From a Buick 8(40)

When the end of the rake-handle touched the place where the wings were crumpled across each other, there was a sound like rustling paper and a bad smell, like old stewed cabbage. The two of them barely noticed. The top of the thing's face seemed to peel back, revealing a dead and glassy eye that looked as big as a factory ball bearing.

Arky backed away, dropping the rake with a clatter and putting both hands over his mouth. Above the spread fingers, his eyes had begun to ooze terrified tears. Huddie simply stood where he was, locked in place.

'It was an eyelid,' he said in a low, hoarse voice. 'Just an eyelid, that's all. You joggled it with the rake, you goddam fool. You joggled it and it rolled back.'

'Christ, Huddie!'

'It's dead.'

'Christ, Jesus God ? '

'It's dead, okay?'

'Ho . . . Ho-kay,' Arky said in that crazy Swedish accent of his. It was thicker than it had ever been. 'Less get oudda here.'

'You're pretty smart for a janitor.'

The two of them headed back for the door ? slowly, backing up, not wanting to lose sight of the thing. Also because both of them knew they would lose control and bolt if they actually saw the door. The safety of the door. The promise of a sane world beyond the door. Getting there seemed to take forever.

Arky backed out first and began taking huge gasps of the fresh evening air. Huddie came out behind him and slammed the door. Then for a moment the two of them just looked at each other. Arky had gone past white and directly to yellow. To Huddie he looked like a cheese sandwich without the bread.

'What-choo laughin about?' Arky asked him. 'What's so funny?'

'Nothing,' Huddie said. 'I'm just trying  not  to   be hysterical.'

'You gonna call Sergeant Schoondist now?'

Huddie nodded. He kept thinking about how the whole top half of the thing's head had seemed to peel back when Arky prodded it. He had an idea he'd be revisiting that moment in his dreams later on, and that turned out to be absolutely correct.

'What about Curtis?'

Huddie thought about it and shook his head. Curt had a young wife. Young wives liked to have their husbands home, and when they didn't get what they wanted for at least a few nights in a row, they were apt to get hurt feelings and ask questions. It was natural. As it was natural for young husbands to sometimes answer their questions, even when they knew they weren't supposed to.

'Just the Sarge, then?'

'No,' Huddie said. 'Let's get Sandy Dearborn in on this, too. Sandy's got a good head.'

Sandy was still in the parking lot at Jimmy's Diner with his radar gun in his lap when his radio spoke up. 'Unit 14, Unit 14.'

'14.' As always, Sandy had glanced at his watch when he heard his unit number. It was twenty past seven.

'Ah, could you return to base, 14? We have a D-code, say again a D-code, copy?'

'3?' Sandy asked. In most American police forces, 3 means emergency.

'No, negative, but we could use some help.'

'Roger.'

He got back about ten minutes before the Sarge arrived in his personal, which happened to be an International Harvester pickup even older than Arky's Ford. By then the word had already started to spread and Sandy saw a regular Trooper convention in front of Shed B ? lots of guys at the windows, all of them peering in. Brundage and Rushing, Cole and Devoe, Huddie Royer. Arky Arkanian was pacing around in little circles behind them with his hands stuffed forearm-deep in his pants pockets and lines climbing his forehead like the rungs of a ladder. He wasn't waiting for a window, though. Arky had seen all he wanted to, at least for one night.

Huddie filled Sandy in on what had happened and then Sandy had his own good long look at the thing in the corner. He also tried to guess what the Sergeant might want when he arrived, and put the items in a cardboard box near the side door.

Tony pulled in, parked askew behind the old schoolbus, and came jogging across to Shed B. He elbowed Carl Brundage unceremoniously away from the window that was closest to the dead creature and stared at it while Huddie made his report. When Huddie was done, Tony called Arky over and listened to Arky's version of the story.

Sandy thought that Tony's methods of handling the Roadmaster were put to the test that evening and proved sound. All through his debriefing of Huddie and Arky, Troop D personnel were showing up. Most of the men were off-duty. Those few in uniform had been close enough to come in for a look-see when they heard Huddie give the code for the Buick. Yet there was no loud cross-talk, no jostling for position, no men getting in the way of Tony's investigation or gumming things up with a lot of stupid questions. Above all, there were no flaring tempers and no panic. If reporters had been there and experienced the atavistic power of that thing ? a thing which remained awful and somehow threatening even though it was obviously dead ? Sandy dreaded to think about what the consequences might have been. When he mentioned that to Schoondist the next day, the Sarge had laughed. 'The Cardiff Giant in hell,' he said. 'That would have been your consequence, Sandy.'

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.