‘I don’t know. Did you see the portholes?’
‘Huh? Sure, but all old Buicks have portholes.’
‘Yeah, but these are wrong. There’s four on the passenger side and only three on the driver’s side. Do you think Buick ever rolled a model off the line with a different number of portholes on the sides? Cause I don’t.’
Ennis gave his partner a nonplussed look, then raised his binoculars and looked downstream. He quickly found and focused on the black bobbing thing that had sent Brad
hurrying to the telephone.
‘What is it? Is it a coat?’ Curt was shading his eyes, which were considerably better than Bradley Roach’s. ‘It’s not, is it?’
‘Nope,’ Ennis said, still peering. ‘It looks like . . . a garbage can. One of those black plastic garbage cans like they sell down at the Tru-Value in town. Or maybe I’m full of shit. Here.
You take a look.’
He handed the binoculars over, and no, he wasn’t full of shit. What Curtis saw was indeed a black plastic garbage can, probably washed down from the trailer park on the Bluffs at the height of the previous night’s cloudburst. It wasn’t a black coat and no black coat was ever found, nor the black hat, nor the man with the white face and the curl of lank black hair beside one strangely made ear. The Troopers might have doubted that there ever was such a man — Ennis Rafferty had not failed to notice the copy of Inside View on the desk when he took Mr Roach into the office to question him further — but there was the Buick. That odd Buick was irrefutable. It was part of the goddam scenery, sitting right there at the pumps.
Except by the time the county tow showed up to haul it away, neither Ennis Rafferty nor Curtis Wilcox believed it was a Buick at all.
By then, they didn’t know what it was.
Older cops are entitled to their hunches, and Ennis had one as he and his young partner walked back to Brad Roach. Brad was standing beside the Roadmaster with the three nicely chromed portholes on one side and the four on the other. Ennis’s hunch was that the oddities they had so far noticed were only the whipped cream on the sundae. If so, the less Mr Roach saw now, the less he could talk about later. Which was why, although Ennis was extremely curious about the abandoned car and longed for a big dose of satisfaction, he turned it over to Curt while he himself escorted Bradley into the office. Once they were there, Ennis called for a wrecker to haul the Buick up to Troop D, where they could put it in the parking lot out back, at least for the time being. He also wanted to question Bradley while his recollections were relatively fresh. Ennis expected to get his own chance to look over their odd catch, and at his leisure, later on.
‘Someone modified it a little, I expect that’s all’ was what he said to Curt before taking Bradley into the office. Curt looked skeptical. Modifying was one thing, but this was just nuts. Removing one of the portholes, then refinishing the surface so expertly that the scar didn’t even show? Replacing the usual Buick steering wheel with something that looked like it belonged in a cabin cruiser? Those were modifications?
‘Aw, just look it over while I do some business,’ Ennis said.
‘Can I check the mill?’
‘Be my guest. Only keep your mitts off the steering wheel, so we can get some prints if we need them. And use good sense. Try not to leave your own dabs anywhere.’
They had reached the pumps again. Brad Roach looked eagerly at the two cops, the one he would kill in the twenty-first century and the one who would be gone without a trace that very evening.
‘What do you think?’ Brad asked. ‘Is he dead down there in the stream? Drownded? He is, isn’t he?’
‘Not unless he crawled into the garbage can floating around in the crotch of that fallen tree and drowned there,’ Ennis said.
Brad’s face fell. ‘Aw, shit. Is that all it is?’
“Fraid so. And it would be a tight fit for a grown man. Trooper Wilcox? Any questions for this young man?’
Because he was still learning and Ennis was still teaching, Curtis did ask a few, mostly to make sure Bradley wasn’t drunk and that he was in his right mind. Then he nodded to Ennis, who clapped Bradley on the shoulder as if they were old buddies.
‘Step inside with me, what do you say?’ Ennis suggested. ‘Pour me a slug of mud and we’ll see if we can figure this thing out.’ And he led Brad away. The friendly arm slung around Bradley Roach’s shoulder was very strong, and it just kept hustling Brad along toward the office, Trooper Rafferty talking a mile a minute the whole time.
As for Trooper Wilcox, he got about three-quarters of an hour with that Buick before the county tow showed up with its orange light flashing. Forty-five minutes isn’t much time, but it was enough to turn Curtis into a lifetime Roadmaster Scholar. True love always happens in a flash, they say.
Ennis drove as they headed back to Troop D behind the tow-truck and the Buick, which rode on the clamp with its nose up and its rear bumper almost dragging on the road. Curt rode shotgun, in his excitement squirming like a little kid who needs to make water. Between them, the Motorola police radio, scuffed and beat-up, the victim of God knew how many coffee and cola-dousings but still as tough as nails, blatted away on channel 23, Matt Babicki and the Troopers in the field going through the call-and-response that was the constant background soundtrack of their lives. It was there, but neither Ennis nor Curt heard it anymore unless their own number came up.
‘The first thing’s the engine,’ Curt said. ‘No, I suppose the first thing’s the hood-latch. It’s way over on the driver’s side, and you push it in rather than pulling it out — ‘
‘Never heard of that before,’ Ennis grunted.
‘You wait, you wait,’ his young partner said. ‘I found it, anyway, and lifted the hood. The engine . . . man, that engine . . .’
Ennis glanced at him with the expression of a man who’s just had an idea that’s too horribly plausible to deny. The yellow glow from the revolving light on the tow-truck’s cab pulsed on his face like jaundice. ‘Don’t you dare tell me it doesn’t have one,’ he said. ‘Don’t dare tell me
it doesn’t have anything but a glow-crystal or some damn thing like in Dumbwit’s flying saucers.’
Curtis laughed. The sound was both cheerful and wild. ‘No, no, there’s an engine, but it’s all wrong. It says BUICK 8 on both sides of the engine block in big chrome letters, as if whoever made it was afraid of forgetting what the damn thing was. There are eight plugs, four on each side, and that’s right — eight cylinders, eight sparkplugs — but there’s no distributor cap and no distributor, not that I can see. No generator or alternator, either.’
‘Get out!’
‘Ennis, if I’m lyin I’m dyin.’
‘Where do the sparkplug wires go?’
‘Each one makes a big loop and goes right back into the engine block, so far as I can tell.’
‘Get . . . out!’
‘Yes! But listen, Ennis, just listen!’ Stop interrupting and let me talk, in other words. Curtis Wilcox squirming in his seat but never taking his eyes off the Buick being towed along in front of him.
‘All right, Curt. I’m listening.’
‘It’s got a radiator, but so far as I can tell, there’s nothing inside it. No water and no antifreeze. There’s no fanbelt, which sort of makes sense, because there’s no fan.’
‘Oil?’
‘There’s a crankcase and the dipstick is normal, except there’s no markings on it. There’s a battery, a Delco, but Ennis, dig this, it’s not hooked up to anything. There are no battery cables.’
‘You’re describing a car that couldn’t possibly run,’ Ennis said flatly.
‘Tell me about it. I took the key out of the ignition. It’s on an ordinary chain, but the chain’s all there is. No fob with initials or anything.’
‘Other keys?’
‘No. And the ignition key’s not really a key. It’s just a slot of metal, about so long.’ Curt held his thumb and forefinger a key’s length apart.
‘A blank, is that what you’re talking about? Like a keymaker’s blank?’
‘ No. It’s nothing like a key at all. It’s just a little steel stick.’
‘Did you try it?’
Curt, who had been talking almost compulsively, didn’t answer that at once.
‘Go on,’ Ennis said. ‘I’m your partner, for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to bite you.’