From a Buick 8

'Do you agree?' Impatient now, his voice saying Sandy had to agree, it was so goddarn obvious.

'It seems likely, but I don't think we have enough evidence to be a hundred per cent sure yet,' Sandy replied at last. He knew saying that made him hopelessly stodgy in Curtis's eyes, but it was what he believed. '"One swallow doesn't make a summer." Ever heard that one?'

Curt stuck out his lower lip and blew an exasperated breath up his face. '"Plain as the nose on your face", ever heard that one?'

'Curt - '

Curt raised his hands as if to say no, no, they didn't have to go back out into the parking lot and pick up where they had left off. 'I see your point. Okay? I don't agree, but I see it.'

'Okay.'

'Just tell me one thing: when'll we have enough to draw some conclusions? Not about everything, mind you, but maybe a few of the bigger things. Like where the bat and the fish came from, for instance. If I had to settle for just one answer, it'd probably be that one.'

'Probably never.'

Curt raised his hands to the smoke-stained tin ceiling, then dropped them back to the table with a clump. 'Gahh! I knew you'd say that! I could strangle you, Dearborn!'

They looked at each other across the table, across the tops of beers neither one of them wanted, and Curt started to laugh. Sandy smiled. And then he was laughing, too.

NOW:

Sandy

Ned stopped me there. He wanted to go inside and call his mother, he said. Tell her he was okay, just eating dinner at the barracks with Sandy and Shirley and a couple of the other guys. Tell her lies, in other words. As his father had before him.

'Don't you guys move,' he said from the doorway. 'Don't you move a red inch.'

When he was gone, Huddie looked at me. His broad face was thoughtful. 'You think telling him all this stuff is a good idea, Sarge?'

'He gonna want to see all dose ole tapes, nex' t'ing,' Arky said dolefully. 'Hell's own rnovieshow.'

'I don't know if it's a good idea or a bad one,' I said, rather peevishly. 'I only know that it's a little late to back out now.' Then I got up and went inside myself.

Ned was just hanging up the phone. 'Where are you going?' he asked. His brows had drawn together, and I thought of standing nose to nose with his father outside The Tap, the scurgy little bar that had become Eddie J.'s home away from home. That night Curt's brows had drawn together in that exact same way. Like father, like son.

'Just to the toilet,' I said. 'Take it easy, Ned, you'll get what you want. What there is to get, anyway. But you have to stop waiting for the punchline.'

I went into the can and shut the door before he had a chance to reply. And the next fifteen seconds or so were pure relief. Like beer, iced tea is something you can't buy, only rent. When I got back outside, the smokers' bench was empty. They had stepped across to Shed B and were looking in, each with his own window in the roll-up door facing the rear of the barracks, each in that sidewalk superintendent posture I knew so well. Only now it's changed around in my mind. It's exactly backwards. Whenever I pass men lined up at a board fence or at sawhorses blocking off an excavation hole, the first things I think of are Shed B and the Buick 8.

'You guys see anything in there you like better than yourselves?' I called across to them.

It seemed they didn't. Arky came back first, closely followed by Huddie and Shirley. Phil and Eddie lingered a bit longer, and Curt's boy returned last to the barracks side of the parking lot.

Like father like son in this, too. Curtis had also always lingered longest at the window. If, that was, he had time to linger. He wouldn't make time, though, because the Buick never took precedence. If it had, he and I almost certainly would have come to blows that night at The Tap instead of finding a way to laugh and back off. We found a way because us getting into a scrape would have been bad for the Troop, and he kept the Troop ahead of everything - the Buick, his wife, his family when the family came. I once asked him what he was proudest of in his life. This was around 1986, and I imagined he'd say his son. His response was The uniform. I understood that and responded to it, but I'd be wrong not to add that the answer horrified me a little, as well.

But it saved him, you know. His pride in the job he did and the uniform he wore held him steady when the Buick might otherwise have unbalanced him, driven him into an obsessional madness. Didn't the job also get him killed? Yes, I suppose. But there were years in between, a lot of good years.

And now there was this kid, who was troubling because he didn't have the job to balance him. All he had was a lot of questions, and the naive belief that, just because he felt he needed the answers, those answers would come. Bosh to that, his father might have said.

'Temp in there's gone down another tick,' Huddie said as we all sat down again. 'Probably nothing, but she might have another surprise or two left in her. We'd best watch out.'

'What happened after you and my dad almost got into that fight?' Ned asked. 'And don't start telling me about calls and codes, either. I know about calls and codes. I'm learning dispatch, remember.'

What was the kid learning, though? After spending a month of officially sanctioned time in the cubicle with the radio and the computers and the modems, what did he really know? The calls and codes, yes, he was a quick study and he sounded as professional as hell when he answered the red phone with State Police Statler, Troop D, this is PCO Wilcox, how can I help?, but did he know that each call and each code is a link in a chain? That there are chains everywhere, each link in each one stronger than the last? How could you expect a kid, even a smart one, to know that? These are the chains we forge in life, to misquote Jacob Marley. We make them, we wear them, and sometimes we share them. George Morgan didn't really shoot himself in his garage; he just got tangled in one of those chains and hung himself. Not, however, until after he'd helped us dig Mister Dillon's grave on one of those brutally hot summer days after the tanker-truck blew over in Poteenville.

There was no call or code for Eddie Jacubois spending more and more of his time in The Tap; there was none for Andy Colucci cheating on his wife and getting caught at it and begging her for a second chance and not getting it; no code for Matt Babicki leaving; no call for Shirley Pasternak coming. There are just things you can't explain unless you admit a knowledge of those chains, some made of love and some of pure happenstance. Like Orville Garrett down on one knee at the foot of Mister Dillon's fresh grave, crying, putting D's collar on the earth and saying Sorry, partner, sorry.

And was all that important to my story? I thought it was. The kid, obviously, thought differently. I kept trying to give him a context and he kept repudiating it, just as the Buick's tires repudiated any invasion - yes, right down to the smallest sliver of a pebble that would simply not stay caught between the treads. You could put that sliver of pebble in, but five or ten or fifteen seconds later it would fall back out again. Tony had tried this experiment; I had tried it; this boy's father had tried it time and time and time again, often with videotape rolling. And now here sat the boy himself, dressed in civvies, no gray uniform to balance his interest in the Buick, here he sat repudiating even in the face of his father's undoubtedly dangerous eight-cylinder miracle, wanting to hear the story out of context and out of history, chainless and immaculate. He wanted what suited him. In his anger, he thought he had a right to that. I thought he was wrong, and I was sort of pissed at him myself, but I tell you with all the truth in my heart that I loved him, too. He was so much like his father then, you see. Right down to the let's-play-Bingo-with-the-paycheck look in his eyes.

'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 nervous 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?'

'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 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 for NAME/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 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.

Huddie had unlimbered the videocam and now he trained it on Curt, who looked très fantastique as 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.'

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.

'I know,' Curt said, lowering his voice so the Troopers outside wouldn't hear. 'Hurts just to look, doesn't it? It's the visual equivalent of hearing someone scrape a blackboard with his fingernails.'

Sandy nodded. Hole in one.

'But what triggers that reaction?' Curt asked. 'I can't put my finger on any one thing. Can you?'

'No.' Sandy licked his lips, which had gone dry. 'And I think that's because it's everything together. A lot of it's the white.'

'The white. The color.'

'Yeah. Nasty. Like a toad's belly.'

'Like cobwebs spun into flowers,' Curt said.

They looked at each other for a moment, trying to smile and not doing a very good job of it.

State Police poets, Trooper Frost and Trooper Sandburg. Next they'd be comparing the goddam thing to a summer's day. But you had to try doing that, because it seemed you could only grasp what you were seeing by an act of mental reflection that was like poetry.

Other similes, less coherent, were banging and swerving in Sandy's head. White like a communion wafer in a dead woman's mouth. White like a thrush infection under your tongue. White like the foam of creation just beyond the edge of the universe, maybe.

'This stuff comes from a place we can't even begin to comprehend,' Curt said. 'Our senses can't grasp any of it, not really. Talking about it's a joke - you might as well try to describe a four-sided triangle. Look there, Sandy. Do you see?' He pointed the tip of a gloved finger at a dry brown patch just below one of the corpse-lily flowers.

'Yeah, I see it. Looks like a burn.'

'And it's getting bigger. All the spots are. And look there on the flower.' It was another brown patch, spreading as they looked at it, gobbling an ever-widening hole in the flower's fragile white skin. 'That's decomposition. It's not going in quite the same way as the bat and the fish, but it's going, just the same. Isn't it?'

Sandy nodded.

'Pull the garbage bag out of my belt and open it, would you?'

Sandy did as he was asked. Curt reached into the trunk and grasped the plant just above its rooty bulb. When he did, a fresh whiff of that watery cabbage/spoiled cucumber stench drifted up to them. Sandy took a step back, hand pressed against his mouth, trying not to gag and gagging anyway.

'Hold that bag open, goddammit!' Curt cried in a choked voice. To Sandy he sounded like someone who has just taken a long hit off a primo blunt and wants to hold the smoke down as long as possible. 'Jesus, it feels nasty! Even through the gloves!'

Sandy held the bag open and shook the top. 'Hurry up, then!'

Curt dropped the decaying corpse-lily plant inside, and even the sound it made going down the bag's plastic throat was somehow wrong - like a harsh whispered cry, something being pressed relentlessly between two boards and almost silently choking. None of the similes was right, yet each seemed to flash a momentary light on what was basically unknowable. Sandy Dearborn could not express even to himself how fundamentally revolting and dismaying the corpse-lilies were. Them and all the Buick's miscarried children. If you thought about them too long, the chances were good that you really would go mad.

Curt made as if to wipe his gloved hands on his shirt, then thought better of it. He bent into the Buick's trunk instead, and rubbed them briskly on the brown trunk-mat. Then he stripped the gloves off, motioned for Sandy to open the plastic bag again, and threw them inside on top of the corpse-lily. That smell puffed out again and Sandy thought of once when his mother, eaten up by cancer and with less than a week to live, had belched in his face. His instinctive but feeble effort to block that memory before it could rise fully into his consciousness was useless.

Please don't let me be sick, Sandy thought. Ok please, no.

Curt checked to make sure the Polaroids he had taken were still tucked into his belt, then slammed the Buick's trunk. 'Let's get out of here, Sandy. What do you say?'

'I say that's the best idea you've had all year.'

Curt winked at him. It was the perfect wiseguy wink, spoiled only by his pallor and the sweat running down his cheeks and forehead. 'Since it's only February, that's not saying much. Come on.'

Fourteen months later, in April of 1985, the Buick threw a lightquake that was brief but extremely vicious - the biggest and brightest since The Year of the Fish. The force of the event mitigated against Curt and Tony's idea that the energy flowing from or through the Roadmaster was dissipating. The brevity of the event, on the other hand, seemed to argue for the idea. In the end, it was a case of you pays your money and you takes your choice. Same as it ever was, in other words.

Two days after the lightquake, with the temperature in Shed B standing at an even sixty degrees, the Buick's trunk flew open and a red stick came sailing up and out of it, as if driven by a jet of compressed air. Arky Arkanian was actually in the shed when this happened, putting his posthole digger back on its pegs, and it scared the hell out of him. The red stick clunked against one of the shed's overhead beams, came down on the Buick's roof with a bang, then rolled off and landed on the floor. Hello, stranger.

The new arrival was about nine inches long, irregular, the thickness of a man's wrist, with a couple of knotholes in one end. It was Andy Colucci, looking in at it through the binoculars five or ten minutes later, who determined that the knotholes were eyes, and what looked like grooves or cracks on one side of the thing was actually a leg, perhaps drawn up in its final death-agony. Not a stick, Andy thought, but some kind of red lizard. Like the fish, the bat, and the lily, it was a goner.

Tony Schoondist was the one to go in and collect the specimen that time, and that night at The Tap he told several Troopers he could barely bring himself to touch it. 'The goddamned thing was staring at me,' he said. 'That's what it felt like, anyway. Dead or not.' He poured himself a glass of beer and drank it down at a single draught. 'I hope that's the end of it,' he said. 'I really, really do.'

But of course it wasn't.

THEN:

Shirley

It's funny how little things can mark a day in your mind. That Friday in 1988 was probably the most horrible one in my life - I didn't sleep well for six months after, and I lost twenty-five pounds because for awhile I couldn't eat - but the way I mark it in time is by something nice.

That was the day Herb Avery and Justin Islington brought me the bouquet of field-flowers. Just before everything went crazy, that was.

They were in my bad books, those two. They'd ruined a brand-new linen skirt, horsing around in the kitchen. I was no part of it, just a gal minding her own business, getting a cup of coffee.

Not paying attention, and isn't that mostly when they get you? Men, I mean. They'll be all right for awhile, so you relax, even get lulled into thinking they might be basically sane after all, and then they just break out. Herb and that Islington came galloping into the kitchen like a couple of horses yelling about some bet. Justin is thumping Herb all around the head and shoulders and hollering Pay up, you son of a buck, pay up! and Herb is like We were just kidding around, you know I don't bet when I play cards, let hose of me!

But laughing, both of them. Like loons. Justin was half up on Herb's back, hands around his neck, pretending to choke him. Herb was trying to shake him off, neither of them looking at me or even knowing I was there, standing by the Mr Coffee in my brand-new skirt. Just PCO Pasternak, you know

- part of the furniture.

'Look out, you two galoots!' I yelled, but it was too late. They ran smack into me before I could put my cup down and there went the coffee, all down my front. Getting it on the blouse didn't bother me, it was just an old thing, but the skirt was brand-new. And nice. I'd spent half an hour the night before, fixing the hem.

I gave a yell and they finally stopped pushing and thumping. Justin still had one leg around Herb's hip and his hands around his neck. Herb was looking at me with his mouth hung wide open. He was a nice enough fellow (about Islington I couldn't say one way or the other; he was transferred over to Troop K in Media before I really got to know him), but with his mouth hung open that way, Herb Avery looked as dumb as a bag of hammers.

'Shirley, oh jeez,' he said. You know, he sounded like Arky, now that I think back, same accent, just not quite as thick. 'I never sar' you dere.'

'I'm not surprised,' I said, 'with that other one trying to ride you like you were a horse in the goddam Kentucky Derby.'

'Are you burned?' Justin asked.

'You bet I'm burned,' I said. 'This skirt was thirty-five dollars at J.C. Penney and it's the first time I wore it to work and it's ruined. You want to believe I'm burned.'

'Jeepers, calm down, we're sorry,' Justin said. He even had the gall to sound offended. And that's also men as I've come to know them, pardon the philosophy. If they say they're sorry, you're supposed to go all mellow, because that takes care of everything. Doesn't matter if they broke a window, blew up the powerboat, or lost the kids' college fund playing blackjack in Atlantic City. It's like Hey, I said I was sorry, do you have to make a federal case of it?

'Shirley - ' Herb started.

'Not now, honeychile, not now,' I said. 'Just get out of here. Right out of my sight.'

Trooper Islington, meanwhile, had grabbed a handful of napkins off the counter and started mopping the front of my skirt.

'Stop that!' I said, grabbing his wrist. 'What do you think this is, Free Feel Friday?'

'I just thought . . . if it hasn't set in yet . . .'

I asked him if his mother had any kids that lived and he started in with Well Jesus, (if that's the way you feel, all huffy and offended.

'Do yourself a favor,' I said, 'and go right now. Before you end up wearing this goddam coffee pot for a necklace.'

Out they went, more slinking than walking, and for quite awhile afterward they steered wide around me, Herb shamefaced and Justin Islington still wearing that puzzled, offended look - I said I was sorry, what do you want, egg in your beer?

Then, a week later - on the day the shit hit the fan, in other words - they showed up in dispatch at two in the afternoon, Justin first, with the bouquet, and Herb behind him. Almost hiding behind him, it looked like, in case I should decide to start hucking paperweights at them.

Thing is, I'm not much good at holding a grudge. Anyone who knows me will tell you that. I do all right with them for a day or two, and then they just kind of melt through my fingers.

And the pair of them looked cute, like little boys who want to apologize to Teacher for cutting up dickens in the back of the room during social studies. That's another thing about men that gets you, how in almost the blink of a damned eye they can go from being loudmouth galoots who cut each other in the bars over the least little thing - baseball scores, for the love of God - to sweeties right out of a Norman Rockwell picture. And the next thing you know, they're in your pants or trying to get there.

Justin held out the bouquet. It was just stuff they'd picked in the field behind the barracks.

Daisies, black-eyed susans, things of that nature. Even a few dandelions, as I recall. But that was part of what made it so cute and disarming. If it had been hothouse roses they'd bought downtown instead of that kid's bouquet, I might have been able to stay mad a little longer.

That was a good skirt, and I hate hemming the damned things, anyway.

Justin Islington out in front because he had those blue-eyed football-player good looks, complete with the one curl of dark hair tumbled over his forehead. Supposed to make me melt, and sort of did. Holding the flowers out. Shucks, oh gorsh, Teacher. There was even a little white envelope stuck in with the flowers.

'Shirley,' Justin said - solemn enough, but with that cute little twinkle in his eyes - 'We want to make up with you.'

'That's right,' Herb said. 'I hate having you mad at us.'

'I do, too,' Justin said. I wasn't so sure that one meant it, but I thought Herb really did, and that was good enough for me.

'Okay,' I said, and took the flowers. 'But if you do it again - '

'We won't!' Herb said. 'No way! Never!' Which is what they all say, of course. And don't accuse me of being a hardass, either. I'm just being realistic.

'If you do, I'll thump you crosseyed.'I cocked an eyebrow at Islington. 'Here's something your mother probably never told you, you being a pointer instead of a setter: sorry won't take a coffee stain out of a linen skirt.'

'Be sure to look in the envelope,' Justin said, still trying to slay me with those bright blue eyes of his.

I put the vase down on my desk and plucked the envelope out of the daisies. 'This isn't going to puff sneezing powder in my face or anything like that, is it?' I asked Herb. I was joking, but he shook his head earnestly. Looking at him that way, you had to wonder how he could ever stop anyone and give them a ticket for speeding or reckless driving without getting a ration of grief.

But Troopers are different on the highway, of course. They have to be.

I opened the envelope, expecting a little Hallmark card with another version of I'm sorry on it, this one written in flowery rhymes, but instead there was a folded piece of paper. I took it out, unfolded it, and saw it was a J.C. Penney gift certificate, made out to me in the amount of fifty dollars.

'Hey, no,' I said. All at once I felt like crying. And while I'm at it, that's the other thing about men -just when you're at your most disgusted with them, they can lay you out with some gratuitous act of generosity and all at once, stupid but true, instead of being mad you feel ashamed of yourself for ever having had a mean and cynical thought about them. 'Fellas, you didn't need to - '

'We did need to,' Justin said. 'That was double dumb, horsing around in the kitchen like that.'

'Triple dumb,' Herb said. He was bobbing his head up and down, never taking his eyes off me.

'But this is too much!'

Islington said, 'Not according to our calculations. We had to figure in the annoyance factor, you see, as well as the pain and suffering - '

'I didn't get burned, that coffee was only luke - '

'You're taking it, Shirley,' Herb said, very firmly. He hadn't gotten all the way back to being Mr State Cop Marlboro Man, but he was well on his way. 'It's a done deal.'

I'm really glad they did that, and I'll never forget it. What happened later was so horrible, you see. It's nice to have something that can balance out a little bit of that horror, some act of ordinary kindness like two goofs paying not just for the skirt they spoiled but for the inconvenience and exasperation. And giving me flowers on top of that. When I remember the other part, I try to remember those guys, too. Especially the flowers they picked out back.

I thanked them and they headed upstairs, probably to play chess. There used to be a tournament here toward the end of every summer, with the winner getting this little bronze toilet seat called The Scranton Cup. All that kind of got left behind when Lieutenant Schoondist retired. The two of them left me with the look of men who've done their duty. I suppose that in a way they had. I felt that they had, anyway, and I could do my part by getting them a big box of chocolates or some winter hand-warmers with what was left over from the gift certificate after I'd bought a new skirt. Hand-warmers would be more practical, but maybe a little too domestic. I was their dispatcher, not their den mother, after all. They had wives to buy them hand-warmers.

Their silly little peace bouquet had been nicely arranged, there were even a few springs of green to give it that all-important town florist's feel, but they hadn't thought to add water.

Arrange the flowers, then forget the water: it's a guy thing. I picked up the vase and started toward the kitchen and that was when George Stankowski came on the radio, coughing and sounding scared to death. Let me tell you something you can file away with whatever else you consider to be the great truths of life: only one thing scares a police communications officer more than hearing a Trooper in the field actually sounding scared on the radio, and that's one calling in a 29-99.

Code 99 is General response required. Code 29 . . . you look in the book and you see only one word under 29. The word is catastrophe.

'Base, this is 14. Code 29-99, do you copy? Two-niner-niner-niner.'

I put the vase with the wildflowers in it back down on my desk, very carefully. As I did, I had a very vivid memory: hearing on the radio that John Lennon had died. I was making breakfast for my dad that day. I was going to serve him and then just dash, because I was late for school. I had a glass bowl with eggs in it curled against my stomach. I was beating them with a whisk. When the man on the radio said that Lennon had been shot in New York City, I set the glass bowl down in the same careful way I now set down the vase.

'Tony!' I called across the barracks, and at the sound of my voice (or the sound of what was in my voice), everyone stopped what they were doing. The talk stopped upstairs, as well. 'Tony, George Stankowski is 29-99!' And without waiting, I scooped up the microphone and told George that I copied, five-by, and come on back.

'My 20 is County Road 46, Poteenville,' he said. I could hear an uneven crackling sound behind his transmission. It sounded like fire. Tony was standing in my doorway by then, and Sandy Dearborn in his civvies, with his cop-shoes hung from the fingers of one hand. 'A tanker-truck has collided with a schoolbus and is on fire. That's the tanker that's on fire, but the front half of the schoolbus is involved, copy that?'

'Copy,' I said. I sounded okay, but my lips had gone numb.

'This is a chemical tanker, Norco West, copy?'

'I copy Norco West, 14.' Writing it on the pad beside the red telephone in large capital letters. 'Placks?' Short for placards, the little diamonds with icons for fire, gas, radiation, and a few other fun things.

'Ah, can't make out the placks, too much smoke, but there's white stuff coming out and it's catching fire as it runs down the ditch and across the highway, copy that?' George had started coughing into his mike again.

'Copy,' I said. 'Are you breathing fumes, 14? You don't sound so good, over?'

'Ah, roger that, roger fumes, but I'm okay. The problem . . .' But before he could finish, he started coughing again.

Tony took the mike from me. He patted my shoulder to say I'd been doing all right, he just couldn't bear to stand there listening anymore. Sandy was putting on his shoes. Everyone else was drifting toward dispatch. There were quite a few guys there, with the shift change coming up. Even Mister Dillon had come out of the kitchen to see what all the excitement was about.

'The problem's the school,' George went on when he could. 'Poteenville Grammar is only two hundred yards away.'

'School's not in for almost another month, 14. You - '

'Break, break. Maybe not, but I see kids.'

Behind me someone murmured, 'August is Crafts Month out there. My sister's teaching pottery to nine- and ten-year-olds.' I remember the terrible sinking feeling I got in my chest when I heard that.

'Whatever the spill is, I'm upwind of it,' George went on when he could. 'The school isn't, I repeat the school is not. Copy?'

'Copy, 14,' Tony said. 'Do you have FD support?'

'Negative, but I hear sirens.' More coughing. 'I was practically on top of this when it happened, close enough to hear the crash, so I got here first. Grass is on fire, fire's headed toward the school. I see kids on the playground, standing around and watching. I can hear the alarm inside, so I have to guess they've been evacked. Can't tell if the fumes have gotten that far, but if they haven't, they will. Send the works, boss. Send the farm. This is a legitimate 29.'

Tony: 'Are there casualities on the bus, 14? Do you see casualties, over?'

I looked at the clock. It was quarter past two. If we were lucky, the bus would've been coming, not going - arriving to take the kids home from making their pots and jars.

'Bus appears empty except for the driver. I can see him - or maybe it's her - slumped over the wheel. That's the half in the fire and I'd have to say the driver is DRT, copy?'

DRT is a slang abbreviation the PSP picked up in the ER's back in the seventies. It stands for

'dead right there'.

'Copy, 14,' Tony said. 'Can you get to where the kids are?'

Cough-cough-cough. He sounded bad. 'Roger, base, there's an access road runs alongside the soccer field. Goes right to the building, over.'

'Then get in gear,' Tony said. He was the best I ever saw him that day, as decisive as a general on the field of battle. The fumes turned out not to be all that toxic after all, and most of the burning was leaking gasoline, but of course none of us knew that then. For all George Stankowski knew, Tony had just signed his death warrant. And sometimes that's the job, yes.

'Roger, base, rolling.'

'If they're getting gassed, stuff them in your cruiser, sit them on the hood and the trunk, put them on the roof hanging on to the lightbars. Get as many as you can, copy that?'

'Copy, base, 14 out.'

Click. That last click seemed very loud.

Tony looked around. '29-99, you all heard it. Assigned units, all rolling. Those of you waiting for switch-over rides at three, get Kojak lights out of the supply room and run your personals. Shirley, bend every duty-officer you can raise.'

'Yes, sir. Should I start calling OD's?'

'Not yet. Huddie Royer, where are you?'

'Here, Sarge.'

'You're anchoring.'

There were no movie-show protests about this from Huddie, nothing about how he wanted to be out there with the rest of the crew, fighting fire and poison gas, rescuing children. He just said yessir.

'Check Pogus County FD, find out what they're rolling, find out what Lassburg and Statler's rolling, call Pittsburgh OER, anyone else you can think of

'How about Norco West?'

Tony didn't quite slap his forehead, but almost. 'Oh you bet.' Then he headed for the door, Curt beside him, the others right behind them, Mister Dillon bringing up the rear.

Huddie grabbed his collar. 'Not today, boy. You're here with me and Shirley.' Mister D sat down at once; he was well-trained. He watched the departing men with longing eyes, just the same.

All at once the place seemed very empty with just the two of us there - the three of us, if you counted D. Not that we had time to dwell on it; there was plenty to do. I might have noticed Mister Dillon getting up and going to the back door, sniffing at the screen and whining way back low in his throat. I think I did, actually, but maybe that's only hindsight at work. If I did notice, I probably put it down to disappointment at being left behind. What I think now is that he sensed something starting to happen out in Shed B. I think he might even have been trying to let us know.

I had no time to mess with the dog, though - not even time enough to get up and shut him in the kitchen, where he might have had a drink from his water bowl and then settled down. I wish I'd made time; poor old Mister D might have lived another few years. But of course I didn't know. All I knew right then was that I had to find out who was on the road and where. I had to bend them west, if I could and they could. And while I worked on that, Huddie was in the SC's office, hunched over the desk and talking into the phone with the intensity of a man who's making the biggest deal of his life.

I got all my active officers except for Unit 6, which was almost here ('20-base in a tick' had been my last word from them). George Morgan and Eddie Jacubois had a delivery to make before heading over to Poteenville. Except, of course, 6 never did get to Poteenville that day. No, Eddie and George never got to Poteenville at all.

THEN:

Eddie

It's funny how a person's memory works. I didn't recognize the guy who got out of that custom Ford pickup, not to begin with. To me he was just a red-eyed punk with an inverted crucifix for an earring and a silver swastika hung around his neck on a chain. I remember the stickers. You learn to read the stickers people put on their rides; they can tell you a lot. Ask any motor patrol cop.

I DO WHATEVER THE LITTLE VOICES TELL ME TO on the left side of this guy's back bumper, I EAT AMISH

on the right. He was unsteady on his feet, and probably not just because he was wearing a pair of fancy-stitched cowboy boots with those stacked heels. The red eyes peeking out from under his scraggle of black hair suggested to me that he was high on something. The blood on his right hand and spattered on the right sleeve of his T-shirt suggested it might be something mean. Angel-dust would have been my guess. It was big in our part of the world back then. Crank came next. Now it's ex, and I'd give that shit away myself, if they'd let me. At least it's mellow. I suppose it's also possible that he was gazzing - what the current crop of kids calls huffing. But I didn't think I knew him until he said, 'Hey, I be goddam, it's Fat Eddie.'

Bingo, just like that I knew. Brian Lippy. He and I went back to Statler High, where he'd been a year ahead of me. Already majoring in Dope Sales & Service. Now here he was again, standing on the edge of the highway and swaying on the high heels of his fancy cowboy boots, head-down Christ hanging from his ear, Nazi twisted cross around his neck, numbfuck stickers on the bumper of his ride.

'Hi there, Brian, want to step away from the truck?' I said.

When I say the truck was a custom, I mean it was one of those bigfoot jobs. It was parked on the soft shoulder of the Humboldt Road, not a mile and a half from the intersection where the Jenny station stood . . . only by that summer, the Jenny'd been closed two or three years. In truth, the truck was almost in the ditch. My old pal Brian Lippy had swerved way over when George hit the lights, another sign that he wasn't exactly straight.

I was glad to have George Morgan with me that day. Mostly riding single is all right, but when you happen on a guy who's all over the road because he's whaling on the person sitting next to him in the cab of the truck he's driving, it's nice to have a partner. As for the punching, we could see it. First as Lippy drove past our 20 and then as we pulled out behind him, this silhouette driver pistoning out his right arm, his right fist connecting again and again with the side of the passenger's silhouette head, too busy-busy-busy to realize the fuzz was crawling right up his tailpipe until George hit the reds. Fuck me til I cry, I think, ain't that prime. Next thing my old pal Brian's over on the shoulder and half in the ditch like he's been expecting it all his life, which on some level he probably has been.

If it's pot or tranks, I don't worry as much. It's like ex. They go, 'Hey, man, what's up? Did I do something wrong? I love you.' But stuff like angel dust and PCP makes people crazy. Even glueheads can go bonkers. I've seen it. For another thing, there was the passenger. It was a woman, and that could make things a lot worse. He might have been punching the crap out of her, but that didn't mean she might not be dangerous if she saw us slapping the cuffs on her favorite Martian.

Meantime, my old pal Brian wasn't stepping away from the truck as he'd been asked. He was just standing there, grinning at me, and how in God's name I hadn't recognized him right off the bat was a mystery, because at Statler High he'd been one of those kids •who makes your life hell if he notices you. Especially if you're a little pudgy or pimply, and I was both. The Army took the weight off- it's the only diet program I know where they pay you to participate - and the pimples took care of themselves in time like they almost always do, but in SHS I'd been this guy's afternoon snack any day he wanted. That "was another reason to be happy George was with me. If I'd been alone, my old pal Bri might have gotten the idea that if he put the evil eye on me, I'd still shrivel. The more stoned he was, the more apt he was to think that.

'Step away from the truck, sir,' George said in his flat and colorless Trooper voice. You'd never believe, hearing him talk to some John Q. at the side of the road, that he could scream himself hoarse on the Little League field, yelling at kids to bunt the damn ball and to keep their heads down while they were running the bases. Or kidding with them on the bench before their games to loosen them up.

Lippy had never torn the Fruit Loops off any of George's shirts in study hall period four, and maybe that's why he stepped away from the truck when George told him to. Looking down at his boots as he did it, losing the grin. When guys like Brian Lippy lose the grin, what comes in to take its place is this kind of dopey sullenness.

'Are you going to be trouble, sir?' George asked. He hadn't drawn his gun, but his hand was on the butt of it. 'If you are, tell me now. Save us both some grief Lippy didn't say anything. Just looked down at his boots.

'His name is Brian?' George asked me.

'Brian Lippy.' I was looking at the truck. Through the back window I could see the passenger, still sitting in the middle, not looking at us. Head dropped. I thought maybe he'd beaten her unconscious. Then one hand went up to her mouth and out of the mouth came a plume of cigarette smoke.

'Brian, I want to know if we're going to have trouble. Answer up so I can hear you, now, just like a big boy.'

'Depends,' Brian said, lifting his upper lip to get a good sneer on the word. I started toward the truck to do my share of the job. When my shadow passed over the toes of his boots, Brian kind of recoiled and took a step backward, as if it had been a snake instead of a shadow. He was high, all right, and to me it was seeming more like PCP or angel dust all the time.

'Let me have your driver's license and registration,' George said.

Brian paid no immediate attention. He was looking at me again. 'ED-die JACK-you-BOYS,' he said, chanting it the way he and his friends always had back in high school, making a joke out of it. He hadn't worn any head-down Christs or Nazi swastikas back at Statler High, though; they would have sent him home if he'd tried that shit. Anyway, him saying my name like that got to me.

It was like he'd found an old electrical switch, dusty and forgotten behind a door but still wired up. Still hot.

He knew it, too. Saw it and started grinning. 'Fat Eddie JACK-you-BOYS. How many boys did you jack, Eddie? How many boys did you jack in the shower room? Or did you just get right down on your knees and suck em off? Straight to the main event. Mister Takin Care of Business.'

'Want to close your mouth, Brian?' George asked. 'You'll catch a fly.' He took his handcuffs off his belt.

Brian Lippy saw them and started to lose the grin again. 'What you think you gonna do with those?'

'If you don't hand me your operating papers right now, I'm going to put them on you, Brian.

And if you resist, I can guarantee you two things: a broken nose and eighteen months in Castlemora for resisting arrest. Could be more, depending on which judge you draw. Now what do you think?'

Brian took his wallet out of his back pocket. It was a greasy old thing with the logo of some rock group - Judas Priest, I think - inexpertly burned into it. Probably with the tip of a soldering iron. He started thumbing through the various compartments.

'Brian,' I said.

He looked up.

'The name is Jacubois, Brian. Nice French name. And I haven't been fat for quite awhile now.'

'You'll gain it back,' he said, 'fat boys always do.'

I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. He sounded like some halfbaked guest on a talkshow.

He glowered at me, but there was something uncertain in it. He'd lost the advantage and he knew it.

'Little secret,' I said. 'High school's over, my friend. This is your actual, real life. I know that's hard for you to believe, but you better get used to it. It's not just detention anymore. This actually counts.'

What I got was a kind of stupid gape. He wasn't getting it. They so rarely do.

'Brian, I want to see your paperwork with no more delay,' George said. 'You put it right in my hand.' And he held his hand out, palm up. Not very wise, you might say, but George Morgan had been a State Trooper for a long time, and in his judgment, this situation was now going in the right direction. Right enough, anyway, for him to decide he didn't need to put the cuffs on my old friend Brian just to show him who was in charge.

I went over to the truck, glancing at my watch as I did. It was just about one-thirty in the afternoon. Hot. Crickets singing dry songs in the roadside grass. The occasional car passing by, the drivers slowing down for a good look. It's always nice when the cops have someone pulled over and it's not you. That's a real daymaker.

The woman in the truck was sitting with her left knee pressed against the chrome post of Brian's Hurst shifter. Guys like Brian put them in just so they can stick a Hurst decal in the window, that's what I think. Next to the ones saying Fram and Pennzoil. She looked about twenty years old with long ironed brownette hair, not particularly clean, hanging to her shoulders. Jeans and a white tank top. No bra. Fat red pimples on her shoulders. A tat on one arm that said AC/DC

and one on the other saying BRIAN MY LUV. Nails painted candycane pink but all bitten down and ragged. And yes, there was blood. Blood and snot hanging out of her nose. More blood spattered up her cheeks like little birthmarks. Still more on her split lips and chin and tank top. Head down so the wings of her hair hid some of her face. Cigarette going up and down, tick-tock, either a Marlboro or a Winston, in those days before the prices went up and all the fringe people went to the cheap brands, you could count on it. And if it's Marlboro, it's always the hard pack. I have seen so many of them. Sometimes there's a baby and it straightens the guy up but usually it's just bad luck for the baby.

'Here,' she said, and lifted her right thigh a little. Under it was a slip of paper, canary yellow. 'The registration. I tell him to keep his ticket in his wallet or the glove compartment, but it's always floppin around in here someplace with the Mickey Dee wrappers and the rest of the trash.'

She didn't sound stoned and there were no beer cans or liquor bottles floating around in the cab of the truck. That didn't make her sober, of course, but it was a step in the right direction.

She also didn't seem like she was going to turn abusive, but of course that can change. In a hurry.

'What's your name, ma'am?'

'Sandra?'

'Sandra what?'

'McCracken?'

'Do you have any ID, Ms McCracken?'

'Yeah.'

'Show me, please.'

There was a little leatherette clutch purse on the seat beside her. She opened it and started pawing through it. She worked slowly, and with her head bent over her purse, her face disappeared completely. You could still see the blood on her tank top but not on her face; you couldn't see the swollen lips that turned her mouth into a cut plum, or the old mouse fading around one eye.

And from behind me: 'Fuck no, I ain't getting in there. What makes you think you got a right to put me in there?'

I looked around. George was holding the back door of the cruiser open. A limo driver couldn't have done it more courteously. Except the back seat of a limo doesn't have doors you can't open and windows you can't unroll from the inside, or mesh between the front and the back. Plus, of course, that faint smell of puke. I've never driven a cruiser - well, except for a 'week or so after we got the new Caprices - that didn't have that smell.

'What makes me think I have the right is you're busted, Brian. Did you just hear me read you your rights?'

'The fuck for, man? I wasn't speedin!'

'That's true, you were too busy tuning up on your girlfriend to really get the pedal to the metal, but you were driving recklessly, driving to endanger. Plus assault. Let's not forget that.

So get in.'

'Man, you can't - '

'Get in, Brian, or I'll put you up against the car and cuff you. Hard, so it hurts.'

'Like to see you try it.'

'Would you?' George asked, his voice almost too low to hear even in that dozy afternoon quiet.

Brian Lippy saw two things. The first was that George could do it. The second was that George sort of wanted to do it. And Sandra McCracken would see it happen. Not a good thing, letting your bitch see you get cuffed. Bad enough she saw you getting busted.

'You'll be hearing from my lawyer,' said Brian Lippy, and got into the back of the cruiser.

George slammed the door and looked at me. 'We're gonna hear from his lawyer.'

'Don't you hate that,' I said.

The woman poked my arm with something. I turned and saw it was the corner of her driver's license laminate. 'Here,' she said. She was looking at me. It was only a moment before she turned away and began rummaging in her bag again, this time coming out with a couple of tissues, but it was long enough for me to decide she really was straight. Dead inside, but straight.

'Trooper Jacubois, the vehicle operator states his registration is in his truck,' George said.

'Yeah, I have it.'

George and I met at the pickup's ridiculous jacked rear bumper - I DO WHATEVER THE LITTLE

VOICES TELL ME TO, I EAT AMISH - and I handed him the registration.

'Will she?' he asked in a low voice.

'No,' I said.

'Sure?'

'Pretty.'

'Try,' George said, and went back to the cruiser. My old schoolmate started yelling at him the second George leaned through the driver's-side window to snag the mike. George ignored him and stretched the cord to its full length, so he could stand in the sun. 'Base, this is 6, copy-back?'

I returned to the open door of the pickup. The woman had snubbed her cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray and lit a fresh one. Up and down went the fresh cigarette. Out from between the mostly closed wings of her hair came the plumes of used smoke.

'Ms McCracken, we're going to take Mr Lippy to our barracks - Troop D, on the hill? Like you to follow us.'

She shook her head and began to work with the Kleenex. Bending her head to it rather than raising the tissue to her face, closing the curtains of her hair even farther. The hand with the cigarette in it now resting on the leg of her jeans, the smoke rising straight up.

'Like you to follow us, Ms McCracken.' Speaking just as softly as I could. Trying to make it caring and knowing and just between us. That's how the shrinks and family therapists say to handle it, but what do they know? I kind of hate those SOBs, that's the ugly truth. They come out of the middle class smelling of hairspray and deodorant and they talk to us about spousal abuse and low self-esteem, but they don't have a clue about places like Lassburg County, which played out once when the coal finished up and then again when big steel went away to Japan and China. Does a

"woman like Sandra McCracken even hear soft and caring and nonthreatening? Once upon a time, maybe. I didn't think anymore. If, on the other hand, I'd grabbed all that hair out of her face so she had to look at me and then shouted 'YOU'RE COMING! YOU'RE COMING AND YOU'RE GOING TO MAKE AN

ASSAULT CHARGE AGAINST HIM! YOU'RE COMING, YOU DUMB BEATEN BITCH! YOU ALLOWING CUNT! YOU ARE! YOU

FUCKING WELL ARE!', that might have made a difference. That might have worked. You have to speak their language. The shrinks and the therapists, they don't want to hear that. They don't want to believe there is a language that's not their language.

She shook her head again. Not looking at me. Smoking and not looking at me.

'Like you to come on up and swear out an assault complaint on Mr Lippy there. You pretty much have to, you know. I mean, we saw him hitting you, my partner and I were right behind you, and we got a real good look.'

'I don't have to,' she said, 'and you can't make me.' She was still using that clumpy greasy old mop of brownette to hide her face, but she spoke with a certain quiet authority, all the same.

She knew we couldn't force her to press charges because she'd been down this road before.

'So how long do you want to take it?' I asked her.

Nothing. The head down. The face hidden. The way she'd lowered her head and hidden her face at twelve when her teacher asked her a hard question in class or when the other girls made fun of her because she was getting tits before they did and that made her a chunky-fuck. That's what girls like her grow that hair for, to hide behind. But knowing didn't give me anymore patience with her.

Less, if anything. Because, see, you have to take care of yourself in this world. Especially if you ain't purty.

'Sandra.'

A little movement of her shoulders when I switched over to her first name. No more than that.

And boy, they make me mad. It's how easy they give up. They're like birds on the ground.

'Sandra, look at me.'

She didn't want to, but she would. She was used to doing what men said. Doing what men said had pretty much become her life's work. '

'Turn your head and look at me.'

She turned her head but kept her eyes down. Most of the blood was still on her face. It wasn't a bad face. She probably was a little bit purty when someone wasn't tuning up on her. Nor did she look as stupid as you'd think she must be. As stupid as she wanted to be.

'I'd like to go home,' she said in a faint child's voice. 'I had a nosebleed and I need to clean up.'

'Yeah, I know you do. Why? You run into a door? I bet that was it, wasn't it?'

'That's right. A door.' There wasn't even defiance in her face. No trace of her boyfriend's I EAT AMISH 'tude. She was just waiting for it to be over. This roadside chatter wasn't real life.

Getting hit, that was real life. Hawking back the snot and the blood and the tears all together and swallowing it like cough syrup. 'I was comin down the hall to use the bat'roorn, and Bri, I dittun know he was in there and he come out all at once, fast, and the door - '

'How long, Sandra?'

'How long what?'

'How long you going to go on eating his shit?'

Her eyes widened a little. That was all.

'Until he knocks all your teeth out?'

'I'd like to go home.'

'If I check at Statler Memorial, how many times am I going to find your name? Cause you run into a lot of doors, don't you?'

'Why don't you leave me alone? I ain't bothering you.'

'Until he fractures your skull? Until he kills your ass?'

'I want to go home, officer.'

I want to say That was when I knew I'd lost her but it would be a lie because you can't lose what you never had. She'd sit there until hell froze over or until I got pissed enough to do something that would get me in trouble later. Like hit her. Because I wanted to hit her. If I hit her, at least she'd know I was there.

I keep a card case in my back pocket. I took it out, riffled through the cards, and found the one I wanted. 'This woman's in Statler Village. She's talked to hundreds of young women like you, and helped a lot of them. If you need pro bono, which means free counseling, that'll happen.

She'll work it out with you. Okay?'

I held the card in front of her face, between the first two fingers of my right hand. When she didn't take it, I dropped it on to the seat. Then I went back to the cruiser to get the registration. Brian Lippy was sitting in the middle of the back seat with his chin lowered to the neck of his T-shirt, staring up at me from under his brows. He looked like some fucked-up hotrod Napoleon.

'Any luck?' George asked.

'Nah,' I said. 'She hasn't had enough fun yet.'

I took the registration back to the track. She'd moved over behind the wheel. The truck's big V-8 was rumbling. She had pushed the clutch in, and her right hand was on the shifter-knob. Bitten pink nails against chrome. If places like rural Pennsylvania had flags, you could put that on it.

Or maybe a sixpack of Iron City Beer and a pack of Winstons.

'Drive safely, Ms McCracken,' I said, handing her the yellow.

'Yeah,' she said, and pulled out. Wanting to give me some lip and not daring because she was well-trained. The truck did some jerking at first - she wasn't as good with his manual transmission as she maybe thought she was - and she jerked with it. Back and forth, hair flying.

All at once I could see it again, him all over the road, driving his one piece of property with his one hand and punching the piss out of his other piece of property with other one, and I felt sick to my stomach. Just before she finally achieved second gear, something white fluttered out of the driver's-side window. It was the card I'd given her.

I went back to the cruiser. Brian was still sitting with his chin down on his chest, giving me his fucked-up Napoleon look from beneath his brows. Or maybe it was Rasputin. I got in on the passenger side, feeling very hot and tired. Just to make things complete, Brian started chanting from behind me. 'Fat ED-die JACK-you-BOYS. How many boys - '

'Oh shut up,' I said.

'Come on back here and shut me up, Fat Eddie. Why don't you come on back here and try it?'

Just another wonderful day in the PSP, in other words. This guy was going to be back in whatever shithole he called home by seven o'clock, drinking a beer while Vanna spun the Wheel of Fortune. I glanced at my watch - 1.44 p.m. - and then picked up the microphone. 'Base, this is 6.'

'Copy, 6.' Shirley right back at me, calm as a cool breeze. Shirley just about to get her flowers from Islington and Avery. Out on CR 46 in Poteenville, about twenty miles from our 20, a Norco West tanker had just collided with a schoolbus, killing the schoolbus's driver, Mrs Esther Mayhew. George Stankowski had been close enough to hear the bang of the collision, so who says there's never a cop around when you need one?

'We are Code 15 and 17-base, copy?' Asshole in custody and headed home, in other words.

'Roger, 6, you have one subject in custody or what, over?'

'One subject, roger.'

'This is Fat Fuck One, over and out,' Brian said from the back seat. He began to laugh - the high, chortling laugh of the veteran stoner. He also began to stomp his cowboy boots up and down.

We'd be half an hour getting back to the barracks. I had an idea it was going to be a long ride.

THEN:

Huddie

I dropped the SC's phone into the cradle and almost trotted across to dispatch, where Shirley was still working hard, bending active Troopers west. 'Norco says it's chlorine liquid,' I told her.

'That's a break. Chlorine's nasty, but it's not usually fatal.'

'Are they sure that's what it is?' Shirley asked.

'Ninety per cent. It's what they have out that way. You see those trucks headed up to the water-treatment plant all the time. Pass it on, starting with George S. And what in the name of God's wrong with the dog?'

Mister Dillon was at the back door, nose down to the base of the screen, going back and forth.

Almost bouncing back and forth, and whining way down in his throat. His ears were laid back. While I was watching, he bumped the screen with his muzzle hard enough to bell it out. Then gave a kind of yelp, as if to say man, that hurts.

'No idea,' Shirley said in a voice that told me she had no time for Mister Dillon. Neither, strictly speaking, did I. Yet I looked at him a moment longer. I'd seen hunting dogs behave that way when they ran across the scent of something big in the woods nearby - a bear, or maybe a timberwolf. But there hadn't been any wolves in the Short Hills since before Vietnam, and precious few bears. There was nothing beyond that screen but the parking lot. And Shed B, of course. I looked up at the clock over the kitchen door. It was 2.12 p.m. I couldn't remember ever having been in the barracks when the barracks was so empty.

'Unit 14, Unit 14, this is base, copy?'

George came back to her, still coughing. 'Unit 14.'

'It's chlorine, 14, Norco West says it's pretty confident of that. Chlorine liquid.' She looked at me and I gave her a thumb up. 'Irritating but not - '

'Break, break.' And cough, cough.

'Standing by, 14.'

'Maybe it's chlorine, maybe it's not, base. It's on fire, whatever it is, and there are big white clouds ot it rolling this way. My 20 is at the end of the access road, the one by the soccer field. Those kids're coughing worse'n me and I see several people down, including one adult female. There are two schoolbuses parked off to the side. I'm gonna try and take those folks out in one. Over.'

I took the mike from Shirley. 'George, this is Huddie. Norco says the fire's probably just fuel running out on top of the chlorine. You ought to be safe moving the kids on foot, over?'

What came next was a classic George S. response, solid and stolid. Eventually he got one of those above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty citations for his day's work - from the Governor, I think -

and his picture was in the paper. His wife framed the citation and hung it on the wall of the rumpus room. I'm not sure George ever understood what the fuss was about. In his mind he was just doing what seemed prudent and reasonable. If there was ever such a thing as the right man at the right place, it was George Stankowski that day at Poteenville Grammar School.

'Bus'd be better,' he said. 'Faster. This is 14, I'm 7.'

Shortly, Shirley and I would forget all about Poteenville for awhile; we had our own oats to roll. If you're curious, Trooper George Stankowski got into one of the buses he'd seen by busting a folding door with a rock. He started the forty-passenger Blue Bird with a spare key he found taped to the back of the driver's sunvisor, and eventually packed twenty-four coughing, weeping, red-eyed children and two teachers inside. Many of the children were still clutching the misshapen pots, blots, and ceramic ashtrays they'd made that afternoon. Three of the kids were unconscious, one from an allergic reaction to chlorine fumes. The other two were simple fainting victims, OD'd on terror and excitement. One of the crafts teachers, Rosellen Nevers, was in more serious straits. George saw her on the sidewalk, lying on her side, gasping and semiconscious, digging at her swelled throat with weakening fingers. Her eyes bulged from their sockets like the yolks of poached eggs.

'That's my mommy,' one of the little girls said. Tears were welling steadily from her huge brown eyes, but she never lost hold of the clay vase she was holding, or tilted it so the black-eyed susan she'd put in it fell out. 'She has the azmar.'

George was kneeling beside the woman by then with her head back over his forearm to keep her airway as wide-open as possible. Her hair hung down on the concrete. 'Does she take something for her asthma, honey, when it's bad like this?'

'In her pocket,' the little girl with the vase said. 'Is my mommy going to die?'

'Nah,' George said. He got the Flovent inhaler out of Mrs Nevers's pocket and shot a good blast down her throat. She gasped, shivered, and sat up.

George carried her on to the bus in his arms, walking behind the coughing, crying children. He plopped Rosellen in a seat next to her daughter, then slipped behind the steering wheel. He put the bus in gear and bumped it across the soccer field, past his cruiser and on to the access road.

By the time he nosed the Blue Bird back on to County Road 46, the kids were singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat'. And that's how Trooper George Stankowski became an authentic hero while the few of us left behind were just trying to hold on to our sanity.

And our lives.

THEN:

Shirley

George's last communication to dispatch was 14, I am 7 -this is Unit 14,1 am out of service. I logged it, looking up at the clock to note the time. It was 2.23 p.m. I remember that well, just as I remember Huddie standing beside me, giving my shoulder a little squeeze - trying to tell me George and the kids would be all right without coming right out and saying it, I suppose. 2.23

p.m., that's when all hell broke loose. And I mean that as literally as anyone ever has.

Mister Dillon started barking. Not his deep-throated bark, the one he usually saved for deer who scouted our back field or the raccoons that dared come sniffing around the stoop, but a series of high, yarking yips I had never heard before. It was as if he'd run himself on to something sharp and couldn't get free.

'What the hell? Huddie said.

D took five or six stiff, backing steps away from the screen door, looking sort of like a rodeo horse in a calf-roping event. I think I knew what was going to happen next, and I think Huddie did, too, but neither of us could believe it. Even if we had believed it, we couldn't have stopped him. Sweet as he was, I think Mister Dillon \vould have bitten us if we'd tried. He was still letting out those yipping, hurt little barks, and foam had started to splatter from the corners of his mouth.

I remember reflected light dazzling into my eyes just then. I blinked and the light ran away from me down the length of the wall. That was Unit 6, Eddie and George coming in with their suspect, but I hardly registered that at all. I was looking at Mister Dillon.

He ran at the screen door, and once he was rolling he never hesitated. Never even slowed. Just dropped his head and broke on through to the other side, tearing the door out of its latch and pulling it after him even as he went through, still voicing barks that were almost like screams.

At the same time I smelled something, very strong: seawater and decayed vegetable matter. There came a howl of brakes and rubber, the blast of a horn, and someone yelling, ' Watch out! Watch out!' Huddie ran for the door and I followed him.

THEN:

Eddie

We were wrecking his day by taking him to the barracks. We'd stopped him, at least temporarily, from beating up his girlfriend. He had to sit in the back seat with the springs digging into his ass and his fancy boots planted on our special puke-resistant plastic floormats. But Brian was making us pay. Me in particular, but of course George had to listen to him, too.

He'd chant his version of my name and then stomp down rhythmically with the big old stacked heels of his shitkickers just as hard as he could. The overall effect was something like a football cheer. And all the time he was staring through the mesh at me with his head down and his little stoned eyes gleaming - I could see him in the mirror clipped to the sunvisor.

'JACK-you-BOYS!' Clump-clumpclump! 'JACK-you-BOYS!' Clump-clumpclump!

'Want to quit that, Brian?' George asked. We were nearing the barracks. The pretty nearly empty barracks; by then we knew what was going on out in Poteenville, Shirley had given us some of it, and the rest we'd picked up from the chatter of the converging units. 'You're giving me an earache.'

It was all the encouragement Brian needed.

'JACK-you-BOYS!' CLUMP-CLUMPCLUMP!

If he stomped much harder he was apt to put his feet right through the floorboards, but George didn't bother asking him to stop again. When they're buttoned up in the back of your cruiser, getting under your skin is just about all they can try. I'd experienced it before, but hearing this dumbbell, who once knocked the books out of my arms in the high school caff and tore the loops off the backs of my shirts in study hall, chanting that old hateful version of my name . . .

man, that was spooky. Like a trip in Professor Peabody's Wayback Machine.

I didn't say anything, but I'm pretty sure George knew. And when he picked up the mike and called in - '20-base in a tick' was what he said - I knew he was talking to me more than Shirley.

We'd chain Brian to the chair in the Bad Boy Corner, turn on the TV for him if he wanted it, and take a preliminary pass at the paperwork. Then we'd head for Poteenville, unless the situation out there changed suddenly for the better. Shirley could call Statler County Jail and tell them we had one of their favorite troublemakers coming their way. In the meantime, however-

'JACK-you-BOYS!' Clump-clumpclump! 'JACK-you-BOYS!'

Now screaming so loud his cheeks were red and the cords stood out on the sides of his neck. He wasn't just playing me anymore; Brian had moved on to an authentic shit fit. What a pleasure getting rid of him was going to be.

We went up Bookin's Hill, George driving a little faster than was strictly necessary, and there was Troop D at the top. George signaled and turned in, perhaps still moving a little faster than he strictly should have been. Lippy, understanding that his time to annoy us had grown short, began shaking the mesh between us and him as well as thumping down with those John Wayne boots of his.

'JACK-you-BOYS!' Clump-clumpclump! Shake-shakeshake!

Up the driveway we went, toward the parking lot at the back. George turned tight to the left around the corner of the building, meaning to park with the rear half of Unit 6 by the back steps of the barracks, so we could take good old Bri right up and right in with no fuss, muss, or bother.

And as George came around the corner, there was Mister Dillon, right in front of us.

'Watch out, watch out!' George shouted, whether to me or to the dog or possibly to himself I have no way of knowing. And remembering all this, it strikes me how much it was like the day he hit the woman in Lassburg. So close it was almost a dress rehearsal, but with one very large difference. I wonder if in the last few weeks before he sucked the barrel of his gun he didn't find himself thinking I missed the dog and hit the woman over and over again. Maybe not, but I know I would've, if it had been me. Missed the dog and hit the woman. How can you believe in a God when it's that way around instead of the other?

George slammed on the brakes with both feet and drove the heel of his left hand down on the horn. I was thrown forward. My shoulder-harness locked. There were lap belts in the back but our prisoner hadn't troubled to put one on - he'd been too busy doing the Jacubois Cheer for that -

and his face shot forward into the mesh, which he'd been gripping. I heard something snap, like when you crack your knuckles. I heard something else crunch. The snap was probably one of his fingers. The crunch was undoubtedly his nose. I have heard them go before, and it always sounds the same, like breaking chicken bones. He gave a muffled, surprised scream. A big squirt of blood, hot as the skin of a hot-water bottle, landed on the shoulder of my uniform.

Mister Dillon probably came within half a foot of dying right there, maybe only two inches, but he ran on without a single look at us, ears laid back tight against his skull, yelping and barking, headed straight for Shed B. His shadow ran beside him on the hottop, black and sharp.

'Ah Grise, I'be hurd!' Brian screamed through his plugged nose. 'I'be bleedin all fuggin over!' And then he began yelling about police brutality.

George opened the driver's-side door. I just sat where I was for a moment, watching D, expecting him to stop when he got to the shed. He never did. He ran full-tilt into the roll-up door, braining himself. He fell over on his side and let out a scream. Until that day I didn't know dogs could scream, but they can. To me it didn't sound like pain but frustration. My arms broke out in gooseflesh. D got up and turned in a circle, as if chasing his tail. He did that twice, shook his head as if to clear it, and ran straight at the roll-up door again.