From a Buick 8(50)

'Don't you pull me back!' Curt shouts. 'Don't do it! I'm five-by-five!' And with that, he opens the door of the Roadmaster.

'Stay out of there!' Tony calls from behind the madly jiggling camera.

Curt ignores him and pulls the plastic gerbil condo out of the car, waggling it gently back and forth to get it past the big steering wheel. He uses his knee to shut the Buick's door and then comes back to the shed door with the habitat cradled in his arms. With a square room at either end, the thing looks like some strange sort of plastic dumbbell.

'Get it on tape!' Curt is shouting, all but frying with excitement. 'Get it on tape!'

Tony did. The picture zooms in on the left end of the environment just as soon as Curt steps out of the shed and back into the sun. And here is Roslyn, no longer eating but scurrying about cheerfully enough. She becomes aware of the men gathered around her and turns directly toward the camera, sniffing at the yellow plastic, whiskers quivering, eyes bright and interested. It was cute, but the Troopers from Statler Barracks D weren't interested in cute just then.

The camera makes a herky-jerky pan away from her, traveling along the empty corridor to the empty gerbil gym at the far end. Both of the environment's hatches are latched tight, and nothing bigger than a gnat could get through the hole for the water-tube, but Jimmy the gerbil is gone, just the same ? just as gone as Ennis Rafferty or the man with the Boris Badinoff accent, who had driven the Buick Roadmaster into their lives to begin with.

CHAPTER 5

NOW:

Sandy

I came to a stop and swallowed a glass of Shirley's iced tea in four long gulps. That planted an icepick in the center of my forehead, and I had to wait for it to melt.

At some point Eddie Jacubois had joined us. He was dressed in his civvies and sitting at the end of the bench, looking both sorry to be there and reluctant to leave. I had no such divided feelings; I was delighted to see him. He could tell his part. Huddie would help him along, if he needed helping; Shirley, too. By 1988 she'd been with us two years, Matt Babicki nothing but a memory refreshed by an occasional postcard showing palm trees in sunny Sarasota, where Matt and his wife own a learn-to-drive school. A very successful one, at least according to Matt.

'Sandy?' Ned asked. 'Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. I was just thinking about how clumsy Tony was with that video camera,' I said. 'Your dad was great, Ned, a regular Steven Spielberg, but ? '

'Could I watch those tapes if I wanted to?' Ned asked.

I looked at Huddie . . . Arky . . . Phil . . . Eddie. In each set of eyes I saw the same thing: It's your call. As of course it was. When you sit in the big chair, you make all the big calls. And mostly I like that. Might as well tell the truth.

'Don't see why not,' I said. 'As long as it's here. I wouldn't be comfortable with you taking them out of the barracks ? you'd have to call them Troop D property ? but here? Sure. You can run em on the VCR in the upstairs lounge. You ought to take a Dramamine before you look at the stuff Tony shot, though. Right, Eddie?'

For a moment Eddie looked across the parking lot, but not toward where the Roadmaster was stored. His gaze seemed to rest on the place where Shed A had been until 1982 or thereabouts. 'I dunno much about that,' he said. 'Don't remember much. Most of the big stuff was over by the time I got here, you know.'

Even Ned must have known the man was lying; Eddie was spectacularly bad at it.

'I just came out to tell you I put in those three hours I owed from last May, Sarge ? you know, when I took off to help my brother-in-law build his new studio?'

'Ah,' I said.

Eddie bobbed his head up and down rapidly. 'Uh-huh. I'm all clocked out, and I put the report on those marijuana plants we found in Robbie Rennerts's back field on your desk. So I'll just be heading on home, if it's all the same to you.'

Heading down to The Tap was what he meant. His home away from home. Once he was out of uniform, Eddie J.'s life was a George Jones song. He started to get up and I put a hand on his wrist. 'Actually, Eddie, it's not.'

'Huh?'

'It's not all the same to me. I want you to stick around awhile.'

'Boss, I really ought to ? '

'Stick around,' I repeated. 'You might owe this kid a little something.'

'I don't know what ? '

'His father saved your life, remember?'

Eddie's shoulders came up in a kind of defensive hunch. 'I don't know if I'd say he exactly ? '

'Come on, get off it,' Huddie said. 'I was there.'

Suddenly Ned wasn't so interested in videotapes. 'My father saved your life, Eddie? How?'

Eddie hesitated, then gave in. 'Pulled me down behind a John Deere tractor. The O'Day brothers, they ? '

'The spine-tingling saga of the O'Day brothers is a story for another time,' I said. 'The point is, Eddie, we're having us a little exhumation party here, and you know where one of the bodies is buried. And I mean quite literally.'

'Huddie and Shirley were there, they can ? '

'Yeah, they were. George Morgan was there, too, I think ? '

'He was,' Shirley said quietly.

' ? but so what?' I still had my hand on Eddie's wrist, and had to fight a desire to squeeze it again. Hard. I liked Eddie, always had, and he could be brave, but he also had a yellow streak. I don't know how those two things can exist side by side in the same man, but they can; I've seen it more than once. Eddie froze back in '96, on the day Travis and Tracy O'Day started firing their fancy militia machine-guns out of their farmhouse windows. Curt had to break cover and yank him to safety by the back of his jacket. And now here he was trying to squiggle out of his part in the other story, the one in which Ned's father had played such a key role. Not because he'd done anything wrong ? he hadn't ? but because the memories were painful and frightening.