From a Buick 8(45)

The hutch was built, painted (PSP gray, of course), and ready for action three days after the memo landed in Tony's in-basket. Prefab and purely functional, it was just big enough for two garbage cans, three shelves, and one State Trooper sitting on a kitchen chair. It served the dual purpose of keeping the Trooper on watch (a) out of the weather, and (b) out of sight. Every ten or fifteen minutes the man on duty would get up, leave the hutch, and look through one of the windows in Shed B's rear roll-up door. The hutch was stocked with soda, munchies, magazines, and a galvanized pail. The pail had a paper strip reading I COULD NOT HOLD IT ANY LONGER taped to the side. That was Jackie O'Hara's touch. The others called him The Irish Wonder Boy, and he never failed to make them laugh. He was making them laugh even three years later as he lay in his bedroom, dying of esophageal cancer, eyes glassy with morphine, telling stories about Padeen the bogtrotter in a hoarse whisper while his old mates visited and sometimes held his hand when the pain was especially bad.

Later on, there would be plenty of video cameras at Troop D ? at all the PSP barracks, because by the nineties, all the cruisers were equipped with dashboard-mounted Panasonic Eyewitness models. These were made specially for law enforcement organizations, and came without mikes. Video of road-stops was legal; because of existing wiretap laws, audio was not. But all of that was later. In the late summer of 1979, they had to make do with a videocam Huddie Royer had gotten for his birthday. They kept it on one of the shelves out in the hutch, stored in its box and wrapped in plastic to make sure it stayed dry. Another box contained extra batteries and a dozen blank tapes with the cellophane stripped off so they'd be ready to go. There was also a slate with a number chalked on it: the current temperature inside the shed. If the person on duty noticed a change, he erased the last observation, wrote in the current one, and added a chalk arrow pointing either up or down. It was the closest thing to a written record Sergeant Schoondist would allow.

Tony seemed delighted with this jury-rig. Curt tried to emulate him, but sometimes his worry and frustration broke through. 'There won't be anyone on watch the next time something happens,' he said. 'You wait and see if I'm not right ? it's always the way. Nobody'll volunteer for midnight to four some night, and whoever comes on next will look in and see the trunk-lid up and another dead bat on the floor. You wait and see.'

Curt tried persuading Tony to at least keep a surveillance sign-up sheet. There was no shortage of volunteers, he argued; what they were short on was organization and scheduling, things that would be easy to change. Tony remained adamant: no paper trail. When Curt volunteered to take over more of the sentry duty himself (many of the Troopers took to calling it Hutch Patrol), Tony refused and told him to ease off. 'You've got other responsibilities,' he said. 'Not the least of them is your wife.'

Curt had the good sense to keep quiet while in the SC's office. Later, however, he unburdened himself to Sandy, speaking with surprising bitterness as the two of them stood outside at the far corner of the barracks. 'If I'd wanted a marriage counselor, I would have consulted the goddam Yellow Pages,' he said.

Sandy offered him a smile, one without much humor in it. 'I think you better start listening for the pop,' he said.

'What are you talking about?'

'The pop. Very distinctive sound. You hear it when your head finally comes out of your ass.'

Curtis stared at him, hard little roses of color burning high up on his cheekbones. 'Am I missing something here, Sandy?'

'Yes.'

'What? For God's sake, what?'

'Your job and your life,' Sandy said. 'Not necessarily in that order. You are experiencing a problem of perspective. That Buick is starting to look too big to you.'

'Too . . . !' Curt hit his forehead with the palm of his hand in that way he had. Then he turned and looked out at the Short Hills. At last he swung back to Sandy. 'It's something from another world, Sandy ? from another world. How can a thing like that look too big?'

'That's exactly your problem,' Sandy replied. 'Your problem of perspective.'

He had an idea that the next thing Curtis said would be the beginning of an argument, possibly a bitter one. So before Curt could say anything, Sandy went inside. And perhaps that talk did some good, because as August gave way to September, Curt's all but constant requests for more surveillance time stopped. Sandy Dearborn never tried to tell himself that the kid had seen the light, but he did seem to understand that he'd gone as far as he could, at least for the time being. Which was good, but maybe not quite good enough. Sandy thought that the Buick was always going to look too big to Curtis. But then, there have always been two sorts of people in the world. Curt was of the sort who believed satisfaction actually did bring felines back from the other side of the great divide.

He began to show up at the barracks with biology books instead of Field and Stream. The one most commonly observed under his arm or lying on the toilet tank in the crapper was Dr John H. Maturin's Twenty Elementary Dissections, Harvard University Press, 1968. When Buck Flanders and his wife went over to Curt's for dinner one evening, Michelle Wilcox complained about her husband's 'gross new hobby'. He had started getting specimens from a medical supply house, she said, and the area of the basement which he had designated as his darkroom-to-be only the year before now smelled of mortuary chemicals.