk to me.'

'Nothing wrong, boss,' Sandy replied, then had to bend over and grip his shins in both hands.

It was a good way to stop yourself from fainting, always assuming you had enough time to use it.

The others stood around watching him, still saying nothing, still wearing those long faces that said the King is dead, long live the King.

At last the world steadied again, and Sandy straightened up. 'I'm okay,' he said. 'Really.'

Tony considered his face, then nodded. He lifted the green bag slightly. 'This is going into the storage closet off the supply room, the little one where Andy Colucci keeps his stroke-books.'

A few nervous titters greeted this.

'That room is going to be off-limits except for myself, Curtis Wilcox, and Sandy Dearborn.

BPO, people, got it?'

They nodded. By permission only.

'Sandy, Curtis, and me - this is now our investigation, so designated.' He stood straight in the gathering gloom, almost at attention, holding the garbage bag in one hand and the Polaroids in the other. 'This stuff is evidence. Of what I have no current idea. If any of you come up with any ideas, bring them to me. If they seem like crazy ideas to you, bring them to me even quicker. It's a crazy situation. But, crazy or not, we will roll this case. Roll it as we would any other.

Questions?'

There were no questions. Or, if you wanted to look at it the other way, Sandy reflected, there was nothing but questions.

'We ought to have a man on that shed as much as we can,' Tony said.

'Guard duty, Sarge?' Steve Devoe asked.

'Let's call it surveillance,' Tony said. 'Come on, Sandy, stick with me until I get this thing stowed. I don't want to take it downstairs by myself, and that's the God's truth.'

As they started across the parking lot, Sandy heard Arky Arkanian saying that Curt was gonna get mad he dint get called, wait and see, dat boy was gonna be madder'n a wet hen.

But Curtis was too excited to be mad, too busy trying to prioritize the things he wanted to do, too full of questions. He asked only one of those before pelting clown to look at the corpse of the creature they'd found in Shed B: where had Mister Dillon been last evening? With Orville, he was told. Orville Garrett often took Mister D when he had a few days off.

Sandy Dearborn was the one who brought Curtis up to speed (with occasional help from Arky).

Curt listened silently, brows lifting when Arky described how the whole top of the thing's head had appeared to roll back, disclosing the eye. They lifted again when Sandy told him about the smudges on the door and the walls, and how they had reminded him of mothdust. He asked his question about Mister D, got his answer, then grabbed a pair of surgical gloves out of an evidence kit and headed downstairs at what was nearly a run. Sandy went with him. That much seemed to be his duty, somehow, since Tony had appointed him a co-investigator, but he stayed in the supply room while Curt went into the closet where Tony had left the garbage bag. Sandy heard it rustling as Curt undid the knot in the top; his skin prickled and went cold at the sound.

Rustle, rustle, rustle. Pause. Another rustle. Then, very low: 'Christ almighty.'

A moment later Curt came running out with his hand over his mouth. There was a toilet halfway down the hall leading to the stairs. Trooper Wilcox made it just in time.

Sandy Dearborn sat at the cluttered worktable in the supply room, listening to him vomit and knowing that the vomiting probably meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. Curtis wasn't going to back off. The corpse of the bat-thing had revolted him as much as it had Arky or Huddie or any of them, but he'd come back to examine it more fully, revulsion or no revulsion. The Buick -

and the things of the Buick - had become his passion. Even coming out of the storage closet with his throat working and his cheeks pale and his hand pressed to his mouth, Sandy had seen the helpless excitement in his eyes, dimmed only a little by his physical distress. Passion is the hardest taskmaster.

From down the hall came the sound of running water. It stopped, and then Curt came back into the supply room, blotting his mouth with a paper towel.

'Pretty awful, isn't it?' Sandy asked. 'Even dead.'

'Pretty awful,' he agreed, but he was heading back in there even as he spoke. 'I thought I understood, but it caught me by surprise.'

Sandy got up and went to the doorway. Curt was looking into the bag again but not reaching in.

Not yet, at least. That was a relief. Sandy didn't want to be around when the kid touched it, even wearing gloves. Didn't even want to think about him touching it.

'Was it a trade, do you think?' Curt asked.

'Huh?'

'A trade. Ennis for this thing.'

For a moment Sandy didn't reply. Couldn't reply. Not because the idea was horrible (although it was), but because the kid had gotten to it so fast.

'I don't know.'

Curt was rocking back and forth on the heels of his shoes and frowning down at the plastic garbage bag. 'I don't think so,' he said after awhile. 'When you make a swap, you usually do the whole deal at the same time. Right?'