From a Buick 8(17)

Mister D was no K-9 specialty dog, but only because no one had trained him that way. He was plenty smart, and protective, as well. If a bad boy raised his voice and started shaking his finger at a Troop D guy while Mister Dillon was around, that fellow ran the risk of picking his nose with the tip of a pencil for the rest of his life.

'What's doin, boys?' Orville asked, but before anyone could answer him, Mister Dillon began to howl. Sandy Dearborn, who happened to be standing right beside the dog, had never heard anything quite like that howl in his entire life. Mister D backed up a pace and then hunkered, facing the Buick. His head was up and his hindquarters were down. He looked like a dog does when he's taking a crap, except for his fur. It was bushed out all over his body, every hair standing on end. Sandy's skin went cold.

'Holy God, what's wrong with him?' Phil asked in a low, awed voice, and then Mister D let loose with another of those long, wavering howls. He took three or four stalk-steps toward the Buick, never coming out of that hunched-over, cramped-up, taking-a-crap stoop, all the time with his muzzle pointing at the sky. It was awful to watch. He made two or three more of those awkward movements, then dropped flat on the macadam, panting and whining.

'What the hell?' Orv said.

'Put a leash on him,' Tony said. 'Get him inside.' Orv did as Tony said, actually running to get Mister Dillon's leash. Phil Candleton, who had always been especially partial to the dog, went with Orv once the leash was on him, walking next to Mister D, occasionally bending down to give him a comforting stroke and a soothing word. Later, he told the others that the dog had been shivering all over.

Nobody said anything. Nobody had to. They were all thinking the same thing, that Mister Dillon had pretty well proved Curt's point. The ground wasn't shaking and Tony hadn't heard anything when he stuck his head in through the Buick's window, but something was wrong with it, all right. A lot more wrong than the size of its steering wheel or its strange notchless ignition key. Something worse.

In the seventies and eighties, Pennsylvania State Police forensics investigators were rolling stones, travelling around to the various Troops in a given area from District HQ. In the case of Troop D, HQ was Butler. There were no forensics vans; such big-city luxuries were dreamed of, but wouldn't actually arrive in rural Pennsylvania until almost the end of the century. The forensics guys rode in unmarked police cars, carrying their equipment in trunks and back seats, toting it to various crime scenes in big canvas shoulder-bags with the PSP keystone logo on the sides. There were three guys in most forensics crews: the chief and two technicians. Sometimes there was also a trainee. Most of these looked too young to buy a legal drink.

One such team appeared at Troop D that afternoon. They had ridden over from Shippenville, at Tony Schoondist's personal request. It was a funny informal visit, a vehicle exam not quite in the line of duty. The crew chief was Bibi Roth, one of the oldtimers (men joked that Bibi had learned his trade at the knee of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson). He and Tony Schoondist got along well, and Bibi didn't mind doing a solid for the Troop D SC. Not as long as it stayed quiet, that was.

NOW:

Sandy

Ned stopped me at this point to ask why the forensic examination of the Buick was conducted in such an odd (to him, at least) off-the-cuff manner.

'Because,' I told him, 'the only criminal complaint in the matter that any of us could think of was theft of services ? eleven dollars' worth of hi-test gasoline. That's a misdemeanor, not worth a forensic crew's time.'

'Dey woulda burned almost dat much gas gettin over here from Shippenville,' Arky pointed out.

'Not to mention the man-hours,' Phil added.

I said, 'Tony didn't want to start a paper trail. Remember that there wasn't one at that point. All he had was a car. A very weird car, granted, one with no license plates, no registration, and ? Bibi Roth confirmed this ? no VIN number, either.'

'But Roach had reason to believe the owner drowned in the stream behind the gas station!'

'Pooh,' Shirley said. 'The driver's overcoat turned out to be a plastic garbage can. So much for Bradley Roach's ideas.'

'Plus,' Phil put in, 'Ennis and your dad observed no tracks going down the slope behind the station, and the grass was still wet. If the guy had gone down there, he would have left sign.'

'Mostly, Tony wanted to keep it in-house,' Shirley said. 'Would you say that's a fair way to put it, Sandy?'

'Yes. The Buick itself was strange, but our way of dealing with it wasn't much different from the way we'd deal with anything out of the ordinary: a Trooper down ? like your father, last year ? or one who's used his weapon, or an accident, like when George Morgan was in hot pursuit of that crazy ass**le who snatched his kids.'

We were all silent for a moment. Cops have nightmares, any Trooper's wife will tell you that, and in the bad dream department, George Morgan was one of the worst. He'd been doing ninety, closing in on the crazy ass**le, who had a habit of beating the kids he had snatched and claimed to love, when it happened.

George is almost on top of him and all at once here's this senior citizen crossing the road, seventy years old, slower than creeping bullfrog Jesus, and legally blind. The ass**le would have been the one to hit her if she'd started across three seconds earlier, but she didn't. No, the ass**le blew right by her, the rearview mirror on the passenger side of his vehicle so close it almost took off her nose. Next comes George, and kapow. He had twelve blameless years on the State Police, two citations for bravery, community service awards without number. He was a good father to his children, a good husband to his wife, and all of that ended when a woman from Lassburg Gut tried to cross the street at the wrong moment and he killed her with PSP cruiser D-27. George was exonerated by the State Board of Review and came back to a desk job on the Troop, rated PLD ? permanent light duty ? at his own request. He could have gone back full-time as far as the brass was concerned, but there was a problem: George Morgan could no longer drive. Not even the family car to the market. He got the shakes every time he slid behind the wheel. His eyes teared up until he was suffering from a kind of waterlogged hysterical blindness. That summer he worked nights, on dispatch. In the afternoons he coached the Troop D-sponsored Little League team all the way to the state tournament. When that was over, he gave the kids their trophy and their pins, told them how proud of them he was, then went home (a player's mother drove him), drank two beers, and blew his brains out in the garage. He didn't leave a note; cops rarely do. I wrote a press release in the wake of that. Reading it, you never would have guessed it was written with tears on my face. And it suddenly seemed very important that I communicate some of the reason why to Curtis Wilcox's son.