This was family business, not police business.
Not strictly police business, at least.
Curtis Wilcox came last, holding his Polaroids in one hand, goggles still pushed up on his forehead, rubber flip-flops on his green feet. His T-shirt read HORLICKS UNIVERSITY ATHLETIC
DEPARTMENT.
He went to the Sergeant and the two of them conferred in murmurs while the rest waited.
Then Tony turned back to the others. ‘There was no explosion, and neither Curt nor I think
there was any sort of radiation leak, either.’
Big sighs of relief greeted this, but several of the Troopers still looked doubtful. Sandy didn’t know how he looked, there was no mirror handy, but he still felt doubtful.
‘Pass these around, if you want,’ Curt said, and handed out his stack of Polaroids by twos and threes. Some had been taken during the flashes and showed almost nothing: a glimmer of grillwork, a piece of the Buick’s roof. Others were much clearer. The best had that odd, flat, declamatory quality which is the sole property of Polaroid photographs. I see a world where there’s only cause and effect, they seem to say. A world where every object is an avatar and no gods move behind the scenes.
‘Like conventional film, or the badges workers in radiation-intensive environments have to wear,’ Tony said, ‘Polaroid stock fogs when it’s exposed to strong gamma radiation. Some of these photos are overexposed, but none of them are fogged. We’re not hot, in other words.’
Phil Candleton said, ‘No offense to you, Sarge, but I’m not crazy about trusting my ‘nads to the Polaroid Corporation of America.’
‘I’ll go up to The Burg tomorrow, first thing, and buy a Geiger counter,’ Curt said. He spoke calmly and reasonably, but they could still hear the pulse of excitement in his voice. Under the cool will-you-please-step-out-of-your-car-sir voice, Curt Wilcox was close to blowing his top. ‘They sell them at the Army Surplus store on Grand. I think they go for around three hundred bucks. I’ll take the money out of the contingency fund, if no one objects.’
No one did.
‘In the meantime,’ Tony said, ‘it’s more important than ever that we keep this quiet. I believe that, either by luck or providence, that thing has fallen into the hands of men who can actually do that. Will you?’
There were murmurs of agreement.
Dicky-Duck was sitting cross-legged on the floor, stroking Mister Dillon’s head. D was asleep with his muzzle on his paws. For the barracks mascot, the excitement was definitely over. ‘I’m all right with that as long as the needle on the old Geiger doesn’t move out of the green,’ Dicky-Duck said. ‘If it does, I vote we call the feds.’
‘Do you think they can take care of it any better than we can?’ Curt asked hotly. ‘Jesus Christ, Dicky! The Feebs can’t get out of their own way, and — ‘
‘Unless you have plans to lead-line Shed B out of the contingency fund — ‘ someone else began.
‘That’s a pretty stupid — ‘ Curt began, and then Tony put a hand on his shoulder, stilling the kid before he could go any farther and maybe hurt himself.
‘If it’s hot,’ Tony promised them, ‘we’ll get rid of it. That’s a promise.’
Curt gave him a betrayed look. Tony stared back calmly. We know it’s not radioactive, that gaze said, the film proves it, so why do you want to start chasing your own tail?
‘I sort of think we ought to turn it over to the government anyway,’ Buck said. ‘They might
be able to help us . . . you know . . . or find stuff out . . . defense stuff . . .’ His voice getting smaller and smaller as he sensed the silent disapproval all around him. PSP officers worked with the federal government in one form or another every day — FBI, IRS, DEA, OSHA, and, most of all, the Interstate Commerce Commission. It didn’t take many years on the job to learn most of those federal boys were not smarter than the average bear. Sandy’s opinion was that when the feds did show the occasional flash of intelligence, it tended to be self-serving and sometimes downright malicious. Mostly they were slaves to the grind, worshippers at the altar of Routine Procedure. Before joining the PSP, Sandy had seen the same sort of dull go-through-the-proper-channels thinking in the Army. Also, he wasn’t much older than Curds himself, which made him young enough to hate the idea of giving the Roadmaster up. Better to hand it over to scientists in the private sector, though, if it came to that — perhaps even a bunch from the college advertised on the front of Curtis’s lawn-mowing shirt.
But best of all, the Troop. The gray family.
Buck had petered out into silence. ‘Not a good idea, I guess,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry,’ someone said. ‘You do win the Grolier Encylcopedia, and our exciting home game.’
Tony waited for a few chuckles to ripple across the room and die away before going on. ‘I want everyone who works out of this barracks to know what went on tonight, so they’ll know what to expect if it happens again. Spread the word. Spread the code for the Buick as well —
D as in dog. Just D. Right? And I’ll let you all know what happens next, starting with the Geiger counter. That test will be made before second shift tomorrow, I guarantee it. We’re not going to tell our wives or sisters or brothers or best friends off the force what we have here, gentlemen, but we are going to keep each other exquisitely well informed. That’s my promise to you. We’re going to do it the old-fashioned way, by verbal report. There has been no paperwork directly concerning the vehicle out there — if it is a vehicle — and that’s how it’s going to stay. All understood?’
There was another murmur of agreement.
‘I won’t tolerate a blabbermouth in Troop D, gentlemen; no gossip and no pillow-talk. Is that understood?’
It seemed it was.
‘Look at this one,’ Phil said suddenly, holding up one of the Polaroids. ‘The trunk’s open.’
Curt nodded. ‘Closed again now, though. It opened during one of the flashes, and I think it closed during the next one.’
Sandy thought of Ennis and had an image, very brief but very clear, of the Buick’s trunk-lid opening and closing like a hungry mouth. See the living crocodile, take a good look, but for God’s sake don’t stick your fingers in its mouth.
Curt went on, ‘I also believe the windshield wipers ran briefly, although my eyes were too dazzled by then for me to be sure, and none of the pictures show it.’
‘Why?’ Phil asked. ‘Why would stuff like that happen?’
‘Electrical surge,’ Sandy guessed. ‘The same thing that screwed up the radio in dispatch.’
‘Maybe the wipers, but the trunk of a car doesn’t run on electricity. When you want to open the trunk, you just push the button and lift the lid.’
Sandy had no answer for that.
‘The temperature in the shed has gone down another couple of degrees,’ Curt said. ‘That’ll bear watching.’
The meeting ended, and Sandy went back out on patrol. Every now and then, when radioing back to Base, he’d ask Matt Babicki if D was 5-by. The response was always Roger, D is 5-by-5. In later years, it would become a standard call-and-response in the Short Hills area surrounding Statler, Pogus City, and Patchin. A few other barracks eventually picked it up, even a couple over the Ohio state line. They took it to mean Is everything cool back home? This amused the men working out of Troop D, because that was what Is D still 5-by? did mean.
By the next morning, everyone in Troop D was indeed in the picture, but it was business as usual. Curt and Tony went to Pittsburgh to get a Geiger counter. Sandy was off-shift but stopped by two or three times to check on the Buick just the same. It was quiet in there, the car simply sitting on the concrete and looking like an art exhibit, but the needle on the big red thermometer hung from the beam continued to ease down. That struck everyone as extremely eerie, silent confirmation that something was going on in there. Something beyond the ability of mere State Troopers to understand, let alone control.
No one actually went inside the shed until Curt and Tony got back in Curt’s Bel Aire —
SC’s orders. Huddie Royer was looking through the shed windows at the Buick when the two of them turned up. He strolled over as Curt opened the carton sitting on the hood of his car and took the Geiger counter out. ‘Where’s your Andromeda Strain suits?’ Huddie asked.
Curt looked at him, not smiling. ‘That’s a riot,’ he said.
Curt and the Sergeant spent an hour in there, running the Geiger counter all over the Buick’s hull, cruising the pick-up over the engine, taking it into the cabin, checking the seats and dashboard and weird oversized wheel. Curt went underneath on a crawly gator, and the Sergeant checked the trunk, being especially careful about that; they propped the lid up with one of the rakes on the wall. The counter’s needle hardly stirred during any of this. The only time the steady cluck-cluck-cluck coming from its little speaker intensified was when Tony held the pick-up close to the radium dial of his wristwatch, wanting to make sure the gadget was working. It was, but the Roadmaster had nothing to tell it.