From a Buick 8(52)

'Did you put her back into the Buick?' Ned asked.

'Nah,' Phil said. 'This is America, kid ? no double jeopardy.'

'Roslyn lived the rest of her life upstairs in the common room,' I said. 'She was three or four when she died. Tony said that was a fairly normal lifespan for a gerbil.'

'Did more things come out of it? Out of the Buick?'

'Yes. But you couldn't correlate the appearance of those things with ? '

'What sort of things? And what about the bat? Did my father ever get around to dissecting it? Can I see it? Are there pictures, at least? Was it ? '

'Whoa, hold on,' I said, raising my hand. 'Eat a sandwich or something. Chill out.'

He picked up a sandwich and began to nibble, his eyes looking at me over the top. For just a moment he made me think of Roslyn the gerbil turning to look into the lens of the video camera, eyes bright and whiskers twitching.

'Things appeared from time to time,' I said, 'and from time to time things ? living things would disappear. Crickets. A frog. A butterfly. A tulip right out of the pot it was growing in. But you couldn't correlate the chill, the hum, or the lightshows with either the disappearances or what your dad called the Buick's miscarriages. Nothing really correlates. The chill is pretty reliable, there's never been one of those fireworks displays without a preceding temperature-drop ? but not every temperature-drop means a display. Do you see what I mean?'

'I think so,' Ned said. 'Clouds don't always mean rain, but you don't get rain without them.'

'I couldn't have put it more neatly,' I said.

Huddie tapped Ned on the knee. 'You know how folks say, "There's an exception to every rule?" Well, in the case of the Buick, we've got about one rule and a dozen exceptions. The driver himself is one ? you know, the guy in the black coat and black hat. He disappeared, but not from the vicinity of the Buick.'

'Can you say that for sure?' Ned asked.

It startled me. For a boy to look like his father is natural. To sound like his father, too. But for a moment there, Ned's voice and looks combined to make something more than a resemblance. Nor was I the only one who felt that. Shirley and Arky exchanged an uneasy glance.

'What do you mean?' I asked him.

'Roach was reading a newspaper, wasn't he? And from the way you described him, that probably took most of his concentration. So how do you know the guy didn't come back to his car?'

I'd had twenty years to think about that day and the consequences of that day. Twenty years, and the idea of the Roadmaster's driver coming back (perhaps even sneaking back) had never once occurred to me. Or, so far as I knew, to anyone else. Brad Roach said the guy hadn't returned, and we'd simply accepted that. Why? Because cops have built-in bullshit detectors, and in that case none of the needles swung into the red. Never even twitched, really. Why would they? Brad Roach at least thought he was telling the truth. That didn't mean he knew what he was talking about, though.

'I guess that it's possible,' I said.

Ned shrugged as if to say, Well there you go.

'We never had Sherlock Holmes or Lieutenant Columbo working out of D Troop,' I said. I thought I sounded rather defensive. I felt rather defensive. 'When you get right down to it, we're just the mechanics of the legal system. Blue-collar guys who actually wear gray collars and have a slightly better than average education. We can work the phones, compile evidence if there's evidence to compile, make the occasional deduction. On good days we can make fairly brilliant deductions. But with the Buick there was no consistency, hence no basis for deduction, brilliant or otherwise.'

'Some of the guys thought it came from space,' Huddle said. 'That it was . . . oh, I don't know, a disguised scout-ship, or something. They had the idea Ennis was abducted by an ET disguised to look at least passably human in his ? its ? black coat and hat. This talk was at the picnic ? the Labor Day picnic, okay?'

'Yeah,' Ned said.

'That was one seriously weird get-together, kiddo,' Huddie said. 'It seems to me that everyone got a lot drunker'n usual, and a lot faster, but no one got rowdy, not even the usual suspects like Jackie O'Hara and Christian Soder. It was very quiet, especially once the shirts-and-skins touch football game was over.

'I remember sitting on a bench under an elm tree with a bunch of guys, all of us moderately toasted, listening to Brian Cole tell about these flying saucer sightings around the powerlines in New Hampshire ? only a few years before, that was ? and how some woman claimed to have been abducted and had all these probes stuck up inside her, entrance ramps and exit ramps both.'

'Is that what my father believed? That aliens abducted his partner?'

'No,' Shirley said. 'Something happened here in 1988 that was so . . . so outrageous and beyond belief . . . so f**king awful. . .'

'What?' Ned asked. 'For God's sake, what?

Shirley ignored the question. I don't think she even heard it. 'A few days afterward, I asked your father flat-out what he believed. He said it didn't matter.'

Ned looked as if he hadn't heard her correctly. 'It didn't matter?'

'That's what he said. He believed that, whatever the Buick was, it didn't matter in the great scheme of things. In that big picture you were talking about. I asked him if he thought someone was using it, maybe to watch us . . . if it was some sort of television . . . and he said, "I think it's forgotten." I still remember the flat, certain way he said it, as if he was talking about ... I don't know . . . something as important as a king's treasure buried under the desert since before the time of Christ or something as unimportant as a postcard with the wrong address sitting in a Dead Letter file somewhere. "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here" and who cares, because all that was long, long ago. It comforted me and at the same time it chilled me to think anything so strange and awful could just be forgotten . . . misplaced . . . overlooked. I said that, and your dad, he laughed. Then he flapped his arm at the western horizon and he said, "Shirley, tell me something. How many nuclear weapons do you think this great nation of ours has got stored out there in various places between the Pennsylvania-Ohio line and the Pacific Ocean? And how many of them do you think will be left behind and forgotten over the next two or three centuries?"'